Monday, November 30, 2015
Bucket List
Back in 2012 when I was 28, I wrote down what I desired to be. I listed 16. I can't help but smile at this because I never included the titles "wife" and "mother". The lesson: Divine will is different from human will.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Inside Out: A Lesson in Psychology
If the animation, Inside Out was shown to us by our college
professor in Psychology 101, perhaps I would have had a stronger grasp and a
clear, albeit animated (pun intended) picture of the inner workings of the
brain instead of just seeing it as a white mass with the vision, tastes,
memory, etc. parts.
The 2015 Pixar movie takes a daring leap by giving life to
the universal emotions of joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger and setting it
in where else, but the brain. It’s a rather risky move from Pixar’s usual
personifying of animals, toys, and machines. But it has been a well-calculated
move, as proven by its $90.4 million earnings at the domestic box office and $132
million in global sales. With an 11 year-old girl as its main human character
trying to adjust in a new home and school and with her emotions playing such a
big role in this change, we get another coming-of-age family movie… and a
lesson in psychology.
The way the mind works has been cleverly engineered in this
movie. Let’s take a look at Riley’s head. So we have the five emotions namely,
Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. They stay in the Headquarters where
they have the upper hand of deciding on Riley’s responses for whatever stimulus
is presented (for example: Dad feeds Riley broccoli, Disgust decides it’s yucky,
so Riley refuses to eat it). Every experience is preserved in a ball of memory,
the color of which depends on the emotion Riley felt; gold for joy, blue for
sadness, green for disgust, grey for fear, and red for anger. These balls get
released to the long-term memory outside the Headquarters. Then, we have the five
core memories. They are the most important ones because they power the islands
that represent Riley’s personality; the Goofball Island, the Hockey Island, the
Friendship Island, the Honesty Island, and the Family Island. All core memories
are of the color of joy, until Sadness touched one of it in an accident that
brought her and Joy into the deeper recesses of Riley’s brain. As Joy and
Sadness took the trek back to the headquarters, they encountered adventures
that gave us some psychological and neuroscientific terms set in laymen’s
cartoon.
When all five core memories were vacuumed out of the
headquarters together with Joy and Sadness, all of Riley’s personality islands
stopped working. From here, we could see Riley becoming rebellious as Fear,
Disgust, and Anger conflict on how to best respond in their new environment
without Joy to lead them. Riley’s numb-like responses gave us a glimpse of what
goes on in the brain when we have that little thing called depression.
It’s interesting how the movie tried to simplify emotions
and the processes of the brain by animating them. Long term memory is an
endless swarm of corridors and shelves.
Mind workers throw unnecessary memories in the dump like phone numbers,
names of presidents, and years of piano lessons. There were instances in the
plot when they tried to take things too literally like the train of thought and
the dream productions. That might seem like a misleading concept to young
viewers, but it’s better than making them bored to death with too technical
terms.
More than the emotions, there is Riley herself who a lot of
young children can relate to. The movie with the aid of its apt musical
sequence makes you understand that in life, sadness is inevitable and we have
to accept, embrace it even, in order to appreciate more what it means to be
happy.
Now, that’s not only just a lesson in psychology, but also a
lesson in life.
Friday, November 13, 2015
American Mistress (2015)
Have you ever experienced that strong desire to be part of
something? To the point that you would do anything just to feel that sense of
belongingness? American Mistress explores this visceral need from the point of
view of a lonely college freshman, who just wants to be part of a literary
society. It raises the bar of need higher from the perspective of a 30-year-old
jane-of-all-trades who wants to open a restaurant. Mix in an unrealistic plot
set in the NYC, a script full of witty lines delivered in too girlish fashion,
and an infuriating background music, and you get a coming-of-age dramedy.
The movie introduces us to Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) who’s bland and flat voice
opens the film with this line: She would say things like, “Isn’t every
story a story of betrayal?” No, I thought. That’s not true. But I could never
say that. I could only agree with her. It was too much fun to agree with her.
As a 1st year college student in Barnard, she
tries very hard to fit in by going to a party even though her roommate warned
her it’s not for her and by submitting a fiction to the lit society called Mobius.
Her efforts are not rewarded as the party turned out to be unwelcoming. She
also got rejected by the lit society. She finds solace from her mother who is
marrying a guy who’s daughter coincidentally also lives in New York. Her mother
suggests that she meet up with her soon-to-be sister, Brooke Cardanis (Greta
Gerwig), and she might as well do it soon because they will be gathering
together for the first time during Thanksgiving.
When they did meet, Tracy was so enamored by Brooke that it
inspired her to write another fiction with Brooke as the lead character. She
tried to screen for Mobius again by passing this story. For Tracy, Brooke represents
the Big Apple – fun, fearless, independent.
Although Tracy feels that Brooke is everything that she is
not and that she secretly wants to be, deep inside she knows that Brooke will
never amount to anything in life. Tracy at eighteen years-old has an old soul
in her in contrast to the thirty year-old Brooke whose devil may care attitude
has gotten her nowhere. As Tracy accompanies Brooke in looking for investors
that will help her build her restaurant, she learned to be fun and fearless,
too.
With these two women as central characters, one may wonder
who between the two is the American Mistress. Is it the young and intellectual Tracy
whose desires are eclipsed by her fears? Or is it the worldly and irrational
Brooke whose well-intentioned dreams escape her because of her senselessness?
“I want the whole
deal. I’ve spent my whole life chasing after things and knocking at doors, and
I’m tired of running towards people. I wanna be the place that people come to.
I wanna make a home for all the knockers and runners. I’m good at that. I’m
happy with that. I keep the hearth. That’s a word, right? Hearth? - Brooke
Such questions can only be answered by having these female
characters come to terms with the possibility of reaching or not reaching their
dreams. So did Tracy make it to the lit society? Did Brooke get her restaurant?
Did they get that sense of belongingness they so desire?
What they got is the sisterhood that’s unique in the plot.
And more.
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