14 ms·

Emotions are so much more complex than our terrible labels for them, and much of your emotional sense of self comes from the language your parents branded you w

Emotions are so much more complex than our terrible labels for them, and much of your emotional sense of self comes from the language your parents branded you with for the most cultural convenience: '"Anger" is bad! It's your fault in not handling "it", not ours or the systems', but "Anger" in-of-itself doesn't exist outside of language, just the nebulous array of feelings and reactions we've been to coniditoned to label as "Anger", what this film effectively did was create an false emotional framework for children to rely on in the future, which should fucking terrify you because so much of modern society and capitalism is built on neurological manipulation to get you to buy things and not disrupt systems of power. The movie was nothing less than brainwashing.

DannoHung 11y ago
Did we watch different films? The end of the movie was about realizing that emotional experiences are complex and that it's ok to be sad about things and that you shouldn't run from negative emotions. Every person had an anger too. Not sure how you got the notion that the film makers thought anger is bad.
- olewhalehunter 11y ago
  My main gripe is that of symbolic brainwashing; allowing millions of children to view media from a global corporation that asserts that the inner world of your mind acts in a specific way using constant mini-deities, asserting that "abstract thought" is risky, and enforcing psychological cliches is dangerous.
  - JabavuAdams 11y ago
    You realize that Pixar movies are made by a brain-trust of intelligent, empathetic, and cultured people, right? None of that means that they are immune to their cultural and corporate biases and zeitgeist, but you seem to be implying something much more intentional and predatory. Why?
    - olewhalehunter 11y ago
      We don't have clear, culturally relative definitions (nor would we want any) of "intelligence", "empathy", or what is "cultured" other than those that the most psychopathically inclined conquerors of civilizations past brought us, however the display of those characteristics seems to be the most valuable social signifier today, and the people behind Pixar (one them was Steve Jobs, a known psychopath) have been the most ruthless accumulators of this level of trust regardless of their individual intentions.
      - JabavuAdams 11y ago
        I'm not referring to Steve Jobs, I'm referring to the Pixar "Brain Trust": http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-the-pixar-braintrust http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-th... Fundamentally, these people are artists.
        olewhalehunter 11y ago
        Fundamentally their films are there to make money in a global economy and to ensure the artists stay hired there. And their art is shit, repetitive, and horrifically ethnocentric, they draw all their eyes the same, big, colorful, inviting, with nice clear whites; their bodies are soft, squeezable, like big babies, with fuzzy or gleaming hair, to exploit humanistic reactions.
        JabavuAdams 11y ago
        Is there anything you're trying to accomplish? I love myself a good rant, and most of us love to be righteous ... but ... What's the state of the world that you want? Does being this angry help you get it there?
        olewhalehunter 11y ago
        I'm automating distributed dialectics software and it appears to be working.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    I guess I see where you're coming from and I agree that we're all entitled to our peeves and things that just rub us the wrong way. That said, I look at these sorts of films like the old fables and many newer children's stories: they personify various aspects of life (in this case, emotions) in order to simplify them at first glance for easy recognition and then as a vehicle to show where those seemingly simple things can also be complex and unpredictable. It's not even just kids' stories that do this. Plenty of movies and other stories use archetypes and "avatars" as characters. It's shorthand that makes it easier to jump into the narrative. Often they're combinations of different stock characters but the kids' stuff is often simpler. Either way, I grew up with plenty of kids' stories where you knew who the good guy was, who the bad guy was, who the rogue/trickster was, etc. It hasn't stopped me from appreciating more subtle or complex characters and stories as an adult. It's almost as if you learn the basic "language" of characterization and storytelling first, and then can appreciate more varied combinations that as possible with experience. At some point, the fact that certain traits and behaviors are unexpected becomes a big part of a more "grown up" story's appeal.
    - olewhalehunter 11y ago
      The danger in this is programming children, and especially the largest global children's media conglomerate, one whose track record is defined by hegemonic ethnocentrism... programming children, to believe that they can tell who the "good guys" or "bad guys" are, what the "positive" or "negative" emotional reactions to events are, targets or images that the giant media machine behind each movie gets to decide. I also refuse to accept that there is or should be a universal "language for storytelling" and it should be a little creepy that most if not all of the participants in this comment tree grew up watching Disney's media, and that if for some reason one doesn't want to see another image associated with Disney again or have their children influenced by them, one literally has to run into the wilderness or leave the planet (but good luck finding an areospace organization without Star Wars fanboys).
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  \philosophical: Showing growth requires showing "before" and "after". Yet, if the bulk of a movie is the "before", it can be a way of celebrating that behaviour, and the brief "after" at the end is a way to slip past the censors. [In general - not saying Inside Out would be censored!] The greater screen time and scenes means "before" leaves the greater impression on viewers. Inside Out's is a dissatisfying explantion for emotion, because each emotion-character themselves exhibited a variety of emotion (e.g. Joy was sad), implying by the conceit of the movie that they each had a set of emotions within their own head... ad infinitum. That's the problem with the homunculi theory of mind: it doesn't explain anything. Did anger ever make a useful contribution in the movie? IIRC only a source of humour, or a problem to be worked around. BTW The outtake-like scenes at the end included a bus driver who was all anger.
deleted 11y ago
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cjhveal 11y ago
I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. While our emotions certainly are complex and misunderstood, I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all these little people in their heads. It's a fun concept that takes some existing cultural trope and runs with it to tell a story. Everything is more complex that the limited linguistic labels that we slice the world into. But if we couldn't reduce that complexity into modular, independent pieces then how would we ever communicate?
- olewhalehunter 11y ago
  >I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. > I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all these little people in their heads. I've met people who think the movie helped them "understand themselves better" whether or not that is actually true. >But if we couldn't reduce that complexity into modular, independent pieces then how would we ever communicate? Not everyone wants to speak the same language, (or even be forced to hear you).
  - lfowles 11y ago
    > And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. Is that a bad thing?
    - olewhalehunter 11y ago
      Disney having a monopoly on children's psychological and cultural associations is a bad thing, yes.
    - knughit 11y ago
      The Nemo movie created a holocaust of clownfish pets.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
If the impression you got was "anger is bad and abstract thought is risky," then I'm not sure what movie you watched, but it definitely wasn't Inside Out. You're mistaken about "anger" being purely a cultural/linguistic construction, and about the authenticity of Inside Out's psychological model in general: the film was inspired by (and admittedly somewhat simplifies) solid psychological research, particularly the work of Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, whom Pixar brought on as consultants.
- olewhalehunter 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    So have we dialed back from "Inside Out's psych theories are monstrous corporate brainwashing lies" to "Inside Out's psych theories are mildly controversial"? I get that you didn't like the movie, and that's okay, and it's certainly reasonable to not like Disney in general; but I don't think you have any grounds to extrapolate that to the movie's message being actively and specifically harmful.
    - olewhalehunter 11y ago
      I've dialed it to "Inside Out is such an effective piece of brainwashing that it can get people to passionately defend it for free on the Internet".
      - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
        "All of my arguments have been refuted, so clearly this means that I have won." That's kinda nostalgic, actually. I remember seeing it a lot on Usenet. It's dwindled since people stopped calling flamewars "flamewars." Dunno why.
        11y ago
bitwize 11y ago
Actually psychologists have identified seven basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, surprise, contempt, and disgust. "Surprise" was considered similar enough to "fear" that Pixar made one character out of them; the same goes for "contempt" and "disgust". Complexity in emotions arises from their interactions, much like how we perceive a spectrum of colors as a mixture of three primaries. Most of the professionals in the field who saw Inside Out have praised it for getting the basics of emotion and memory right, even if it isn't super accurate. It is after all a cartoon.
- isolate 11y ago
  The original Tomkins model had dissmell in place of contempt, but it's similar. I think it's limited because it's based on facial expressions and doesn't account for things like shame and guilt and compassion.
- olewhalehunter 11y ago
  Is there any evidence those labels aren't a product of linguistics and culture? Two things developed during childhood that Disney is working to profit from? Did those professionals grow up watching Disney movies?
  - isolate 11y ago
    The labels are based on experiments and are cross-cultural.
    - olewhalehunter 11y ago
      Are you insinuating those cross-cultural experiments predate the institutions of culture and language that produced them? Sounds a bit like time travel.
      - isolate 11y ago
        They looked at people's facial expressions, it wasn't based on self-reporting of emotion. The subjects were treated as animals in a biology experiment. You can look it up easily enough, the guy's name is Silvan Tomkins and the work is known as "affect theory".

DannoHung 11y ago

Did we watch different films? The end of the movie was about realizing that emotional experiences are complex and that it's ok to be sad about things and that you shouldn't run from negative emotions. Every person had an anger too. Not sure how you got the notion that the film makers thought anger is bad.

olewhalehunter 11y ago
My main gripe is that of symbolic brainwashing; allowing millions of children to view media from a global corporation that asserts that the inner world of your mind acts in a specific way using constant mini-deities, asserting that "abstract thought" is risky, and enforcing psychological cliches is dangerous.
- JabavuAdams 11y ago
  You realize that Pixar movies are made by a brain-trust of intelligent, empathetic, and cultured people, right? None of that means that they are immune to their cultural and corporate biases and zeitgeist, but you seem to be implying something much more intentional and predatory. Why?
  - olewhalehunter 11y ago
    We don't have clear, culturally relative definitions (nor would we want any) of "intelligence", "empathy", or what is "cultured" other than those that the most psychopathically inclined conquerors of civilizations past brought us, however the display of those characteristics seems to be the most valuable social signifier today, and the people behind Pixar (one them was Steve Jobs, a known psychopath) have been the most ruthless accumulators of this level of trust regardless of their individual intentions.
    - JabavuAdams 11y ago
      I'm not referring to Steve Jobs, I'm referring to the Pixar "Brain Trust": http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-the-pixar-braintrust http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-th... Fundamentally, these people are artists.
      - olewhalehunter 11y ago
        Fundamentally their films are there to make money in a global economy and to ensure the artists stay hired there. And their art is shit, repetitive, and horrifically ethnocentric, they draw all their eyes the same, big, colorful, inviting, with nice clear whites; their bodies are soft, squeezable, like big babies, with fuzzy or gleaming hair, to exploit humanistic reactions.
        JabavuAdams 11y ago
        Is there anything you're trying to accomplish? I love myself a good rant, and most of us love to be righteous ... but ... What's the state of the world that you want? Does being this angry help you get it there?
        olewhalehunter 11y ago
        I'm automating distributed dialectics software and it appears to be working.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  I guess I see where you're coming from and I agree that we're all entitled to our peeves and things that just rub us the wrong way. That said, I look at these sorts of films like the old fables and many newer children's stories: they personify various aspects of life (in this case, emotions) in order to simplify them at first glance for easy recognition and then as a vehicle to show where those seemingly simple things can also be complex and unpredictable. It's not even just kids' stories that do this. Plenty of movies and other stories use archetypes and "avatars" as characters. It's shorthand that makes it easier to jump into the narrative. Often they're combinations of different stock characters but the kids' stuff is often simpler. Either way, I grew up with plenty of kids' stories where you knew who the good guy was, who the bad guy was, who the rogue/trickster was, etc. It hasn't stopped me from appreciating more subtle or complex characters and stories as an adult. It's almost as if you learn the basic "language" of characterization and storytelling first, and then can appreciate more varied combinations that as possible with experience. At some point, the fact that certain traits and behaviors are unexpected becomes a big part of a more "grown up" story's appeal.
  - olewhalehunter 11y ago
    The danger in this is programming children, and especially the largest global children's media conglomerate, one whose track record is defined by hegemonic ethnocentrism... programming children, to believe that they can tell who the "good guys" or "bad guys" are, what the "positive" or "negative" emotional reactions to events are, targets or images that the giant media machine behind each movie gets to decide. I also refuse to accept that there is or should be a universal "language for storytelling" and it should be a little creepy that most if not all of the participants in this comment tree grew up watching Disney's media, and that if for some reason one doesn't want to see another image associated with Disney again or have their children influenced by them, one literally has to run into the wilderness or leave the planet (but good luck finding an areospace organization without Star Wars fanboys).
hyperpallium 11y ago
\philosophical: Showing growth requires showing "before" and "after". Yet, if the bulk of a movie is the "before", it can be a way of celebrating that behaviour, and the brief "after" at the end is a way to slip past the censors. [In general - not saying Inside Out would be censored!] The greater screen time and scenes means "before" leaves the greater impression on viewers. Inside Out's is a dissatisfying explantion for emotion, because each emotion-character themselves exhibited a variety of emotion (e.g. Joy was sad), implying by the conceit of the movie that they each had a set of emotions within their own head... ad infinitum. That's the problem with the homunculi theory of mind: it doesn't explain anything. Did anger ever make a useful contribution in the movie? IIRC only a source of humour, or a problem to be worked around. BTW The outtake-like scenes at the end included a bus driver who was all anger.

deleted 11y ago

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deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cjhveal 11y ago

I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. While our emotions certainly are complex and misunderstood, I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all these little people in their heads. It's a fun concept that takes some existing cultural trope and runs with it to tell a story. Everything is more complex that the limited linguistic labels that we slice the world into. But if we couldn't reduce that complexity into modular, independent pieces then how would we ever communicate?

olewhalehunter 11y ago
>I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. > I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all these little people in their heads. I've met people who think the movie helped them "understand themselves better" whether or not that is actually true. >But if we couldn't reduce that complexity into modular, independent pieces then how would we ever communicate? Not everyone wants to speak the same language, (or even be forced to hear you).
- lfowles 11y ago
  > And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. Is that a bad thing?
  - olewhalehunter 11y ago
    Disney having a monopoly on children's psychological and cultural associations is a bad thing, yes.
  - knughit 11y ago
    The Nemo movie created a holocaust of clownfish pets.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

If the impression you got was "anger is bad and abstract thought is risky," then I'm not sure what movie you watched, but it definitely wasn't Inside Out. You're mistaken about "anger" being purely a cultural/linguistic construction, and about the authenticity of Inside Out's psychological model in general: the film was inspired by (and admittedly somewhat simplifies) solid psychological research, particularly the work of Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, whom Pixar brought on as consultants.

olewhalehunter 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  So have we dialed back from "Inside Out's psych theories are monstrous corporate brainwashing lies" to "Inside Out's psych theories are mildly controversial"? I get that you didn't like the movie, and that's okay, and it's certainly reasonable to not like Disney in general; but I don't think you have any grounds to extrapolate that to the movie's message being actively and specifically harmful.
  - olewhalehunter 11y ago
    I've dialed it to "Inside Out is such an effective piece of brainwashing that it can get people to passionately defend it for free on the Internet".
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      "All of my arguments have been refuted, so clearly this means that I have won." That's kinda nostalgic, actually. I remember seeing it a lot on Usenet. It's dwindled since people stopped calling flamewars "flamewars." Dunno why.
      - 11y ago

bitwize 11y ago

Actually psychologists have identified seven basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, surprise, contempt, and disgust. "Surprise" was considered similar enough to "fear" that Pixar made one character out of them; the same goes for "contempt" and "disgust". Complexity in emotions arises from their interactions, much like how we perceive a spectrum of colors as a mixture of three primaries. Most of the professionals in the field who saw Inside Out have praised it for getting the basics of emotion and memory right, even if it isn't super accurate. It is after all a cartoon.

isolate 11y ago
The original Tomkins model had dissmell in place of contempt, but it's similar. I think it's limited because it's based on facial expressions and doesn't account for things like shame and guilt and compassion.
olewhalehunter 11y ago
Is there any evidence those labels aren't a product of linguistics and culture? Two things developed during childhood that Disney is working to profit from? Did those professionals grow up watching Disney movies?
- isolate 11y ago
  The labels are based on experiments and are cross-cultural.
  - olewhalehunter 11y ago
    Are you insinuating those cross-cultural experiments predate the institutions of culture and language that produced them? Sounds a bit like time travel.
    - isolate 11y ago
      They looked at people's facial expressions, it wasn't based on self-reporting of emotion. The subjects were treated as animals in a biology experiment. You can look it up easily enough, the guy's name is Silvan Tomkins and the work is known as "affect theory".