Inside
Out
did big business this summer alongside a handful of 40th anniversary
re-releases of the progenitor of the modern blockbuster, Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Without getting too much into the
oft-narrated shifts that the movie industry underwent in the mid-70's (relevant
as it might be) it seems useful to reflect on the films that populated the top
ten from the “Year of Jaws” in
contrast to this summer’s top grossers: Jurassic
World, Fast and Furious 7, Pitch Perfect 2, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fifty
Shades of Grey, and Cinderella.
In other words, this summer brought new meaning to the metaphor of cinema-as-fast
food. If you don't see the similarities between the latest recombinant Taco
Bell item and the nutritional/cultural value of Fast and Furious 7, then you really aren't paying attention.
In contrast, the box office frontrunners
accompanying Jaws forty years ago
include the likes of Hal Ashby's Shampoo,
Milos Foreman's adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. Needless to say, these films have a challenging
complexity that has endured across the intervening decades, and a maturity that
is only magnified when put in relief to the listless screenwriting and
relentless marketing of films like Jurassic
World.
To gaze at the list of films leading the box office
so far in 2015 is to see the reflection of a culture with developmental problems.
Of course, American culture and media has had numerous occasions to flaunt its
truly immature nature recently, dangerously so. Those who have followed the childish,
anti-intellectual responses to everything from the Caitlyn Jenner story to the
denials of racism in the Charleston church shootings are possibly coming to
similar conclusions recently: that American culture has not only failed to
learn from the past, but to simply grow
up. In part, the cinema is the place
where those attitudes are incubated and debated, where we deepen our emotional
connection to each other; not unlike how Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) ultimately
develops deeper emotional capacities and wider personal constructs through the
narrative arc of Pixar’s Inside Out.
So, what to say of the films dominating the Box
Office this year? At least half of it is built from young-adult or children's
sources, while the more adult-oriented fare would be hard to make a case for actually
having been made with adults in mind. Inside Out is somewhere in the middle of
this current top ten, and maybe one of the most intelligent and artful of the
bunch. The structure of Inside Out is
an exercise in cross-cut action between the inner, psychological world of
11-year old Riley, and her less-colorful, increasingly troubled external
journey as an only child having to move from Minnesota to San Francisco. The
design of Inside Out is essential to
establishing these two separate worlds, at first creating entertaining juxtapositions,
but eventually making more elaborate assertions about consciousness, memory,
and the nature of the Self more commonly found in the realms of philosophy or
neuroscience.
By film’s end, I found the questions raised by Inside Out to be quite engaging, even though
enduring the more maudlin aspects of the movie threaten to overwhelm all this
by the final reel. The hilarious outro sequence takes us through various
depictions of the inner-pilots of minor characters, ultimately landing us
inside the mind of a cat. At this point, questioning the problematic though
common assumption of a tiny character (or characters) controlling consciousness
from behind the third eye (if so, who pilots their consciousness?), this “cat-based”
paradigm opened up a whole new imagistic world that jived more with my
understanding of the chaotic, mysterious, and pluralistic nature of
consciousness, while simultaneously providing the biggest laugh in an already
pretty funny film. In any case, the discussions evoked by Inside Out will likely be what sets it apart from a surfeit of young-adult
fare, and what distinguishes it from the current trends in mainstream movie
consumption that endlessly reward disproportionate preoccupations with
nostalgia over any engagement with the world on the other side of the screen.
In this way, Inside
Out is the most hopeful of the aforementioned commercial frontrunners. Beyond
that, it’s a film that elaborates on the idea of meta-cognition--that is, it
offers a way to think about how we think--that seems a novel idea in the world
of animated movies, though right in line with the more sophisticated of Pixar
films, which present everything from eloquent examinations of criticism (Ratatouille) to questions of post-Earth
post-humanism (Wall-E). In fact, I
imagine Inside Out will be the only
animated film--possibly the only mainstream film--to reference Inductive
Reasoning, Critical Thinking, and the traditions of Abstract Art I’m likely to
see all year. Warning: Adult themes.
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