Pixar is the most consistent film company in the United States. The company has mostly made excellent movies, has a few mediocre titles, (Cars series shout out), and no bad films. Inside Out is as good as the best of Pixar and that means it is funny, well written, and thoughtful.
Like all great films, Inside Out has images so powerful that they become part of us. A favorite image is the thought bubble that is formed whenever Riley “makes a memory.” The memory is a film clip that loops eternally inside the shell of the thought bubble. Is there a better icon for the relationship between mind and matter?
The bubble itself is the material structure that holds the ideas in the memory. Film, could be stored in a mind, on a Blu-Ray, or streamed from servers at Netflix. The thought bubble contains the memory, but is not the memory. The mind is able to extract the meaning from the storage medium and recreate the memory. Inside Out uses the spherical thought bubbles to capture both concepts: the medium that holds the idea in a form where we can retrieve it and the idea itself.
Ideas are a big problem for the simple minded crowd that thinks all that exists is matter and energy. You don’t want to believe in God, because you cannot grasp an immaterial being? What about numbers? Numbers exist, but they are not “made” of matter and energy. Doubt that numbers exist? What about the film Inside Out? It can be stored in many media, but the movie is the same wherever it is stored. Hope and I share a memory of seeing the fireworks at Disneyland, but you cannot find the memory by looking inside our brains. You could destroy our ability to retrieve the memory, interpret it, or understand it by messing with our bodies and brains, but the memory would endure in the other person’s mind. It could even be restored, since ideas endure!
People I love suffer from problems due to brain difficulties. The mind presses the proper button on the control panel, but it gets a wrong result. Joy means to send a smile to the world, but instead the console shorts and sends a frown. The mind endures, but the interface has failed. As the mind slips into eternity, a place where it will receive a better more enduring interface, the old system fails, but we, the idea of who we are, can endure.
I see my own aging body and know that this is real. This dying that is coming is part of me. I cannot escape it, but it is not all of me. There is a part of me, the ideal, that simply needs a new medium to live again. The promise of Scripture is that this day is coming. Just as Jesus received a new body and now lives forever, so I will receive a new body and live eternally with Him. We cannot be destroyed and God cannot forget us. If we choose not to change, we damn ourselves, but we need not choose badly.
I can allow myself to be “born again” and become fit for a new upgraded console, material interface, and retrieval system where nothing good, true, or beautiful is ever lost or forgotten.
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