Amid what was otherwise a disappointing summer season for Hollywood movies, Inside Out 2 was one of the few exceptions. A sequel that takes its main character Riley into puberty and features characters representing a wide range of Riley's emotions, the film is now the highest grossing in the history of Pixar. In what is rare for sequels, it is at least as entertaining as the first film and—what's more—it contains much wisdom about the nature of human emotions and the best response to anxiety, a problem afflicting not just teens but an increasingly high percentage of the entire population.
The film adds new emotions to the original set of joy, sadness, anger, and fear. When Riley hits puberty, anxiety enters the picture—along with envy, embarrassment, and boredom—and immediately throws everything off course. The emotions operate at a console that enables Joy, who is always trying but regularly failing to keep Riley's emotions in some sort of order, to observe and organize Riley's interior life. In an amusing scene, puberty arrives and promptly dismantles the console.
The film is replete with brilliant psychological insights concerning anxiety, among which is the idea that anxiety "has plans" and can easily come to dominate one's soul. It is adept at anticipating potential problems and working to either solve them or at least minimize their consequences. In multiplying plans endlessly, anxiety can occupy a large portion of one's conscious attention, as the bad things that might happen are potentially infinite.
In adolescence—and indeed through the rest of life—much anxiety is caused by the question of one's social group. At the start of the sequel Riley, an avid ice hockey player, already has some established friends. They are all attending a hockey camp that will determine who will make the high school team. Riley's anxiety over making the team fuels her desire to receive the approval of the team's star players and her consequent neglect of her current friends.
Here the film echoes something C.S. Lewis warned about in a speech to young people. He cautioned them to be wary of the temptation to succumb to the lure of the inner ring, the in-group that calls the shots and operates by defining who is in and who is out. The motivation to enter and remain within an inner group, Lewis says, can lead not-so-bad people to do very bad things. Lewis presents the following situations to his audience: "I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in . . . ."
Riley never goes all the way into the inner ring, but she is strongly tempted by it, as most high school students are in some way. The film shows the way fear of isolation and anxiety about acceptance can fuel the desire for membership in the inner ring. This observation seems quite apt for the current social moment of all Americans, a moment in which Americans report high levels of loneliness and isolation. Indeed, many Americans, on both sides of the political spectrum, report that they don't recognize their country, don't feel that they belong. The accompanying anxiety can easily generate a strong desire to be part of an inner ring, evidence of which abounds on social media.
In both films, Joy starts out ruling Riley's soul, loses control, and then seeks to reestablish harmony and flourishing. In the first film, Joy expresses skepticism that Sadness has any positive role to play, but she learns that acknowledging sorrow and allowing friends and family to share in it are crucial to Riley's ongoing mental health. In the sequel, Anxiety wreaks havoc. Unleashing bad memories, even as Joy attempts to permit only positive ones to surface, Anxiety induces debilitating self-doubt. Joy finally tackles Anxiety and insists that Anxiety doesn't get to make all the decisions, but Joy has also learned that a life free from significant emotional disruption is neither possible nor desirable. As Matthew Crawford points out in his book, The World Beyond Your Head, life on screens presents to us the illusion of a frictionless life, a life in which the external world and other persons don't push back against your will. Joy seems to long for the possibility of a frictionless world, but a world void of sorrow or anxiety-inducing events is not really a feasible or even desirable way of life.
The film also underscores the fact that flourishing is not something we do alone; it happens in, through, and with family and friends. At a time when not just young people but all of us seem to veer back and forth between being dominated by emotions like sorrow and anxiety and wishing for a world free from all negativity, Inside Out 2 is a pretty good guide to psychological health and human flourishing.