Finally, we have a movie where happiness is the bad guy.
In our positivity-obsessed culture, where books like “The Happiness Project” and “10% Happier” make the best-sellers list, Pixar’s new release, “Inside Out,” is making a bold claim: Sometimes it’s good to be unhappy.
The movie, which depicts the five emotions reigning in an 11-year-old girl’s head, chronicles the interior tumult protagonist Riley faces when her family moves from fun, hockey-loving Minnesota to San Francisco, a place with one kind of pizza: broccoli-laden.
Immediately, tensions flare in Riley’s head, pitting Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler of “Parks and Recreation”) against Sadness (Phyllis Smith of “The Office”).
Joy could be the self-help guru appearing on Oprah or the “Today” show: She relentlessly tries to reorient Riley to being happy again, finding the sunny side of every experience.
She epitomizes the viewpoint that attitude, not events, can be a person’s reality — that just as Dorothy got back home with a click of her ruby red slippers, so can we find our way out of misery with a devotion to positive thinking.
Joy also pushes Sadness out of commission, assigning her long books to read and asking her to stay in a contained area.
But then both Joy and Sadness are cast out of the “headquarters” of Riley’s mind to the rest of Riley’s brain, where they explore her imagination and her memories. Their journey that follows is one of the strangest — and perhaps most profound — buddy comedies in a long time.
A conversation with Sadness about a memory of Riley’s (warning: spoilers ahead) gives Joy pause. The memory is a happy one: Riley surrounded by her friends on the hockey team and then later sitting on a tree branch between her parents.
But Sadness points out that that moment was preceded by Riley’s failure to score a crucial goal in her hockey game.
Joy ultimately accepts that Sadness was right about that memory. Riley’s unhappiness over missing the goal drew in her friends and family, who sought to comfort her.
Out of sorrow came joy — and deepened relationships. If Riley had stayed on Team Positive, she never would’ve been vulnerable enough for her loved ones to realize she needed them.
So Joy changes: When they’re allowed to return to Riley’s mind, she allows Sadness to (temporarily) take control of Riley’s emotions.
Riley, who ran away from home, returns to her parents, sobbing about how sad she is about the move from Minnesota to Frisco, and receives a hug in return.
It’s a moment of unhappiness and happiness mingled, and the more mature Joy can accept that.
But can our culture, like Joy, accept that unhappiness must sometimes exist in order for us to flourish?
That’s not so clear. Psychiatrist Julie Holland sparked controversy in February with a New York Times article suggesting that the high number of women on psychiatric medications — one in four — was partially due to a lack of cultural acceptance of women’s emotions. (Tellingly, Riley is asked by her mom after the move if she could please remain the happy Riley she’s always been.)
Holland recounted a patient who called her crying, saying she needed to up her antidepressant dosage. Yet after discussing it, Holland wrote, “we decided that what was needed was calm confrontation, not more medication.”
Of course, clinical depression should be treated.
But Holland’s article broached the notion of medication sometimes being used to treat not depression, but everyday emotions that are uncomfortable.
The distaste for unhappiness often seems to drive views about morality as well.
Caitlyn Jenner’s mother, Esther Jenner, told People magazine about her child’s transformation: “I love her. And she’s happy. That’s all that matters.”
A character in bestselling novelist Jennifer Weiner’s “Fly Away Home” says, “Divorce isn’t such a tragedy. A tragedy’s staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.”
Implicit in this mindset is that feeling happy is either the highest good people can have, or one of the most important.
But is that true?
We all (understandably) want to be happy. But “Inside Out” raises the question our culture needs to confront: Can we be always happy without consequences — and are those consequences worth it?
Katrina Trinko is managing editor of The Daily Signal.
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