One think I would like to start out with is this quote from Saddness, ““Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life’s problems.” What I really appreciated about this is how Joy herself comes to understand this in a new way. Particularly when she sees that saddness isn’t an entirely negative thing, it can heal and that in general negative emotions can indeed be positive in the end. We see this being threaded through the whole film as we cover different aspects of Riley’s maturity progress.
I think emotions are pretty much depicted as happening to us in Inside out, I think automatically of the scene where Riley is at the dinner table and anger takes hold both in Reilly and the fathers brain. What I find interesting as well, is positing what would have happened if joy was there? Would things went as far as they did? Perhaps so, if you feel this was the natural curse of things.
I don’t want to lean to deeply into the lore of the Disney Inside out film, but i also find it very interesting how the emotions cooperate within the mind, They all know the role they play, and typically don’t try to step in when it is another emotions time. I am curious what that is commenting about the emotions themselves in general.
This Star Trek: The next generation episode is a lot. It plays with the common trope of a villain hiding in plain sight. (This is also seen in frozen with Hans 😉 ) I think it actually adds a lot to the episode in terms of helping us sympathize with the charecter. Seeing the physically toll the emotions of this single man has on a EMPATH was an interesting twist. I am curious why he truly choose her specifically because, it makes me concur that he didn’t foresee that someone more sensitive to emotions would have a. More challenging time containing all of his abundant ones. I think looking at this from a psychological point of veiw would be interesting. In the real word often people are crushed by their abundance of emotions and are crippled by them, and we see this idea conveyed in the episode “Man of the People”
Alkar, at one point in the episode says, “You see, I discovered long ago I had the ability to channel my darker thoughts, my unwanted emotions, to others, leaving me unencumbered.“ This was a very interesting concept to bring forth, particularly for someone with his job title. I would presume that it would be a major part of his job, his emotions, yet he is decided in his choice that it actually improves him. I also I appreciate the use of the word, “unencombered” because I think that word holds a visual weight, which goes along with the visualization of usually unseen emotions.
One thought on “Saddness Isn’t so Bad After All?”
Hi Olivia,
In Module #4, we learned about cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphors. Your post points to one of the conceptual metaphors that we use to talk about our feelings: SADNESS IS HEAVY. We talk about having a “heavy heart” or the “weight of grief.” This is an entailment of the HAPPY IS UP; SADNESS IS DOWN metaphor. The idea is that our sadness is pushing us down so that we “feel low” or “depressed.”
Jessica Hautsch