Inside Out and a Common Loss

Of the Pixar films produced in the last decade, one of my favorites has been Inside Out. If you have not seen it, the story takes place almost entirely within the psyche of the protagonist Riley, a girl on the brink of adolescence. As the perspective shifts to what is happening within her, the drama is played out by a host of personified facets of her interior life. There is the relentlessly optimistic Joy, the mopey Sadness, the anxious Fear, the hot-headed Anger, and the dismissive Disgust. Together, they manage a control room overseeing Riley’s interactions with her family as they move to a new city and home as Riley begins to transition into young adulthood.

Of the many fascinating insights the film provides, and one of the features that has received significant attention is the fact that there is no notable antagonist to the story. There is conflict and dramatic tension, but no ‘bad guy.’ One of the more perceptive commentators I remember reading or hearing on the matter–though I am sorry to say I cannot presently find in order to credit–made note that the most substantial case for the antagonist points most to the forces of time and change, both of which prove to be general atmospheric qualities that challenge all the characters involved. Though the movie centers on Riley’s attempts to cope with these forces, it is the internal tension between Joy and Sadness that drives a majority of the dialogue and action. The writers certainly did their homework on this subject, and although Inside Out is now over seven years old, it helpfully illustrates what I believe to be a relevant interior crisis that many are currently experiencing. 

Let us begin with the nature of loss itself. The helpful manual from the Grief Recovery Institute characterizes loss as “any change in our familiar pattern.” I find this definition helpful because it moves us past a stereotype of loss as being only high-degree cataclysms that destroy the momentum of our lives. While these events surely fall under the category of loss, an overemphasis on them distracts us from the truth that we experience loss on a daily basis in a thousand smaller ways, and that even those so-called big losses are themselves the combination of a dense cluster of breaks in the familiar patterns that give our lives a sense of security and continuity.

As I have written before, the experience we call grief is the normal emotional response to loss. Put plainly, grief is what sane and healthy hearts do when they detect that loss has happened. Contrary to what seems a popular notion, grief in this sense is not a pathology, it is not a sign that our emotions are broken but rather that they are attuned to what is really happening around and to us. In fact, the absence of grief in the wake of a loss can be an indication that something is awry in our interior life, and is worthy of further examination.

The denial of grief as a normal response to loss is, I believe, doing great harm to many people. As I’ve taught students and pastored a church in Orange County for the past decade, I have been persuaded that the denial of grief is one of our great spiritual maladies. In Inside Out, Joy grows instantly anxious whenever Sadness comes near to her. Joy assumes that she is the standard setting of life and that all other emotions and impulses are interruptions to her work. Like Joy, we assume that our world should be simply delightful and that all disruptions are a kind of enemy to be defeated as quickly as possible. The great genius of the movie, I think, is that for as much as Joy knows herself to be the main character of Riley’s psyche, Sadness knows herself to be the main character at the same time. The conflict between them crescendos when both are forced to confront that each and the other are both correct. Neither Joy nor Sadness are ancillary–they are both central. 

I find that this comports with a properly Christian view of things. As Christians, we live in the overlapping of two ways of life. On the one hand is a life that has been corrupted by the Fall, a life accompanied by death in the thousand forms it takes everyday. On the other is the life of God we receive in Baptism, the spiritual life through which we share the victory of Jesus Christ, who trampled down death by His holy Death. There is no moment of our lives that is untouched by both of these truths. So we live a dappled life in which loss is known in every moment as time marches us toward our ends, while at the same time renewal can be found at every point because God is with us and for us there. Like Riley’s maturity into adulthood, so Christian maturity holds that Joy and Sadness are both meaningful protagonists in our interior drama. Growing up means coming to hold the hand of both on either side of us. 

It is sub-Christian to deny the reality of loss because to do so would deny the reality of death. These are no illusions to be dismissed. They are the real enemy that the Lord of life defeats by the precious gift of His own life. Because of the Passion of Christ, there is no Joy that does not confront the truth of the Cross. There is no Resurrection that does not put us face to face with the glorious Christ who bears His scars. 

Each day, we have to confront in new ways what we began to know in life as soon as we took our first real backward glance at the past: we are no longer the people we once were. This is the common loss we share, and each new moment brings a new form of it. Embraced, we allow ourselves the healthy grief that attends such loss–we learn to express to God and the brethren what we wish would be different, better, or more. Having grieved, our hearts become more present to what remains after the loss, to the Lord who holds our life in His hand and that neither time nor change themselves can snatch away from Him. 

The recent past and all of its obvious calamities have changed us. And we would have been changed had the time been marked by other weal or woe than these. These years revealed that we continue not to be the people we once were. But the gift of Hope that is our inheritance in Christ through the Spirit imparts to us the grace to see that who we are becoming in Christ surpasses all that we leave behind. And as the glorified, crucified Lord abides in us, like Riley we find within us Joy embracing Sorrow and the daily miracle of His making all things new.

We welcome all those who would like to discuss these things further to contact our pastoral staff to set up a meeting for spiritual direction. Their contact information is available here.