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.

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. 

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 1^st 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.