Private Therapy

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A friend recently introduced me to the YouTube channel, Cinema Therapy.  While I had some vague notions already that cinema therapy was “a thing,” I had never looked into it.  This was so, even while consciously knowing that I use movies that way.  Most of what I’ve seen on the YouTube channel has been about Disney/Pixar movies, especially those that tug at emotions.  These have never been my favorite movies since I have unresolved issues from childhood.  Still I learn a lot from watching their analyses.  It can still be difficult to watch these films, though.  As a family we recently rewatched Finding Nemo.  It struck me pretty hard how growing up without a father figure left me the anxious, quivering mess that I often am.  I prefer movies where I can find a father, no matter how odd the choices may be.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

In fact, in my own form of cinema therapy, I use horror films.  (Even the YouTube channel parses M. Night Shyamalan.)  Part of this is clearly because such movies take me back to my childhood.  I’m not sure why I found monsters so comforting, but I did.  We had no father and I latched onto the strong men—particularly if they didn’t smoke or drink—that dominated movies  (it was the sixties, after all).  Somehow I felt that this made the world seem alright.  Or a little less scary.   I didn’t understand the biology of parenthood, I just knew that I needed a man in the family.  One who would protect me and show me how to be a man.  Well, that never really happened.  My step-father was verbally abusive and I seemed to be his special target.  I watched horror and listened to Alice Cooper.

Sublimation, in psychology, is where you put difficult feelings aside, acting as if everything’s normal.  I did that for many, many years.  College, seminary, doctoral program, full-time professorate.  Then it all broke down.  After the tragedy at Nashotah House, I found myself watching horror movies again.  It took about a decade of doing that to realize that I could write books about the connection between religion and horror.  With three published (the third about to be, actually), I have a fourth nearly finished.  The writing is therapeutic as well.  I have to wonder, however, if these Pixar movies that are so painful for me to watch are really helping me.  I don’t always feel refreshed afterwards, as I do when I see a good horror movie.  (Bad films are their own kind of therapy.)  I’m an amateur psychologist (no license), with a most intractable client (myself).  My way of dealing with him is to watch horror and call it therapy.

Pre-Soul

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Streaming seems to be the way of the future.  I’m reluctant to trust corporations (does anyone remember Ultra Violet?) keeping content I’ve paid for, but the pandemic makes movie theaters scary places.  Some of the movies I’m eager to see aren’t even released on DVD or Blu-ray any longer, and your only choice, increasingly, is to subscribe to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts method of “buying” a subscription.  You’ve got to go where the content is.  All of this is a long way of saying I saw Disney/Pixar’s Soul very nearly on its release day.  It underscored a couple things for me.  One is that the idea of transmigration of souls is alive and well.  Second, and this is a point I make in Holy Horror, movies are often where people get their understanding of religious concepts.

In case, like me, you have to have movies pointed out to you by others more aware, Soul is about a jazz musician who dies the very day he gets his big break.  On his way into the great beyond, he tries to escape and ends up where souls are prepared for their embodiment on earth, “The Great Before.”  In order to make the leap, they must find their “spark”—the thing that makes them who they are.  Pixar may not be a theological seminary, but there are people who find meaning in many of their films, even to the point of  using them as coping mechanisms for real life.  When the internet didn’t exist and animated films required years of drawing or stop-motion animation to complete, people tended to go to religious/psychological professionals for such issues.  Now we have corporations.

The reason I find this of concern is that I have an idea of how content is created.  How those who come up with ideas have to pitch them to financial backers or publishers, and how those backers weight concepts in the scales of lucre.  In other words, money is frequently the deciding factor.  Those doing the pitching are seldom the same people with specialized training in the subject addressed, and yet they reach far larger viewerships than the classroom of such an expert does.  The financial implications are troublesome.  None of this is to suggest Soul is a flawed film.  I know many former seminary professors who’d quibble—or perhaps something stronger—with the way the afterlife/beforelife are presented here.  The movie itself is both fun and profound.  Don’t ask me, though.  I’m still trying to figure out this streaming thing.