Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Inside Out
2015 · Pete Docter · Inside Out on Sightlines
Five small figures stand at a console and look out through a wide window. What they see is what Riley sees: a kitchen, a parent's face, a drab new apartment in San Francisco. When something happens out there, someone in here pushes a lever, and Riley does something. Pete Docter has built a movie theater inside an eleven-year-old's head and given the audience the controls.
That room is the best place to start thinking about Inside Out with Gilles Deleuze, because it is close to a working model of the first half of his two books on cinema. Deleuze took an idea from the philosopher Henri Bergson. A stone that gets hit just moves. A living creature hesitates. Between what reaches it and what it does back there is a small gap, and in that gap feeling happens, and so does choice. Bergson called the living body a centre of indetermination. Deleuze called the gap the interval, and he built his account of classical cinema, which he named the movement-image, on top of it. In that cinema a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. The film's cuts carry the chain from seeing to doing.
Headquarters is the interval with furniture in it. The window is perception, the console is action, and the emotions are the hesitation in between, each with an opinion about what to do next. Deleuze once wrote that the brain is the screen. Docter took him at his word, then filled the screening room with coworkers.
The editing follows the same rule. Kevin Nolting cuts between the two worlds so that each crossing is a cause: something happens at the console, then something happens at the dinner table. The dinner-table sequence, the film's best joke, swings through three control rooms, Riley's, her mother's and her father's, each with its own crew, decor and office culture. It's funny because for once we can see every interval in the family reacting to the same situation at the same moment.
Then the machine breaks. Joy and Sadness get flushed out of Headquarters along with Riley's core memories. Fear, Anger and Disgust can still work the board, but Riley starts to fail at coping. Deleuze saw something like this in postwar cinema, which he called the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer answer what they see with any act that fits it. Docter stages that crisis as a breakdown at the controls in a little girl's head.
That changes the meaning of the film's hero. Joy belongs to the action-image. For her every situation is a problem with a fix, and Sadness is a fault in the system to be fenced off inside a chalk circle. The film's argument, unusual for a family film, is that Joy is wrong. In Deleuze's terms, Inside Out asks whether a feeling can be lived through without being solved.
Be honest about the form, though. The film doesn't give up the classical machine. It runs on one. Toy Story lends it the chassis: two mismatched workers thrown out of the child's room have to cross hostile ground before a deadline, and the proud one ends up carrying the rival she tried to push aside. The Wizard of Oz lends it a displaced girl crossing a fantasy land that has rules, trying to get back to the room she started in. The two tracks race toward each other the way D.W. Griffith's did, the pattern Deleuze called organic American montage. Docter uses the most dependable form in the business to argue against that form's favorite emotion.
The color does the arguing too. Ralph Eggleston built each emotion around a hue, gold, blue, red, purple and green, and those hues carry over into the memory orbs, the lighting and the whole palette. Deleuze wrote about color that soaks up a scene and its feeling until the colour is the feeling. Here it's also a technical fact. Joy gives off real light. Where she stands decides how the floors, the walls and the other characters are lit. Kim White's lighting tracks the drama without a word of dialogue: watch where Joy's glow ends and Sadness's blue begins.
Next come the memories, and here the film opens a question that it answers better than it seems to know. The golden orbs are what Deleuze called recollection-images, each one a dated, sealed piece of a past moment, like the warm Minnesota flashbacks set against the cool new apartment. Long Term Memory is a library of them, endless shelves with a maintenance crew that throws out what nobody uses. Bergson had argued against exactly this picture. Memory, he said, is not a stock of objects kept in the brain. The past survives whole and lives alongside the present, and we dip into it from where we are now. When Joy and Sadness walk through the shelves they are, in a cartoon way, moving through the past as a territory instead of replaying it in order. Deleuze calls that sheets of past.
The film breaks the warehouse model with one touch. Sadness lays a hand on a golden memory and it turns blue. A stored object can't change color after the fact. A past that can be felt differently from the present was never a finished record. With a single prop, the film moves from the filing cabinet to something much closer to Bergson.
The development record shows this was earned. For a long time Joy's road partner was Fear, which gave the film comedy and no thesis. Moving Sadness into that seat turned a picaresque into an argument. The rest of the system came from somewhere too. Disney's wartime short Reason and Emotion had already put personified faculties at a cockpit inside a skull. A Matter of Life and Death gave each world its own photographic look, with a bureaucratic beyond arguing over a man. Being John Malkovich got its comedy from two occupants fighting over the controls. Ren Klyce, better known for his work with David Fincher, gave the mind a reverberant, machine-hummed sound and kept Riley's world close. Even the Abstract Thought gag, where the characters flatten from solid bodies to cubist pieces to line drawings, works only because the film has made its rendering style a rule.
What Docter added was rigor. He took the oldest picture of the mind, little workers running a body, and followed its rules until they gave way.
So when you watch it again, watch the light. Notice where Joy stands, what she lights up, and what goes dark when she's gone. Then watch a golden orb turn blue at Sadness's touch, and ask what it means that the past can still change.
Concepts in play
- the interval — Headquarters: the emotions sit between the window (Riley's field of vision) and the console that steers her, a literal room between perception and action
- the movement-image — Nolting makes the cut causal (an action in the mind produces an effect in the world), which turns the sensory-motor chain into the editing rule; the dinner-table rotation through three consoles
- crisis of the action-image — With Joy and Sadness flushed out, Riley outwardly fails to cope while the remaining emotions work the board
- organic American montage — Two simultaneous tracks converging against a deadline on the Toy Story chassis: two functionaries ejected from the child's room must cross hostile territory to get back
- affective colour — Eggleston's color scripts: each emotion anchors a hue that carries into the orbs, the lighting and the palette; Joy as a practical light source whose glow competes with Sadness's blue
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The color-coded memory orbs and the warm, golden Minnesota flashbacks, each a sealed former present
- order of time / coexistence — Joy and Sadness trek through Long Term Memory's endless shelving as a territory; a golden memory turning blue at Sadness's touch shows a past that is still open to the present