Grrrrrr

Anger and Sadness: Masculine and Feminine

This is a third essay in a series about the personified emotions in the movie Inside Out.  To go back and read the previous two parts, click here.

Last time, I delved more deeply into Disgust and Attraction (or what Rudolf Steiner I think would have called Sympathy and Antipathy), and then ended with some beginning thoughts about Fear.  I certainly have a lot more to say about Fear, but for now I’ll just note that it seems to be that each of the five emotions, like Disgust, has its counterpole or mirror image that appears as one develops and matures.  So, just as a transformed and developed Disgust creates the conditions for a mature aesthetic sense for Beauty, Fear as it matures in the human being lays the ground work for a true Courage.  I think all of the emotions work this way, that they begin in the child as undifferentiated simple emotions, but then each one “pulls apart,” so to speak, into a tension between poles, the one our inheritance by being born human, and the other our birthright by living our lives and transforming that inheritance into something more personal, nuanced, flexible, textured and powerful.

Let’s extend this idea to Anger and Sadness.  Both of these characters have a lot more speaking lines and agency in the narrative of Inside Out as it unfolds.  Lewis Black voices the character Anger and is, I must say, so much fun to listen to.  And Phyllis Smith as Sadness is equally masterful in her portrayal.  I’ve already mentioned that Anger plays the lead role (with Fear and Disgust helping out) in driving Riley out the door in a brief attempt to run away and get back to Minnesota, which feels like a home that has been taken from her.  Sadness, for her part, plays perhaps the most crucial role in the entire movie, although one doesn’t realize it until the end, when she and Joy finally see each other and themselves for what they are and will be as Riley matures.  I think I’ll write later more about the Sadness-Joy detente, which is so rich to behold. So much subtlety there!

What I’d like to focus on in this essay is a small detail that, when I first noticed it, really rocked my world and gave me what felt like some real insight. Not far into the movie, there is a dinner table scene where we are briefly removed from the mind of Riley and dive into the minds of each of her parents.  This happens several times throughout the movie, mostly for comic effect and to illustrate some trite and (to me) not very interesting stereotypes about women and men.  For example, the first time we go into Dad’s mind, we find him daydreaming about a great hockey game he recently watched rather than listening to his family’s conversation.  With a similar amount of cliche, the mom’s mind includes her own daydream about an exotic man she met on some adventurous vacation long ago who swept her off her feet.  All of this is not the interesting part to me. The thing that made me sit up and pay attention was simply this: in the father’s mind, the “lead emotion” who has the central place at the (very large and more intricate) control board, is Anger.  In the mother, it is Sadness.

When I first saw this, it made so much instant sense to me.  It was like precognition, or recognition of something I already knew but hadn’t been able to articulate.   “Of course this is true,” was my first thought.  I can’t cite anything I’ve ever read, I can’t really even say exactly why (but I’ll try to outline it below); the idea just feels totally right to me, that in the mind of a mature man, it is transformed Anger that often sets the course and takes the lead, and in the mind of a mature woman, it is transformed Sadness.

A brief digression to another animated movie, this time the first Avengers movie (for all of my protestations about how much I dislike television and movies, I guess I have watched a few).  Late in the plotline of this movie, Bruce Banner shows up to the ongoing destruction of New York City on a moped, quipping in a totally deadpan way, “Well, this seems horrible.”  A few lines later, he’s walking down the street toward a humongous alien monster flying toward him, still in his human form.  Captain America asks him, “Don’t you think you should, you know, get angry?”, to which Bruce replies,” That’s my secret, Captain.  I’m always angry.”  And then he Hulks out.  

This line has had a rich meaning for me since I first heard it.  Just like Bruce Banner, I’ve known for a long time that in some deep way, I am always angry.  This troubled me for a long time, because I thought of anger as a mostly negative emotion that’s really not useful in society or polite company.  Yet my understanding of this was taken to a new level in a moment when I saw inside the minds of Mom and Dad in Inside Out .  It has made me reflect that I really have had such a rich relationship with my own feelings of anger, going back to my earliest childhood, through high school, adulthood and right up to now.  I can honestly say that I now think of Anger as a true friend, a singular emotion out of all of them that has helped me shape my life consciously, take up opportunities when they come along with gusto, and break away from situations that become toxic, among other things.  And I also see this in some of my fellow men, especially the ones I admire: a transformed Anger manifesting in a man who is creatively engaged in his own life and the life of his family and neighbors.  What would I name this polarity, this matured form of Anger?  Perhaps something like Strength and the Desire to Protect and/or Sacrifice.

In the same manner, although I don’t directly experience it in the same way, I observe that Sadness transforms into something powerful in many women, and I might call this power Warmth and Resolve and the Desire to Nurture Life.  This is, I think, beautifully portrayed in the scene where Sadness comforts Bing Bong by sitting with him and letting him cry and release his grief, whereas Joy in that moment is no help whatsoever.  And the final scenes of the movie where Sadness comes into her own are what I’d like to write about more next time.

Charles Eisenstein has written recently about masculine and feminine archetypes, and I’ve read what he has to say with interest and even contributed some commentary to his posts.  I see this area of understanding (how our emotional life affects our actions, and how masculine and feminine archetypal traits shape those emotional effects) as an area of really lively interest for me right now.  It’s given me a lot of insight that feels very valuable to me, into myself and into the women and men in my family and circles of friends, neighbors and coworkers.

Of course, none of this is meant to imply that men only interact with the world through their anger, nor women only through their sadness.  All of the emotions are still on the scene, and I have nothing prescriptive to say about any individual person’s sexual identity and their emotional life. In my own life, I’ve had a very rich relationship with sadness, too.  It’s not the point to use this information to typify any particular person.  I think of it as a tool and an invitation, to feel, rather than think, your way into your life for a change; to inquire to find out who those feelings are that are captaining the ship and what their nature is.  I recently wrote a poem about my anger, and may choose to share it here someday, to see what you think.

An obvious place for further study here could be: what happens when a man doesn’t mature well (out of control undifferentiated Anger, or suppressed, inwardly focused anger)? Or when a women doesn’t (a tragic drama projected into all of life, or irrepressible overwhelming inward Sadness)? Does this schema work, and do we see it working in our lives and the lives of others?  I certainly do.  All of this helps me feel that Inside Out was really onto something when they put Anger and Sadness each into their respective driver seats.

Let me know what you think about all of this, as always!  Next time, I think I’ll focus on the fascinating development of the relationship between Joy and Sadness.  Gotta get Fear back in there too, lots to say about him.

To go on to read the fourth essay in the series, click here.