Boo Boo on the Beach — Pure Joy Personified

When you have a wife who’s a psychologist, and a movie that’s directly on psychology comes out, guess what. You’re gonna go watch it. And I’m not talking about psychological thrillers here. My wife works with sad people and children. While she’s not perfect, she’s no psychopath. And as any sane psychologist will tell you, they are the worst part of the practice.

So when Inside Out originally came out in 2015, of course we went to see it. I remember finding it enjoyable enough, as well as applicable enough to the work I write about to have a small e-mail conversation with the chief technical advisor to the film, Dacher Keltner. For the record, he is a very smart and pleasant human, and we had some honest intellectual fun sharing ideas on adolescent development.

And Inside Out (2015) had enough big themes that it was entertaining. Discussing the move from Minnesota to the coast was big enough — separation, anxiety, starting over and growing up — that I was amused enough to think about it at least a little while after it passed.

Not so much for Inside Out 2 (2024). What had nine years of development wrought? Nothing good. Now the main protagonist, Riley, who is now a 13 year old ostensibly adolescent girl, is settled in at her new home in California, and making a transition to joining an up-grade hockey league. She has to leave behind her old friends, who are going to a different school, and somehow make a team of new girls so she can play in high school.

But the whole movie this time has been run through the current DEI blender, as well as pounding stereotypes of male de-testosteronization. The mom’s in charge, the dad’s a cuck, and Riley is annoying. Character development is relatively non-existent, save for making sure that there’s a “rainbow” of representation for all the various roles on the team. The coach is a stern-faced African-American woman, who is never developed as any character other than to have a cartoon character painted in blackface. Riley’s potential new teammates are a once-and-future dyke, a character actually wearing a hijab, a Hispanic girl and others. I can’t remember, and I don’t care. The goal, on the surface, is to virtue-signal the audience with representation.

The plot is annoying enough — who really cares if a 13-year-old girl doesn’t make a sports team? How CAN you care? But you can at least recruit enough psychologists to watch this kind of movie if you scatter enough Easter Eggs — little psychological professional nuggets — to make the therapists in the movie feel, well, special. But you can’t get away from the lack of gravitas. Yeah, I know it’s a cartoon. But you start wondering if something else is going on. And Riley’s emotions and transitions ain’t it.

But what really IS going on? It’s another piece of gaslighting media out of Hollywood, that really is wrecking the enjoyment value of anything emanating from that particular black hole of society. The movie could easily have been made about a young girl joining a basketball team (far more relevant for the California backdrop than hockey) than foisting on us some unbelievable multicultural hockey paradise. A black female hockey coach? Really? Are we really at the stage of society where we believe that African-Americans cannot play hockey, or are being denied opportunities to play hockey, that a children’s cartoon has to be stunning and brave with this portrayal?

And while the racial/ethnic teammates might be somewhat representative of California as a whole, it’s utterly unrepresentative of any hockey team you’d find anywhere. Once again, why is Hollywood in general, or Pixar/Disney doing this in particular? You get the feeling you are being propagandized and gaslit by a stupid movie. It’s not that white folks have a total lock on hockey, to the point where any other minority showing up is pandering with its own version of cultural appropriation. But if there’s a white sport, folks, it’s hockey. You’re being played. And it doesn’t feel good.

But that’s the point. The emergent effect of this kind of media is to make folks dull down their sense of reality that this cartoon is supposed to be enhancing, and tune out. And boy, does it do that in spades. Contrast this to my recent video affectation, Battlestar Galactica (the reimagined 2003 series) which is likely the most integrated racial/ethnic portrayal of any TV series of all time. I challenge anyone to even take the character representations on that show and see how any current DEI portrayals actually influence the plot. You can’t really recount someone’s background. And why? The character development is so oriented on who they are, that what they are is absolutely irrelevant.

And once again, why does this matter? Just before my wife and I checked out the movie, my younger son and I took a short visit to the Oregon Coast. Sitting in the hotel room in between hikes, my son and I were watching the NBA playoffs. As per usual, there was an endless stream of ads for all sorts of the usual shit. Except, by at least a ratio of 10:1, the actors and pitch-folks in those ads were mostly African-American, mostly multicultural, and all middle class or up. I had never known about the existence of a ubiquitous African-American semi-elite until I watched all those ads. And if you know anything about the income distribution in this country (African-Americans make up ~13% of the population, but only .3% of the GDP!) you start realizing that all those ads are really just gaslighting you. You are being played.

I know the minute that I say this, the simpletons out there will say “but you’re a racist! We need representation in order to move forward the agenda!” I’m OK with representation. But this is ridiculous. And what it really serves to do is provide social anesthesia that really only helps the elites in society. Problems that people refuse to face don’t get solved. It’s literally a Potemkin Village out there in media-land.

After our beach sojourn, Conor and I drove back into the upper Willamette wine country. We arbitrarily picked two wineries to stop by and indulge — and by “arbitrarily” I really mean that. One I picked as the winery of a famous rich inventor. The other I literally had no idea. When we drove up into the parking lot at Domaine Serene, it was almost like approaching an estate in the Loire Valley. We got out into a large, well appointed bar and dining room. Does anyone want to guess how many African-Americans were waiting for a table? Or even Asian-Americans? Pure as the driven snow doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Of course, the fine hostesses at that establishment would have seated anyone (well, at least in the bar — that’s what they did with us.) But if you need a class discriminator, I can tell you that driving into the middle of the countryside and paying $34/glass for some Pinot Noir is definitely an upper middle class/rich white thing to do.

The problem with the constant bombardment and gaslighting around race — both positive and negative — is that it shuts down and disorients the critical faculties of people. And it goes without saying that it destroys any discussion of anything other than the official line, which, quite frankly is still not working out. But worse, it creates a populace that tunes out on everything. Our brains don’t compartmentalize this kind of stuff.

Misrepresented virtue is still misrepresented virtue. It creates an impenetrable fog that disables all of us. And makes it far more easy for psychopaths to manipulate us. And ignore the real problems in communities of color. As well as problems white folks are having as well.