Many of us remember fondly the classic 1956 film The Red Balloon by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in which a sensitive schoolboy (in reality Lamorisse's own five-year-old son Pascal) is befriended by a good-natured, cherry-red helium balloon.
Absent dialogue, the movie follows the joyful two, boy and balloon, through the somber, working class streets of Ménilmontant near Paris, the glossy red balloon contrasting sharply with the bleak old Europe atmosphere, while adults, oblivious to the presence of an inanimate object that has apparently been ensouled by an intelligent gas, are largely indifferent, even hostile, to the pair. Eventually, as so often happens with films of this genre, a mob of cruel children corners the boy and, in a film moment that may have pulled more tears than Bambi's mother being shot by hunters, begins pelting the kind-hearted balloon with stones, ultimately popping it. There's something of a happy ending, though, with the smiling boy being hoisted off to an unknown destiny by the other resident helium souls of Ménilmontant, sympathetic balloons that, we can only assume, have been inspired by the ‘death' of their persecuted red brother to untangle themselves from their heartless captors and to rescue Pascal.
The plot of The Red Balloon exemplifies how our evolved brains have become hyper-social brains, such that our social psychology is applied not only to the mental innards of other people and animals, but also, in error, categories that haven't any mental innards at all, such as ebullient skins of elastic stretched taut by an inert gas. If it weren't for our evolved social brains, we couldn't really follow the premise of the movie, let alone enjoy Lamorisse's particular oeuvre of magical realism.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett has said that by virtue of the brain's evolution, human beings have adopted unconsciously an "intentional stance" towards the world, which means that we often see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't a smidgeon of a neural system generating psychological properties. It's the reason we kick our car tyres when they coincidentally break down on our way to the airport, why we verbally abuse our computers when they freeze up in the middle of a task, and why we feel we've betrayed our house plants when we forget to water them. In fact part of the reason The Red Balloon may have been so effective -- my eyes well up every time I see it -- was that the lead role, the young boy, genuinely believed during filming that the balloon was alive. "The Red Balloon was my friend," recalled a much-older Pascal Lamorisse in a 2007 National Public Radio interview. "When you were filming it, did you really feel that way?" asked the reporter. "Yes, yes, he was a real character with a spirit of his own."
Even preverbal infants display this cognitivebias to see intentions in inanimate objects, as the psychologist György Gergely has revealed in his work showing that babies, based on their eye gaze, become ‘surprised' when dots on a computer screen suddenly change course, as if the dots are doing so volitionally and the baby is puzzling over their motives. When we're confronted with motion cues that tend to correlate with intentional agency, our social psychology is often triggered and it requires executive functioning to override any false positives. Many of these cues -- self-propelled movement, goal-directedness, arrhythmic action patterns -- are on display in The Red Balloon. When the balloon hovers outside Pascal's flat after his grandmother tries to rid herself of this nuisance, we perceive a charismaticpersonality there that ‘wants' to be with the boy and is ‘trying' to leverage itself against the windowpanes, it ‘sees' Pascal and ‘knows' he's inside the flat. And another psychologist, Paul Bloom, has argued persuasively in his fascinating Descartes' Baby that, unlike other animals, human beings carve up the world into bodies and minds.... Bloom labels our species "commonsense dualists."
Our social psychology is so effortlessly applied under such conditions that it's next to impossible to see the scene any other way. Now that you know how our social brains are duped into attributing mental states where none in fact dwell, try watching the movie again; I challenge you not to feel that exact same pang of sadness you've always experienced when observing helplessly as the red balloon is fatally punctured by a stone cruelly thrown. Just like any run-of-the-mill visual trick, having knowledge of how a cognitive illusion works doesn't switch of its subjective effects on our brains. All we can do is laugh at ourselves, teary-eyed saps that we are, and at our vulnerability to unconsciously animate the world with our own mental shadows.
