WHAT I LEARNED AT THE MOVIES
“All of life’s riddles are answered at the movies.” Grand Canyon, Lawrence Kasdan (w/d)
My entire life I’ve been a thief.
I didn’t steal cars, candy bars, or even hearts, I stole dialogue from the movies. I have a pretty scary memory and when it became clear as a precocious child actor that I could memorize and recite lines with little to no effort, my life as a thief began in earnest.
I became so adept at stealing lines from movies that adults would stare at me with wonder and confusion, questioning how I could have that knowledge, or desperately trying to remember where they had heard it from. My friends would encourage me to perform scenes for them and we would play games trying to guess the source of the material — who said it, what year it came out, etc. Undaunted and undeterred, I took on bigger game, lifting lines from books, poetry, famous speeches, music, and even the Bible if I was feeling particularly pious. When I started working in the entertainment industry as an executive and later as a screenwriter, I discovered there were even more people like me. We’d size each other up like dueling gunslingers over cocktails, trying to determine the other’s acumen, judging their mettle. In this sub-culture, there are two kinds of people — the quick and the dead — and I left many a body in my wake.
You’re probably asking, “What the hell does this have to do with being a psychotherapist and what is wrong with this man?”
Well, I missed my community when I left show business, and while I learned a different vernacular as a therapist, I quickly discovered in working with clients that being able to use scenes in movies, or even just dialogue, I could invite a shorthand in the therapeutic work I was doing while also strengthening the therapeutic alliance. I’d identify themes in patient’s lives that reminded me of something I experienced on the silver screen, and I could use that in my work, either through a shared experience or making it relatable through an emotional lens. Movies offer us the opportunity to experience a wide range of emotions — sadness, joy, fear, anger, love — in a finite amount of time. We have to be able to tolerate those emotions in order to embrace the experience. “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.” as one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, once wrote.
And something amazing happened.
It worked.
I was able to elicit deeper emotion and I had the joy of sharing something meaningful to me that I had thought was long gone.
My hope in writing this blog is to not only put this gift to use, but also try and create some understanding into how psychotherapy works for the uninitiated and curious. Some of it might be helpful. Some of it might be insightful. At the very least, I’d like it to be entertaining, and who knows, maybe you’ll find some good movie recommendations in the process.
Feel free to steal whatever you like.
