Rome, 16 June – He makes his entrance with his red hair gathered in a tuft standing up on his head, his smile wide, long and crooked, his round eyes wide open, six suitcases in his hands. She flits elusive around the control room which is the brain of thirteen year old Riley, and she introduces herself: “I can take notes, bring you a coffee, manage your agenda, go for a walk with the dog, watch over you while you sleep…”. She is the new emotion protagonist of the Disney-Pixar cartoon Inside Out 2, sequel to the 2015 masterpiece just released in the USA and Canada (and kissed by record takings: $155 million over the weekend, nearly $300 globally, the biggest debut of 2024), arriving in Italian cinemas on Wednesday; an emotion called Anxiety.
In the original English it is Anxiety, single word, like the German Angst, which encompasses the two Italians anxiety and anguish, with the latter considered “more serious”, a pathological expression (neurotic or psychotic) of the former. Even if anxiety alone is no joke: “today depression no longer presents itself, as in Freud’s time, as a conflict between norm and transgression and therefore as ‘neurosis’ – wrote Umberto Galimberti in ‘The myths of our time’, 2013 – but as a failure in the ability to push the possible at full throttle to the limit of the impossible… What has disappeared in our current society is the concept of limits. And in the absence of a limit, the subjective experience can only be one of inadequacy, if not anxiety”.
Depression disease of the West. And illness anxiety, in particular, of the new generations: in the USA it has been debated for some time, first with the alarm raised in 2023 and reiterated this year by the “Surgeon general”, the person responsible for public health Vivek H. Murthy who denounced the link between depression and anxiety in teenagers and the time they spend on social media, and in recent months following the publication, last March, of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book ‘The Anxious Generation’. Haidt’s theories have monopolized the debate on Generation Z for weeks, renamed by the professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU) “Anxious generation“: the idea behind the volume is that the rapid spread of smartphones and the prevalence of an overprotective parenting model have caused a progressive reduction in the time spent by young people offline. This condition would be the cause of a sort of “re-wiring” of synaptic connections during childhood and adolescence, and of a consequent increase in mental illnesses: in the United States, levels of anxiety and depression, which have remained fairly stable over the years Two thousand, according to various studies cited by Haidt, grew by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate increased by 48 percent in the age group between 10 and 19 years: among adolescents aged 10 to 14 , in particular, by 131 percent.
It is certainly no coincidence, then, that the now 13-year-old protagonist (Generation Alpha) of Inside Out 2 suddenly finds himself at the mercy of the new emotion called Anxiety, which manifests itself in the company of other “new entries” such as Boredom (Ennui, with French accent), Embarrassment and Envy, which go alongside the “classics” Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear of Riley as a child. The arrival of Ansia is emblematic: for Inside Out 2 director Kelsey Mann, the film thus becomes “an opportunity to help viewers of all ages feel less alone. Much of the difficulty in dealing with our emotions is naming them.”he told the “New York Times”. “And when they are recognized, their intensity – therefore also the intensity of the pain, the discomfort, the frustration – begins to decrease a little.”
For the cartoon, Mann availed himself of the advice of a psychologist Lisa Damour and the emotion science expert and psychology professor at the University of California – Berkeley Dacher Keltner: “At the beginning Ansia was the classic ‘villain’ of the film, but she didn’t convince me – revealed Mann – I didn’t understand her. So, with the consultants, we decided that Anxiety was actually motivated by love for Riley, just like Gioia was.” Although moved by the ghost of perfectionism“Anxiety’s job, as she sees it, is to plan for the future and protect Riley from the scary things she can’t see.” we are often told that mental health is about ‘feeling good’. But really mental health is about having feelings that fit what’s happening and then managing them well.” For Keltner the film is therefore an invitation – aimed not only at younger people – “to be more accommodating with ourselves, to accept our complexity. Riley’s anxiety isn’t pathological, it’s an emotion that’s trying to tell her something, and emotions have the wisdom of the ages.” So that they don’t annihilate, they must be listened to. Including anxiety.
