What does Boredom, from “Inside Out 2”, have to teach us?

Editor’s Note: Tina Kendall is Professor of Film, Media and Communication Studies at Anglia Ruskin University (UK). The text was originally published by The Conversation, which brings together articles written by experts.

Animated children’s films have long strived to teach young viewers how to manage their emotions. The film “Inside Out” (2015), by Disney Pixar, made this task of emotional regulation literal.

Joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust, protagonist Riley’s five basic emotions, became characters in her internal “control room”. Together, they guided her actions as she developed, going from baby to pre-teen. Now, in the next installment, “Inside Out 2”, Riley turns 13 years old. This means the emergence of more “sophisticated” emotions, including anxiety, shame, envy and boredom.

I’m a researcher who has studied how boredom shapes media content and use. Therefore, I was particularly intrigued by the character Tédio (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who embodies this state of unmotivated apathy that we call boredom.

At the beginning of the film, Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke in the original) explains to her older emotions that “we all have a job to do,” adding that hers is “planning for the future.” So what is the role of Boredom in the film, and how does it relate to the role of boredom in our everyday lives?

Since its creation in the early 19th century, the concept of “boredom” has been a topic of debate and disagreement. Philosophers and psychologists have noted that boredom can have both a positive and negative impact, suggesting that it plays a particularly important role in childhood and adolescent development.

In his influential discussion of boredom, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips describes boredom as: “That state of suspended animation in which things begin and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness that contains the most absurd and paradoxical desire, the desire for a desire.”

Or, as psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood say in their recent study, the inertia of boredom is, above all, “a call to action, a signal to become more engaged” – or to try something different.

While it’s associated with disinterest and apathy and can be a sign that we need to shift gears, my research shows how boredom is increasingly being targeted by big tech and media companies. They’ve worked hard to cement the link between feeling bored and picking up our digital devices. Our phones are often promoted as tools to combat boredom, whenever and wherever it sets in.

Boredom, and the fear of it, motivates us to scroll mindlessly. But research has shown that the more we use smartphones to distract ourselves from boredom, the more bored we risk becoming. This is a particular problem for teenagers. Over the past few decades, research has shown a correlation between increased boredom and mental health difficulties.

“Inside Out 2” doesn’t exactly deal with these potentially negative aspects of boredom. Instead, he focuses on the positive developmental role that boredom plays in helping Riley manage the intensity of teenage life. Throughout the film, the character Tédio, with a French accent, lies on a sofa, wearing a dark blue sweatshirt, looking dispassionately at his smartphone screen.

While early conceptual design sketches depicted Boredom in pinkish-red, the final version reimagined her in shades of dark blue and deep purple. How does it explain [designer de produção] from the film (https://www.newsweek.com/ennui-inside-out-pixar-emotions-1913199 “”): “Ultimately, we went with this dark, desaturated blue-gray hue – if I had to give a name for it would be ‘blah’.”

Boredom’s appearance, movements, and verbal tics exude the mental fatigue, physical torpor, and lack of interest of the feeling of boredom.

For most of the film, she takes a backseat to Anxiety, the film’s main antagonist. While Anxiety ignites the screen with her frenzied nervous energy, Boredom is a lurker who exudes what the French call je m’en futisme, the distinctly adolescent art of not giving a damn. Importantly, Boredom’s smartphone functions as a remote control for the control console, allowing her to modulate Riley’s emotions without ever getting up from the couch.

This ease is a central aspect of Boredom’s role in the film. She largely takes a backseat to other emotions, responding only minimally to the drama with dramatic sighs, yawns, eye rolling, or through sarcastic jokes and criticism. This sense of disinterested coldness is how the film makes sense of the role of boredom in Riley’s emotional life as she grows from child to teenager.

At key moments in the film, however, Boredom takes control of the console, influencing Riley’s emotional experience by lessening its intensity—for example, when Riley tries to impress the older friends she made at summer camp. When they say the name of the band she went to see last summer, causing Anxiety and Embarrassment to appear, Boredom gets up from the couch and announces, “I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

Boredom counterbalances Riley’s fear of how others see her with a heavy dose of sarcasm, which acts as a protective shield. At other important times, Boredom’s function is to keep other emotions in check, helping to soften the emotional intensities of teenage life.

The way this helps temper Riley’s emotional experience harkens back to sociologist Georg Simmel’s notion of a “blasé attitude.” In your essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Simmel described the blasé attitude as a consequence of the “rapidly changing stimulations of the nerves which are brought together in all their contrasts” in the modern metropolis.

Defined by a sense of apathetic indifference, Simmel argued that the blasé attitude provided a form of protection against the sensory intensity and nervous overstimulation that came with city life.

Without a doubt, it is this version of boredom that predominates in the character of Tedio. By smoothing Riley’s emotional ups and downs, Boredom offers its own inimitable form of protection against the overstimulation that comes with adolescence.

This text was originally published by The Conversation. Read the original article.

“Inside Out 2”: what the film teaches about teenage brains