Psychology of Character Personality #2: Breakdown of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” Panic Attack

In this post, I wanted to use the scene in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” to talk about the psychology and physiology of panic attacks and explore the connection between thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Be wary that this post will contain some spoilers.

Panic attacks are defined as a brief period of intense anxiety that often causes physical symptoms of discomfort.

Panic attacks can have multiple triggers that can be either physiological (often disorders in the hormones), caused by the memory of trauma (such as PTSD), or situations that trigger a big fear (as phobias can do). In the case of Puss in Boots, the triggers come in a blend of all these three.

The trigger for our puss in boots happens just before this clip when death comes to visit our hero once more on his journey. This encounter spikes our hero’s level of fear and high levels of stress can flood the body with large amounts of nervous system and chemical activation. Known as the "fight or flight" response, this stressful state floods the system with adrenaline and cortisol, building up tension in the body and getting it ready to confront the danger or run away.

What makes the difference between the two outcomes often is our evaluation of the threat in front of us. If we think we can eliminate the obstacle, our adrenaline state will get us ready to brawl. But, like in the movie, we believe the threat to be way bigger than us and we lost complete control of the situation, panic and running are what we can expect. This position changes in the movie and is reversed in the final encounter though, when our hero, matured by the lessons he has learned, decides to instead stay and fight death itself.

But, at this point we find our hero in the clip, running as far away as possible.

These high levels of stress manifest themselves in different ways that are represented in the movie: pounding heartbeat, shortness of breath (possibly hyperventilation), dizziness, sense of impending doom, narrow vision, detachment from reality, and others. If you take a closer look, most of these sensations are depicted masterfully in this clip not only by Puss acting but also from the uses of lenses and added "hallucinations".

When Perrito finds him, Puss is completely overwhelmed, his breathing is short and fast (contrary to deep slow breathing we have when we are relaxed), and his heart is pounding with even beatings (contrary to variable, soft heartbeats we have when relaxed). His eyes are lost, staring into the void to signal that his mind is completely detached from his surrounding, so much so that he doesn't even realize Perrito is there.

It is at the point where Perrito makes physical contact with Puss that things start to finally take a turn. The starting of physical contact is the first anchor Puss is given to get back to the present moment and to reality. He follows that anchor and strengthens it by putting his hand on Perrito's head, creating even more contact.

Next, Puss starts to slow down his breathing pattern. Our breathing pattern has a feedback loop that goes both ways, our mental state can influence our breathing, but the opposite is also true, taking conscious control and slowing our breathing can signal our system that everything is "fine". The reason people often focus on breathing to relax and change their inner state is that breathing is one of the few automatic systems in the body we can choose to take control of at any point (unlike sweating or the heart beating).

(side note: often in a panic attack this feedback loop can work against us. We become mentally anxious and speed up our breathing, which signals back to the nervous system that we are getting really anxious and escalates the situation until we find ourselves into a full-blown panic attack)

Puss progressively takes control of his breathing and ground himself back to reality, relaxing the muscles and taking bigger and slower exhales.

What Puss in Boots says afterward is revealing of how we got to this point in the movie. We might think that the panic attack he experienced was the direct consequence of the event just prior to the clip, but these reactions aren't often simple responses, they are the culmination of patterns of behavior and layers of thoughts and beliefs.

Specifically, the pattern of reinforcement I'm referring to starts at the very moment where, at the beginning of the movie, Puss in Boots gets told he is on his last life. That is the first drop of fear, but it is not overwhelming yet. What follows next is the encounter with death and his clash with him. This adds more fear and stress on our hero as he gets defeated and when he has the chance, he understandably runs away and hides. This is the moment a cycle starts: the more we run away from the thing that is scaring us, the more we reinforce our fear of it. Every time our hero in this movie is confronted with the danger of dying, he runs and hides. Every time he does that, his fear of the thing he's scared of increases. We often end up building up the actual danger of what we are scared of exponentially in our minds, and we start getting scared of fear itself.

On top of everything we covered, our hero has a whole system of inner thoughts and beliefs that add their own weight to the situation. Being scared of death itself hiding behind the corner is hard enough, but it gets harder if you add to it that Puss believes he "shouldn't" be scared because he is... Puss in boots. Puss created a character of himself as someone who is brave, infallible, mysterious, and confident. Since this persona he created is believed to be his real self, every emotion he feels that doesn't reflect that "confidence" creates a form of ambivalence, which can express itself in the forms of anger, shame, pain, sadness, inner conflict, depression…

So, not only our hero is scared, but he's also ashamed of being scared. Death is something Puss in Boots never had to be afraid of because of his nine lives, his confidence was clearly related to that. Now things are different, he can't lean on his "immortality" anymore. He needs to find a way to finally relate to death. Learning to accept his current situation and finding in himself the strength of Puss in Boots is the major character arc of the movie.

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