Commodification of Emotion in Pete Docter’s Inside Out.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65496/jssme.2025.67Keywords:
Commodification of Emotions, Emotional Dystopia, Emotional Regulation, NeoliberalismAbstract
Disney Pixar’s Inside Out (2015) is a movie directed by Pete Docter, and it presents the story of an 11-year-old girl, Riley’s psychological and emotional development through personifications of primary emotions like Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. The movie represents emotional regulation as the foundation for a balanced life. However, this paper argues that Inside Out (2015) envisions emotional regulation as a utopian idea, but in reality, this process of regulation leads to the commodification of emotions to meet societal and economic demands. This conceptual gap allows us to examine the film from a neoliberal paradigmatic perspective; it depicts how emotions are transformed from personal experiences into marketable products. This paper aims to establish how emotional regulations, represented as a way of utopian living, are transforming into a mechanism of control that reduces emotional freedom. The analysis highlights how negative emotions are trained to be regulated to construct personal behaviour and social structure, hence endorsing the film’s critique of neoliberal capitalism, which would place emotional productivity above genuine expressions. The paper utilizes qualitative methodology to closely analyse the movie and apply the following theoretical perspectives: Affect theory, Marxist critique of commodification to study the market system, theories of emotional labour to link emotion with the real world, and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to understand the power dynamics of capitalism. The movie concludes by presenting a utopian vision that regulates Riley's emotions to fit social and economic expectations. However, this commodification of emotions transforms authentic feelings into a market system, resulting in a performance-oriented cycle and ultimately leading to emotional dystopia.
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