Inside Out 2 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There's a room in this film where people sit at desks and draw. Not art: disasters. Sketch after sketch of everything that could go wrong at hockey camp, stacked and handed off and stacked again, a whole industrial floor given over to manufacturing futures that will never arrive. Anxiety runs the shop. She has just taken Riley's head, and the first thing she does with the power is open a factory.

Hold onto that room. It's the sharpest thing in Inside Out 2, and it's where Gilles Deleuze's two books on cinema stop being furniture and start being useful, because Deleuze spent both of them on a question this cartoon walks straight into: what happens to a mind when what it sees can no longer be answered by anything it does?

Begin with the set the whole franchise rests on. Headquarters is a console, a window, and a crew who watch what comes in and push buttons that send behavior back out. Deleuze got this picture from Bergson, who was blunt about it. A living creature is a centre of indetermination: a gap. Perception arrives, action departs, and between them sits a hesitation, a delay in which the response is not yet decided. The brain, in this account, isn't a warehouse of images or a seat of thought. The brain is the interval. It's the pause.

Pixar built a set inside the pause. Say it plainly and it sounds obvious, which is usually the mark of a real invention. Inner-space-as-landscape was already there in Fantastic Voyage (1966), which gave the body its own weather and terrain. Personified faculties arguing in a control room were already there in Herman's Head (1991). What Pete Docter added, working out the method on Monsters, Inc., was the trick of taking an intangible economy and building it a functioning industry with labor and machines and quotas. Inside Out aimed that method at the half-second before a girl speaks. Everything in Headquarters happens inside that half-second.

Deleuze had a phrase for films built this way: a cinema of the brain, where the world on screen is laid out as brain architecture rather than as geography. He meant Resnais, whose corridors are memory circuits, and Kubrick, whose hotels and spacecraft think. Those films are brains. This one draws a picture of one, with signage. The difference is real and it's the honest limit of the comparison. But the picture is unusually good, because the topology is right: memory shelves, a vault for what's been shoved out of sight, a belief system where strands braid into a tree that is who Riley thinks she is.

So what kind of film is it? In Deleuze's terms, almost aggressively one kind. He split cinema into the movement-image, where a character perceives a situation and acts and the action resolves it, and the time-image, which surfaces after the war when characters start perceiving things no action can answer and film has to invent ways of showing time instead of plot. The mind-world here is movement-image cinema at maximum purity, in what Deleuze called the large form: a global situation bears down until one decisive act transforms it. Anxiety's takeover is the situation. The quest to recover the discarded Sense of Self is the act. Perception comes in a literal window, behavior goes out a literal console, and the two-track cutting between hockey camp and Headquarters tightens toward rescue exactly the way American movies have tightened toward the last-minute rescue since Griffith.

Here's the friction worth staying with. What this perfectly sensory-motor movie is dramatizing is the failure of the sensory-motor circuit. That's what anxiety is. Not a situation you can act on, but a flood of situations that haven't happened, arriving faster than any act could address.

Which is precisely what the drawing room manufactures. Deleuze has a name for time experienced this way, borrowed from Augustine: peaks of present. Not past-present-future in a line, but several presents running at once, the present of the future live alongside the present of the present. Everyone has that. Anxiety industrializes it. She puts the present of the future on a production line until it crowds the building, and the film's best joke turns out to be its most accurate psychology: the anxious mind isn't confused about the future, it's overproducing it.

The takeover also arrives as light. Orange seeps into Headquarters and keeps going, and the room's whole feeling travels with the hue rather than being described by it. That's the affective colour, a device from Antonioni and Godard, working perfectly well in a family comedy.

Then the film does the thing nobody expected. In the panic-attack sequence it quits explaining. The allegorical machinery falls away and what remains is density and rhythm, sound piling up until a physiological state is transmitted instead of illustrated. Deleuze called these pure optical and sound situations: passages where a character, and the audience with them, can only look and listen because no available action fits. This is the film's one time-image, and it's the sequence everyone remembers. The reason is structural. For ninety minutes we've been inside a mind where every feeling had a button. Then, briefly, there's no button.

Which sets up an ending stranger than its reputation. The Sense of Self tree is an image of Riley that starts doing Riley's living for her. Joy grows a flattering one by discarding the bad memories; Anxiety tears it out and grows a punishing one; the girl behaves accordingly, because in this world beliefs drive the console. Deleuze called this a crystalline description, a description that composes its object and then quietly replaces it. The 2015 film argued that Sadness deserved a seat at the desk. The sequel argues that no single emotion should be allowed to author the portrait at all, and it lands on a sentence with no synthesis in it: I'm a good person and I'm not. Late Deleuze built an ethics on that conjunction, the AND in place of the IS, relation held open rather than resolved into identity. A children's film gets there in six words and declines to reconcile them. From the studio that invented the tidy last reel, that's worth something.

What did it do to filmmaking? Not much yet, and it's better to say so. Its legacy so far is industrial, in that it reset what a theatrical animated film could earn, and it is linguistic, in that a great many people now describe their own interiors using its furniture. Craft-wise it inherits rather than invents. The wordless compression Docter perfected in Up's "Married Life," an emotional arc carried by cutting and score alone, runs directly into the memory and belief-system montages. The populated interior reaches back past Osmosis Jones to the ancient habit of picturing the head as an office staffed by small operators.

But what it inherits, it aims well. Watch it again for the interval. Every Headquarters scene is a delay being dramatized, and the film's true subject is what fills the gap between what Riley sees and what she does. When the orange floods in, the gap stops being hers. When the sound takes over, the gap is all there is.