(smooth music)
- What's up, guys?
Michael here to talk about a movie
that made me wish I got to moonlight as a fluffy animal
during middle school, "Turning Red."
Pixar's newest entry explores all
of the pressure and horrors
of becoming a young adult through the story
of a girl who turns into a giant red panda
whenever she gets too emotional.
Oddly relatable stuff.
And while I'm pretty sure none
of you have literally transformed
into an ancestral panda during puberty,
we've probably all had the experience of being an awkward
and confused 13-year-old with a changing body
and raging hormones.
But is this movie about more than just that?
Is this exploration of the dark side
of emotional repression
also a window into the broader world
of psychosexual development?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack edition on "Turning Red,"
Unleashing Your Panda,
and spoilers ahead (alarm blaring)
for "Turning Red,"
which you can currently watch right now on Disney+,
who isn't sponsoring this video,
but hey, they wanna pay, we're down.
So what can an animated film about a girl
who turns into a panda
tell us about the psychology behind emotional repression?
We'll get there.
But first, let's meet our main character.
"Turning Red"'s about 13-year-old Mei Lee,
nicknamed Mei Mei.
- I've been doing my own thing,
making my own moves, 24/7/365.
- [Michael] Clearly Mei's crushing it.
- All about that hustle. Am I right?
- She has a crew of best friends,
excels scholastically, can play a rippin' flute solo,
(fast-paced flute music)
and seems to genuinely enjoy helping
her mom manage the family temple,
and in a key sign of early 2000s life,
she's also deeply emotionally invested in a boy band.
Much of what's happening in Mei's life fits pretty well
with Sigmund Freud's description
of the psychosexual development of children,
which is basically the process
where we go from disinterested in sex to horned up 24/7.
According to this theory,
around the ages of seven through 12,
children begin to assert their own independence,
and move beyond their childhood ego
as they learn to love and care about others,
and Mei seem to be on the precipice of all of this.
In one early scene, her friends urge her to assert herself,
cancel plans with her mom, and come do karaoke.
Though Mei seems tempted, she resists,
not wanting to let her mom down on cleaning day.
- I can't. It's cleaning day.
- Mei, every day is cleaning day.
- And for the most part,
everything seems pretty chill, until that night
when Mei's casual doodling turns
into a pretty erotic picture of corner store hunk, Devon.
It's clear that Mei's expressing a type of unconscious lust
or desire, which, based on her reaction, seems new for her.
This suggests she might be entering the final phase
of psychosexual development in Freud, the genital stage,
which typically happens around 13.
And this leads to a type of anxiety
or shame that sends Mei under her bed,
seemingly hiding from the watchful eyes of, say, God,
or, you know, her mom.
If you grew up religious,
and ended up accidentally inventing masturbation
when you were 13, then you know what we mean.
And this right here
is the film's first clear example of repression.
Mei tries to hide the drawings from her mother,
seemingly fearing that she'll be judged
for her fledgling desire.
This, of course, is exactly what happens.
Mei's mom can pounce her daughter's shame
and anxiety by showing the drawings
to Devon and a bunch of Mei's classmates.
The subsequent teasing
only causes Mei more anxiety and shame.
Freud can help us better understand what's happening here,
particularly in regards to Mei's initial repression
of her desires.
Now Freud first noticed repression
when his patients struggled
to recall past memories during analysis.
He concluded that this had to do
with an unconscious mechanism
by which our human minds
push down and hide, (people shouting)
i.e. repress, shameful memories,
so we don't have to actively deal with them.
That's probably why, for the life of me,
I can barely remember anything that happened
between the ages of 11 and 15.
And I'm just gonna trust my unconscious,
and assume it's for good reasons.
This led old Sigmund to develop a theory
of repression that involves two stages.
First, there's primal repression,
in which a child realizes
that acting on certain desires leads to anxiety
and other unpleasant emotions.
The child subsequently represses those desires.
This eventually blossoms into repression proper,
in which repression leads to the development
of the superego.
That's a sort of self-regulated internal law
or conscience often modeled on a parent or religious figure.
This superego then bosses around our ego,
which is the part of the mind we'd usually associate
with our identity,
and helps keep our innate impulses and desires at bay.
These desires are what Freud calls our id,
which is basically the Four Loko-chugging frat boy part
of your personality.
In this case, Mei's id is expressing
a sexual desire for Devon,
but then this desire results in shame
and other negative consequences.
So her superego starts to create a moral structure,
under which this type
of desire and behavior is bad and must be repressed.
- This will never happen again.
- And her poor ego now has
to try to balance these two opposing forces.
Of course, repression isn't necessarily a bad thing,
like if you have a strong unconscious desire to strip
down to your underwear, jump up on a conference table
at your next work meeting while flinging lunch meat
at your colleagues,
it's a good thing you have a superego to say,
"No, bro, that's weird. Don't do that."
However, it's not good
when a normal and healthy desire gets repressed.
In fact, that can come with some serious side effects.
It's like the unconscious version of what happens
when the adults in the Footloose town forbid
the teens from dancing.
If you tell the kids they can't dance,
they're just gonna wanna dance more.
♪ Hot ♪
♪ Loaded like a gun ♪
- [Michael] And Mei realizes the side effects
of her repression pretty quickly,
when she wakes up the next morning
as a giant red panda.
This transformation literalizes some of her fears and shame,
namely that having normal teenage desires is turning her
into a monster.
And, of course, the movie isn't not using this
as an allegory for a young woman getting her first period,
as Mei's mother's initial reaction is to get her ibuprofen
and a shocking variety of pads.
But the film uses the specificity of Mei's experience
of transitioning into womanhood to make a much broader point
about the role of repression.
We learn early on
that the panda is brought out by strong emotions,
and it's not just negative emotions.
Even a box full of adorable Pixar kittens threatens
to unleash the beast.
But this paints a clear message.
Strong emotions of any kind are bad,
and should be kept inside where they can't cause any harm.
Now Mei learns that one of her ancestors asked to be turned
into a red panda to defend her family
while the men were away at war.
Ever since, each woman
in her lineage has developed a panda of their own.
However, they've all gone
through a religious ceremony to separate from their panda,
trapping its essence in a piece of jewelry or other token.
If Mei can just make it to the next red moon,
she can exercise that furry critter for good,
but in the meantime, being forced to contain her panda
just furthers Mei's established pattern of repression.
Her experience of sexual desire led to shame and guilt,
which caused the panda to emerge,
and now keep the panda at bay,
she needs to repress any further desires and emotions,
even positive ones, so that she can remain a model student
without revealing her very furry family secret.
Now, we already talked about the superego,
that part of the unconscious that sets up all types of rules
and regulations so that our scumbag id can't run rampant,
and Mei, with the help of her family's mythology,
takes on a new superego structure
specifically designed to repress the hell
out of that adorable panda.
- Happy?
- Oh yeah, that's the stuff.
- [Michael] But even with this family narrative,
Mei slowly embraces her emotions and passions,
and starts turning panda whenever she feels like it.
Though she's supposed to keep her panda at bay
until the ritual, she realizes being a panda is,
as you might expect, super fun,
not to mention quite financially lucrative,
and her best friends encourage it,
noting that it's bringing out a whole new side
of Mei that they really love.
- You really changed.
And I'm proud of you.
Just don't get rid of all of it.
- However, in doing this,
Mei's once Lorelai and Rory relationship
with her mother begins to slowly fracture.
And to understand
this fracturing mother-daughter relationship,
we need to kiss Freud goodbye,
as he was notorious
for framing psychological development around male sexuality,
and that's led many subsequent theorists to worry
that thinkers like Freud failed
to adequately understand the particulars
of female sexual development.
This is exactly
what Bulgarian French theorist Julia Kristeva thought.
Her own account of psychosexual development lands
with the symbolic stage, i.e. when children enter the world
of linguistic communications, social relations,
the law, et cetera.
During this phase, a child develops a sense
of identity that is separate from the mother,
and this process involves something called abjection.
Abjection basically happens when we encounter a rupture,
specifically, the distinction between ourself and the other.
This causes a breakdown in our sense of meaning.
According to Kristeva, "The abject confronts us
with our earliest attempts to release the hold
of maternal entity even before existing outside of her,
thanks to the autonomy of language.
It is a violent, clumsy breaking away
with the constant risk of falling back
under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling."
Surprisingly, realizing that you are not one
and the same as your mom can be pretty upsetting.
A very gnarly example of this would be that seeing a corpse
for the first time is a traumatic reminder that we, too,
are a body made of material stuff that is one day going
to die and decay.
In a less gnarly, but still gross example,
this can also happen when we see an open wound, or, like,
fecal matter, (gas passes)
as it reminds us that our own bodies
are full of blood and (bleep),
and we're basically animals, but also human,
but still animal, which is super confusing.
In particular, Kristeva associates this process
with the maternal figure,
and that horrifying moment in which we separate ourselves
from our mother.
Also important to note
that Kristeva's account doesn't map on
to the same age progression as Freud's,
with much of this development taking place from birth
through age four, though it repeats throughout life.
For Kristeva, experiencing the abject is a necessary part
of the development process on the individual's way
to language and a full self-consciousness,
or as Kristeva puts it,
abjection is a pre-condition of narcissism,
with narcissism here being less about loving
to look in the mirror,
and more about recognizing that there's a you
to look at in the mirror in the first place.
Now "Turning Red" definitely hints at the idea
that dropping your uterine lining
can provide an abject experience,
which can lead to distancing from the mother,
even if she's not-
- The Lord visited Eve with a curse.
And the curse was a curse of blood.
- That said, this is only hinted at,
and not explicitly explored in the movie,
which is why we're more interested
in the film's primary metaphor for the abject,
which is, of course, the red panda.
It puts Mei at the unstable boundary of the human
and the animal.
She wants to just be a normal human kid,
but is haunted by this wild animal that exists within her.
It's an identity crisis that Kristeva might have warned
could lead to melancholia, depression,
and even aggressive acting out,
which we see in both Mei's initial reaction
to becoming panda,
and her near murder of her Nelly-idolizing classmate, Tyler.
So how do we deal with these abject experiences
that send our fragile developing egos reeling?
Kristeva says that both art
and religion can serve the purpose
of purifying the abject, i.e. they give us images
and narratives that make gross stuff feel less gross.
And we see something similar happening in the film.
First, the mythology
around Mei's family lineage is represented
in art throughout the temple,
which shows her brave ancestor who took
on the whole panda bit to protect her family.
This turns the potentially aggressive
and frightening animality of the panda
into a story about courage and bravery.
And, of course, the panda can only be truly purified
from Mei's person via a ritual
that takes place during a red moon.
Kristeva says that "the various means
of purifying the abject make up the history of religions,
and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art."
And in Mei's case, it's very clear
that much of her family's own mythology
and religious practice serve this very purpose:
to purify the dangerous animal,
and make it part of a larger narrative.
But to be clear,
for Kristeva, this purifying is not necessarily
a good thing.
Rather, it's a process
by which we avoid directly confronting the horrifying
and upsetting aspects of our own humanity.
She sees art and religion as attempting to wallpaper
over the breakdowns associated with the abject.
But back to our ritual.
Mei gets sort of teleported up to an ancestral realm,
where she's led to separate herself from her panda,
but right at the crucial moment,
where she is about to be purified
of this seemingly abject thing once and for all,
she remerges with it, comes back to Earth,
embodying her panda, and joyfully flies
over Toronto's rooftops on her way to the 4*TOWN concert.
And yes, just like Mei's mom,
we can't stop wondering why it's called 4*TOWN
if there are five of them.
Is one of them meant to be the town, right?
Like, how does it work?
At this moment,
rather than continue to repress the panda,
she embraces it as one aspect of her complex self.
In this way, she is accepting the split nature
of her own subjectivity, or personhood, or, um, pandahood,
rather than seeking some unifying sense of self.
It's accepting rather than purifying this abject thing.
- The point isn't to push the bad stuff away.
It's to make room for it, live with it.
- [Michael] This is great for Mei,
not so great for her mother, Ming,
who nearly loses her damn mind,
releases her own truly terrifying panda,
and goes on a legit rampage.
The size of Ming's panda seems like a kind of metaphor
for what happens when strong feelings
are repressed for decades,
and the toxic effect this can have on the psyche.
And it's hinted out throughout the film
that Ming has a less-than-healthy relationship
with her own mother.
- Ming, it's your mother.
- I'm not here.
- [Michael] A relationship that seems to be marked
by the type of depression
and melancholia that Kristeva associates
with female children's inability
to fully separate from their mothers.
And speaking of Mei's grandmother, eventually,
all the women in her family unleashed their own pandas,
showing that when they use their passion for a purpose,
it's not all bad.
After Ming, Grandma,
and the aunties all return their pandas back
to the ancestral realm,
Mei reaffirms her commitment
to accepting her panda and keeping it
as an unrepressed part of her identity.
- I'm changing, Mom.
I'm finally figuring out who I am.
- [Michael] She knows that in doing so,
she'll be severing her bond with her mother,
one that Ming has tried to maintain throughout the film.
In embracing the panda,
it's as if Mei is acknowledging the fundamental separation
between her mother and herself,
an acknowledgement that's crucial to growing up.
And it's not a stretch to say that this theme
in particular is pretty autobiographical
for writer and director Domee Shi, who, in an interview,
recounts the words of her mother,
the sentence she heard upon each visit home
after moving out.
"Oh, Domee, I wish I could put you back in my stomach
so I knew exactly where you were at all times,"
but instead, Mei is out of Ming's womb,
and finally partying at the all-age karaoke spot.
- Ready to get your karaoke on?
- Totally.
- By its end,
the film seems to be a sort of warning
against the shame and subsequent repression experienced
by young people who are coming of age,
along with an endorsement of embracing and affirming some
of the more abject aspects of their identities.
In doing so, "Turning Red" challenges us
to embrace all the weird and embarrassing aspects
of ourselves, even the really gross stuff.
(retches)
But what do you guys think?
Is "Turning Red" going to help a lot
of young folks accept their desires,
rather than repressing them?
Can we accept our animality, and cope with the fact
that our bodies make weird fluids sometimes?
Or should we just shut up and get good grades,
'cause that's our only hope?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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Later.
(upbeat music)