{"id":1547,"date":"2015-06-19T00:20:33","date_gmt":"2015-06-19T06:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theamericancrawl.com\/?p=1547"},"modified":"2015-06-19T00:20:33","modified_gmt":"2015-06-19T06:20:33","slug":"four-emotions-while-watching-pixars-inside-out-body-shaming-charlestonshooting-and-the-privileged-feels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theamericancrawl.com\/?p=1547","title":{"rendered":"Four Emotions While Watching Pixar\u2019s Inside Out: Body Shaming, #CharlestonShooting, and the Privileged Feels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building off of the four key emotions portrayed in Inside Out<\/em>, a quartet of reflections on Pixar\u2019s latest.<\/p>\n

Joy<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fun<\/em> Pixar film that gives you Pixar feels. Yay.<\/p>\n

(Also, the fleeting nod to Steve Jobs\u2019s \u201creality distortion field\u201d was a nice gesture.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anger<\/strong><\/p>\n

As much as I wanted to love this movie, I kept wondering why the characters of \u201cAnger\u201d and \u201cSadness\u201d had to be the heavyset characters. The former resorts to violence and the latter is so lazy she is dragged on the floor throughout a third of the movie. If I think about the diverse bodies we have, I can’t\u00a0help but ponder what effect seeing one\u2019s larger body type manifested as someone\u00a0that is \u201cangry\u201d or \u201csad\u201d will have on an impressionable audience. What does this movie say about who I am and my relationship to feelings of joy if I am considered \u201cfat\u201d by society\u2019s definitions?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Disgust<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the heart of this movie (and not really a spoiler) is a young girl struggling to adjust to life in a new city with her parents; there are delays from a moving truck, a fleeting moment of embarrassment in school, an argument at home. The entire social and emotional range that this character undergoes is rooted in the pretty comfortable life of being a white girl in an upper-middle-class family in an industrialized, wireless, and accepting society. As I watched the movie, I reflected on Jeff Duncan-Andrade\u2019s scholarship on “critical hope<\/a>,”\u00a0the signs of PTSD that youth in spaces of poverty experience<\/a>, and the ways youth of color’s\u00a0feelings would be triggered by entirely different<\/em> circumstances than those of the protagonist of the film. This is very much a film for<\/em> and about<\/em> white feelings. (My caveat here<\/a> about reading Catcher in the Rye<\/em> with my high school students applies to this concern. But. But the whiteness of the film\u2019s emotional core is frustrating in light of where American discourse stands in 2015, which brings me to\u2026)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fear<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last night, nine people were murdered. It was fueled by hate and our country needs to do more than mourn. We need to have important discussion<\/a> and\u00a0action <\/em>about race<\/a>, our history<\/a> of racism, and what \u201cfear\u201d means when it feels like it is open season on unarmed boys and girls of color in the U.S. I worry that the snow-globe like feelings of Inside Out <\/em>and an underlying feeling of see-we\u2019re-all-the-same<\/em> does more harm than good when the very real differences in where we\u2019re born and from whom can mean life or death.<\/p>\n

Tell people this is awesome:<\/h3>