Inside Out: Loss in Light of the Last Things
Below is an excerpt of my article in Church Life Journal, looking at loss as an eschatological experience. The piece used the Disney Movie Inside Out as a case study, and studied loss and eschatology in light of Affect Theory, Critical Theory, Romano Guardini and St Bonaventure. Click on the link below for the full article.
The sequel to the Pixar film Inside Out (2015) will be released later this year. I rewatched the original in anticipation of the new release. Almost a decade on, the movie holds up well. What I appreciated to a greater degree, however, was the way in which the movie dealt with the subject of loss, in this case, the loss by the main human protagonist, Riley, of her place of origin in Minnesota while she tries to adapt to life in San Francisco. Whereas once I thought the film’s resolution of the subject—the mutual admission of their loss between Riley and her parents—as trite and oozing with schlock, I have now realized that it was the inbreaking of an eschatological moment into another that might strike us as relatively mundane, a parent’s comforting of a child in the grips of the realization that something has been lost.
I would like to unpack how Riley’s loss is set against the backdrop of the last things. I propose that loss and the last things are more connected than we realize, and because of this connection, loss is more comedy than tragedy than we realize. Indeed, in light of the last things, our experiences of loss and its opposite, the restoration of what was lost, converge into one and the same thing.
Affect Theory: Judgment
More than anything else, Inside Out is as much a movie about Riley’s feelings as they are about Riley herself. More precisely, the film is an extended exploration on how subjective feelings work in the face of external empirical stimuli. The caveat to put here is that, in the world of Inside Out, there are two sets of “subjective” protagonists, namely Riley and Riley’s emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Because of this, Inside Out is a prime candidate for reflection in terms set by Affect Theory in the tradition of Silvan Tomkins. Within this context, we can say that the film is a case study on the aesthetic dimension of Tomkins’ Affect Theory, which focuses on how feelings are experienced. As we shall see, this is not as straightforward as it sounds.
My reason for highlighting affect in the context of a reflection on eschatology is because, from the standpoint of Affect Theory, affect can be described, as Donovan Schaefer puts it, as an effect of power,[1] and I mean this in two senses. First, on a surface reading of the film, we can see how affects generate psychological power insofar as they are “primary motivators of human behavior,” providing more impetus for behavior than simple Freudian drives.[2] In the context of the film, we can see the way in which Riley’s actions are preceded by the dynamics initiated by her emotional states.
There is a second sense that is more interesting and more relevant for the purpose of this argument, and this relates to power that is…(read the full article on Church Life Journal)
Click to read Matthew Tan’s other articles on Church Life Journal.
