All those colors

Yesterday Elai invited us to the movies, so of course we went. We wouldn’t have chosen an animated movie on our own, especially with the new Terminator out (just kidding!!), but she insisted, so in we went. After Up and Wally I had some hope. And I was not disappointed. I think the only two movies Elai has insisted we watch with her are Silver Linings Playbook and now Inside Out, both about living with extreme ends of emotion and finding the silver linings.

Elai and I were talking before the movie about how we process things so differently in our heads. I tend to think in terms of connections, metaphors, symbols, a constant linking of things, a constant seeing of one thing as being another, (of being, maybe, a much bigger or smaller “another,” which is why I exaggerate all the time). Elai, my artsy, feeling child, thinks in terms of colors and images, and both her color palette for visualizing and her emotional palette for responding to these images is so much broader than mine. Next to her I am color-blind. As our former principal used to say, who has a daughter with similar gifting, “they have a wide emotional range.”  Put your hands out in front of you a foot apart. That’s you and me. Now stretch them out wide. That is their range. They are rich in imagery and feeling.

And as a verbal soul, my words come quickly. I have so many words in my head that I can’t stand background noise, even music. I want total silence in the house, especially when I read or write or think or…yes, just about anything. Elai, on the other hand, wants stimulus. She has the music on all the time. She thinks better with surround-sound. And she thinks in pictures and wishes she could paint those pictures on canvas and paper and screen exactly as she sees them, and she struggles with the gap between the true image and the art. And she struggles with translating, always translating the pictures into w-o-r-d-s. Imagine typing ever letter of every word with a hyphen in between. It slows her down. It even shuts her down sometimes. Especially when we run ahead with our words or get impatient waiting for her words to surface. They come so easily for us. It’s easier for her sometimes to walk away.

I liked the way the movie put in images and sounds the way our feelings move us. I liked how it showed that inside different people’s heads there are different stories playing, and sometimes these stories don’t match up, and we misunderstand each other and react. I liked how it showed how emotions can be a tangled mess, and how they can trigger actions that we don’t even understand ourselves, and how even sadness has its purpose when there is true loss. I especially liked how it showed that emotions can color our memories retroactively. C. S. Lewis said heaven is retroactive, and so is hell, coloring every memory we take with us for good or ill. This is a family movie good to watch together and talk about (though Robert heard the little boy behind us ask his dad halfway through, “Can’t we change it now?” so not for all ages).

For an hour and a half, Elai, her dad, and I got to see feelings exposed as images, as brightly colored personalities moving, talking, and triggering those actions we have so much difficulty explaining, or explaining away. This is Elai’s world, an Oz to us.

P.S. Don’t miss the final shorts. Especially the cat. Elai and I? We both got it. Robert, the literalist one? Not so much. It was a mother-daughter moment.