Brainstorm

Turning myself Inside Out twice

I’ve lost my marbles.

The thought pinballed my mind as my daughters and I—45 minutes early—settled into our reclining theater seats for Inside Out 2 this week, in our favorite row, just behind the handicapped section that largely goes unused and in the sweet spot in mid-aisle just enough rows away from the screen. My kids wanted to ensure a buffer between us and any others, as we packed about a dozen snack containers and reusable bottles which made for an embarrassing buffet of homemade bounty on our tray tables—but I’m used to being embarrassing, if not proud of it. Why do $10 movie popcorn when we can have olives, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, mushroom quiche, watermelon, roasted almonds, chocolate. We were there for the air conditioning as refugees from our hothouse, but also in pre-celebration of my birthday. I was really hopeful that this second movie in the franchise would help stir a cathartic cry.

There’s Trump’s terrifying 922-page Project 2025 manifesto, an outline for the end times, to dog-ear, and then on a diurnal level, it’s been a challenging week with our fairly new house HVAC system apparently springing a leak, rendering it nonfunctional. The bedrooms have been “moldering” (my new favorite word as it seems to appear often in the Washington Irving collection I’m about to publish) at 93 degrees, day or night, with or without ceiling fans, and whether windows open or shut—as is my mind. My thoughts have noticeably grown ranker and fuzzier this week—maybe it’s the tilting-toward-the-farther-side-of-midlife problem now that I’m losing my train of thought or can’t retrieve the right word fast enough, or maybe it’s the heat-fugue sleep deprivation. If you find any typos here, don’t come for me. I knew going into the cinema that our recurring character Riley would be grown into a teenager, and there’s plenty about being perimenopausal that aligns me with these hormonal maniacs (next to me, and onscreen) with their underdeveloped frontal lobes.

Jeremy Thompson, CC BY 2.0, California Disney’s repurposed balloon ride under construction 2019

As a scientist-wannabe who loves a good visual representation of all the oft-inarticulable blobs of emotional madness running amuck inside me, it sure is riveting to see such complex psychology mapped out in the mental world according to these movies.

I’ve been laying the foundations for a world-building series—I’ve examined the structure of the underworld, now how about the inner? In Inside Out, the genius metaphor they bring to vivid animated life is that thoughts and memories are like a rainbow of big marbles/small bowling balls that roll around as if in a pinball machine of our brains, glowing with compacted scenes like the witch’s orb in The Wizard of Oz, getting ejected into tubes to “nowhere” or piles of repression, and resurfacing in an avalanche (since there’s no such thing as successful repression) when you least expect them.

Just like I relished the funhouse of the topsy-turvy horrors of the Upside Down of Stranger Things, I could stay and play all day in an Inside Out space such as this, worn with seams showing, and featuring: Goofball Island, Imagination Land, Train of Thoughts, Stream of Consciousness, occasional bouts of brainfreeze, a command console called Headquarters. Another way I’m embarrassing in a movie theater—beyond the crying I did successfully achieve, and the abundant snack spread—is that I was busy taking notes in the dark (which is hard!) since I couldn’t trust my rotting brain to remember any of this in my wilted, age 51 state. But don’t worry girls: Embarrassment is one of the best new characters so this is all going according to script, and again we’ll see our friend Sadness.

First, I had done the same with the initial Inside Out, renting it again recently to refresh. You’ve got a simpler spectrum of adolescent emotions here: Joy and Sadness, the main yin and yang duo with their matching blue hair; skinny purple Fear, glittering green Disgust, stout red Anger. We tour the journey of marbles, with core memories becoming long-term and powering personality. There are island conglomerations of memories that form according to themes, and the moment Family Island darkens and crumbles into a chasm when Riley decides to run away from home is when my tear ducts get the signal to open. I’ve been on the queasy passive ride of watching this loss of innocence, losing any parental control I once had as my girls inevitably shift away from me, slapping off my attempts to reach for their hands, the inner children dying off. And I remember and mourn the death of my own inner child, how she morphed into emotions not highlighted here: Self-Consciousness and Shyness. How the brightness of Joy dims with age as Sadness darkens and widens. Sadness, voiced so sympathetically by The Office’s Phyllis Smith, blubbers in her personal storm cloud or face down on the floor, “I only make everything worse,” but the fact is: Sadness is not only found to be necessary but she makes everything better. After we visit the film production center of dreams, witness how thoughts self-destruct from abstraction into the nonfigurative, explore subconscious fears like Grandma’s vacuum and broccoli, and abandon Bing Bong the imaginary friend left alone crying candy, it’s Sadness who saves the day and brings the poor isolated Riley back to her loved ones relatively intact, if deeper and more interesting, with new islands—BoyBand Island, TragicVampireRomance Island—and an expanded console with a little more room for Sadness.

Jeremy Thompson, CC BY 2.0, from the queue of the Disney ride

Enter Inside Out 2, and new additional starring emotions as Riley’s teenage brain is more crowded, complicated, and confusing: bloated Embarrassment in a hoodie, Envy, Ennui on the chaise, or my evil personal nemesis and/or great motivator: Anxiety. Anxiety is orange, hair in a tizzy, frazzled and neurotic, and runs a sweatshop of artists in the night who sit in cubicles madly depicting sketches of worst case scenarios. Sound the alarm, it’s Puberty and time to dismantle any hard-won equilibrium established at the end of the first installment. Now we navigate a weirder and uglier terrain with dark secrets, sarcasm, denial, projection, a funny old lady called Nostalgia they try to shove back into her closet (“too soon!”), delusion, an endless loop of tragedy and consequence, and oh shucks, I think that must be a zit on poor Riley’s chin. I love it all, and it smarts in my sensitive parts because we are living this now too. The moment I cry here is when the former shiny and round tree she had been forming, this idea of self, that chanted “I am a good person,” is starting to become this jagged-edged new tree with negative beliefs hardening, and an inner voice that repeats, “I am not good enough.” The same way we come to appreciate in the first Inside Out that the combo of Joy and Sadness is good and healthy, we learn here that the self-tree is going to be rotating through all kinds of shapes and messages depending on the day, or second. Each of them are an essential part of the crazy composite of ever-forming self. No marbles are really ever lost, or worth losing.

Does that give it all away? I didn’t say “spoiler alert” because don’t we know how this ride goes? Should this series continue, with an Inside Out 3, 4, 5, perhaps we’d cover all the ages of a life, and, would that make for a comedy or tragedy is arguable. It will go downhill from here and then up, then further down, with terrible heartbreak(s) in the next chapter, then maybe if we’re being honest Riley might drink or drug too much in college and have some bad sexual experiences, maybe she’ll overcome depression and/or a suicide attempt and go onto getting a tedious job and marrying a man, or—there seem to be potential seeds for this since never has there been a boy peer in these scripts—come out as a lesbian. Maybe she’ll have kids, or maybe she’ll opt out or have a bunch of miscarriages, in any case she’s likely to go into debt and get a divorce, and perhaps finally make it, somewhat smarter yet scarred, to age 51, feeling like a cat on a hat tin roof and getting a little nauseous when she looks down from this height, with some time now to welcome a little nostalgia, but never too much, because—thank you, Anxiety—there’s still so much work to do.

But before we get off this metaphorical ride, it’s worth noting there’s a real one, repurposed from Bugs and a Maliboomer. About the Inside Out ride in California Disneyland, from coasterpedia.net:

Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind is a Balloon Race built by Zamperla located at Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, California, USA. It is based on the film Inside Out.

The ride originally opened on October 7, 2002, as Flik’s Flyers in the new A Bug’s Land, based on the 1998 Pixar film A Bug’s Life. The ride was styled to be “bug-made”, with baskets being made out of food boxes, and sticks holding up giant fallen leaves which have been stitched together by Flik.

The ride closed on September 4, 2018 with the land. It was the only attraction from “A Bug’s Land” to be repurposed, and in this case, it was given an extensive refurbishment and retheme to Inside Out, and was placed in Pixar Pier (the former Paradise Pier) in the long vacant plot formerly occupied by Maliboomer. The ride reopened on June 27, 2019.

Or says, Disneyland: “Tap into Riley’s Emotions when you take a sense-sational spin around the whimsical world inside her mind’s Headquarters.”

This fun family-friendly attraction invites you to step into the workplace of Riley’s Emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger.

Your adventure begins when you hop aboard one of 8 Memory Movers, each uniquely colored to evoke one of Riley’s Emotions or another exuberant character from her imagination.

You’ll find yourself surrounded by vibrant shelves packed with glowing recollections as the Memory Movers ascend in unison, fly in a circle and inspire you to create your own happy memory of this experience.

If I’m going to be on an emotional whirlwind, I’d rather it be an actual roller coaster, an old wooden one that rattles with the threat of imminent collapse at any moment, like life.

But wait, the AC is back on. I’ll stay inside.