Tag: funny

Therapomania – The near-religious belief in the infallibility of psychotherapy

Rick and Morty was mid.

I seem to be one of the only people who has this opinion. Most people, it seems, either haven’t seen the show, or think it’s absolutely brilliant.

I actually didn’t see the show for many, many years. It was only last year, I think, that I watched it all. (Well, up to the end of season six – I dislike changes in voice actor.) I had tried to get into it several times previously – because people had said that it was a great show – but I just found the first three episodes unbelievably dull.

Having now watched it, I’m confused as to why people think it’s so outstandingly brilliant. The show is nowhere near as funny as I was expecting it to be based on what people said. (It is funny – it’s just not that funny.) It’s also quite slow – there is much that could have been cut out. I actually far more enjoy clips of the show as YouTube Shorts than the show itself, because the clips cut out the dead time. I’m concerned that people like it as much as they do simply because it is whacky. It’s off-the-wall; it’s random. It’s weird and it’s cool, and it’s cool that it’s weird. ‘Whackiness’ like this is actually quite easy to produce in an artistic work. (I think people think it’s hard to do, but it’s not.) And if it’s not paired with true humour or insight, it’s cheap.

Anyway, one of the tangents of the show that is quite funny, is that of the therapist character – Dr. Helen Wong. The idea of the Smith family going to therapy is intrinsically hilarious – partly because of the contrast between their space-faring, multidimensional lives involving the most grotesque, unsettling, and downright bizarre aliens, and the HR-style banality of psychotherapy, and partly because the problems the Smith family face are not ones that can be solved by psychotherapy. But the therapy scenes are also hilarious because of the way they mock the trite ruminations and kum-ba-yah-ism of therapy – in a way that dozens of shows have done before.

At the end of the episode of Pickle Rick, where Rick tries to avoid going to a ‘family therapy’ session by turning himself into a pickle, Rick stumbles into the therapist’s office, where the rest of his family (minus Jerry) have been sitting and being intellectually harassed by the therapist. Rick asks Beth to give him the serum that will turn him back into a human, which she has held onto for the entire episode. The therapist then directs Beth to ask Rick why he needs the serum, knowing that it will force him to say that he didn’t want to come to a family therapy session.

Rick ends up giving a monologue about why he doesn’t like therapy – most of which is correct. Dr. Wong then responds with a monologue.

Dr. Wong’s monologue is part psychoanalysis, part life-coaching speech. Her psychoanalysis of Rick is incorrect based on what we know from all the previous episodes of the show, and the monologue overall is incoherent – making points that do not logically follow on from each other – but it contains the kind of pretentious language and lilt that all successful life coaches use.

It’s actually quite funny, because it’s an excellent mockery of the kind of beatification that therapists, life coaches, business coaches, consultants, megachurch pastors, and certain influencers sometimes receive. Here is someone who has mastered the aesthetics and cadence of insight, while having absolutely nothing profound to say. Very funny.

This is how I understood this moment in the show when I first saw it – and how I thought everyone understood it. However, when I watch this clip on YouTube, and I scroll down to the comments, I am mortified to find that there are seemingly a large number of people – thousands of people, based on the likes – who treat this scene as actual, genuine, real psychotherapy, and Dr. Wong’s analysis of Rick as being nothing short of perfection in profundity.

This baffled me when I first saw it. How do these people not know that this is a joke? How do people not know that this is mocking the character of Dr. Wong? The entire setup for this scene is a textbook example of the humour of contrast – the extremity of Rick and Morty’s multidimensional life against the mundanity of a therapist’s office in a shopping mall. We have seen this kind of contrast humour – between the extraordinary and the mundane – hundreds upon hundreds of times in media over the last 25 years – how are these people not able to recognise it again here? But no, apparently these commenters believe that everything Dr. Wong is saying about Rick is absolutely true, and can be applied to real people in the real world.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that these kinds of comments on the video and the likes they have received may be entirely fake. I have noticed a change recently in the kind of comments that appear at the top of YouTube videos. They’re sort of all like this – right across YouTube, but particularly under comedy videos – people taking the content of the video far too seriously, as though it isn’t comedy. I’m not the only person who’s noticed this either – I recall that there’s even a Twitter account dedicated to overly-serious comments under Family Guy videos. In a world where it is possible to generate readable text very easily (AI), it is entirely possible that all of these comments are from fake accounts.

However, the reason why I am not entirely convinced that these comments are fake is because I have noticed a similar attitude towards psychotherapy in real people – either commenters on certain kinds of podcast or even friends in real life.

There is a common refrain that you will see right across the internet. It’s a kind of text-based meme. ‘Men will do anything except go to therapy.’, or some variation of that. You see this refrain anywhere that tells of or shows a man who has done something seemingly incomprehensible to the commenter.

A good 80-90% of the time I see this refrain, I think ‘Yes, because most men intuitively know that what’s done in “therapy” will have absolutely no capacity to solve this problem.’. There is an assumption, held by some people – a belief, even – in the infinite power of ‘therapy’ to fix everything. They seem to believe that therapy can fix every problem. I have even heard, over the years, these people express that they believe everyone should be in therapy – all the time.

As I say, the reason why therapy is less popular with men than it is with women is because men realise that it will not solve their problems. This is not to say that it is never useful – there are certain problems that it can solve – but psychotherapy is treated by some as a panacea. It is not. And not only is it not, it can also create problems. Psychotherapy can encourage excessive rumination and the acceptance of non-agency – and even worse, the near-worship of psychotherapy that seems to exist among a small proportion of the population can promote both of these things.

Psychotherapy is not neutral. We are encouraged to think that it is – that the psychotherapist comes with no biases. But actually they do – and sometimes they have very strong biases. Psychotherapy is not neutral – not morally, not philosophically, not politically. They have replaced, in some ways, a task done in previous centuries by vicars and other religious figures – except that while you likely know the approximate moral, philosophical, and political positions of a Christian vicar before talking to them, with a psychotherapist, you don’t.

Psychotherapy is not infallible. This should be obvious, but apparently to some it is not. One of the clearest and most topical examples of this is the complete capture of the profession of psychotherapy by Gender Ideology that we have seen over the last decade or more. When an entire field can make that big of a mistake, one should not only not consider it infallible, one should consider it to be highly fallible.

Yet there are people who seem to believe in the complete infallibility of psychotherapy. More than that – they won’t have a word said about it. If you try to suggest that maybe – just maybe – psychotherapy is anything other than salvation, they will try to shut you down – cut you off mid sentence. No wrong word may be said about it. It is a religious-like zeal, and I have observed it enough times now to need a name for it.

Psychotherapomania – or just therapomania for short – the near-religious belief in the infallibility of psychotherapy.

Deadpool 3 – Enjoyable, but flawed – 8/10

I would have liked to have reviewed this earlier, but this movie required a second viewing.

It was difficult to decide what to title this review. This movie is, in some ways, quite complex. It achieves some remarkable things with regards to the context in which it was made, but also has some crucial flaws that I think make it not quite as good as the first two movies in the series.

Where to begin. Well this movie masterfully handles the inclusion of the Deadpool franchise – and the X-Men franchise – into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is an aspect which it could have gotten very, very wrong – and I think with anyone other than Ryan Reynolds writing it, it would have gone very, very wrong.

This movie had many problems it had to solve. First, of course, was that the last time we saw Wolverine was in 2017’s Logan (seven years ago!). The general commentary around that movie was that it was going to be Hugh Jackman’s last performance of the character – I don’t know if that was an idea that came from Hugh Jackman himself, or whether the tone of the movie itself simply suggested it to everyone – but either way, that was the general understanding. And along with that also came the idea that this was the true end for the character. Logan was well and truly dead – his healing factor had finally given out. It was an extraordinary ability but it was not infinite. He was not coming back. (I found it a bit strange that everyone was willing to go along with this idea. It wasn’t as though the X-Men movies had handled timelines and do-overs perfectly up until that point. Timelines had been altered, people had come back, people had made unusual cameos – the studios had always just done whatever they wanted – that’s how it had been for years.)

This was what Deadpool 3 was facing as soon as they decided to include Wolverine. A lesser movie would have just avoided giving any explanation – it would have just included Wolverine and ignored any questions about timelines and settings and canon. This movie tackled it head-on – and that was the right way to do it.

The opening scene handles the questions that we the audience have. Surely Wolverine’s healing factor is infinite? Surely its slow-down was just a result of whatever that evil guy in Logan was doing with the water or something? Surely he’s actually alive? Surely Deadpool’s just got to dig him up?

Well he does, and no, he really is dead. A clever writing move – in writing it’s always extremely risky to bring a character back from the dead, as you undermine the ultimate stakes of any story. And how did Deadpool 3, therefore, get around this? By using the MCU’s new(-ish) multiverse to acquire an alternate Wolverine.

After Deadpool digs up Logan’s adamantium-coated skeleton, some people from the Time Variance Authority show up, and there’s a big fight. The Deadpool movies always start with a fight – which always includes lots of unusual and striking methods of attack, with plenty of gore, highlighted with slow motion.

Now, I was very sceptical when the TVA showed up. I do not think the TVA have been done very well at all. I did not watch the Loki television series. (Have there been two series’ of it so far? I don’t know.) Well – I watched the first episode and a quarter, or something – I can’t quite remember – but it was just dreadful and I couldn’t watch another second. I did not like the TVA in that and I haven’t liked them in anything I’ve seem them in.

I have said it many times before: time travel is difficult to get right as a writer – you have to be very careful about including it in a story. And even harder to get right is any kind of extra-temporal entity. Doctor Who has had problems with this in the past. The TVA seem to exist ‘outside’ of time, but the very fact that they can breathe and walk and talk at all shows that they themselves occupy a space-time. It might be a different space-time to our own, but they clearly occupy one. But then also the fact that they can and do interact with our own space-time shows that they are causally connected to it – they can take part in the events that they are supposedly ‘outside’ of temporal connection with. So to what extent are they really ‘outside’ of it at all. It just becomes meaningless – the TVA isn’t outside of time or outside of our reality at all – they are, unavoidably, inevitably, part of our timeline.

This is the kind of problem you run into when doing any kind of time-travel stuff in stories. Most writers are not mentally equipped to deal with the paradoxes of time travel – and it tends to show VERY quickly. The TVA come across as nothing special. They appear to be able to teleport, but they don’t seem to be able to do anything clever at all time-wise, despite ostensibly having the knowledge, means, and dimensional vantage point to do so.

In order to make something like the TVA work, they cannot merely be ‘quirky’, with some outdated, Arts décoratifs, brown-glass design choices. They must be unknowable. Any beings that are truly beyond time would have such a radically different experience of reality that we would struggle to understand them. Think of how in Interstellar the super-dimensional beings that make the tesseract towards the end never speak or communicate directly. We do not see them; we do not understand them – we only know of their existence through their actions. It doesn’t have to be taken to this extreme every time, but this is how you make something unknowable. They could have done this in the MCU, but they didn’t, and the result is that the TVA is plain and uninteresting. The TVA comes across as less powerful and less mysterious than SHIELD did.

So the moment I saw that the TVA was going to be included in this movie, I was sceptical. But actually, not only did this movie avoid some of the mistakes made with the TVA previously, it managed to repair the concept somewhat. And it did this by not over-using them. A few scenes later we meet Paradox – the movie’s second villain, or deuterantagonist. The fact that Paradox is not following the commands of the broader TVA, and working somewhat independently, allows for an explanation for the TVA’s apparent non-omnipotence. The TVA should be extremely powerful, but Paradox does not have many of the usual options available to him because he is trying not to draw attention to what he’s doing. Deadpool steals a device for travelling around the multiverse, and Paradox tries using a ‘time ripper’, but that’s it really. It sets the movie up for a standard ‘destroying the universe’ storyline with a little bit of multiversial travel to get another Logan. Beyond that the TVA’s just a bunch of kitch workers in a dreary super-dimensional office and their incapable henchmen. We don’t need to indulge the underwhelming ideas of Loki.

This is why I say that this movie achieves some remarkable things with regards to the context in which it is made. With just a few deft keystrokes, this movie has solved the problem of everyone expecting Logan to be truly dead, the problem of how the Deadpool stories can actually be included in the multiverse, and the problem of how to include the TVA (which they have to be to some extent), while also actually improving the TVA over their appearance in Loki. This movie manages to put one thread through several needles on its first try.

I’ve been going through this movie somewhat chronologically because it’s difficult to do anything else. The opening scenes – though clever, and solving many problems – do make one or two mistakes.

Something I found quite confusing on first watch-through, and which I still don’t understand now that I’ve seen it a second time, is how exactly the events of the first two Deadpool movies fit into the timelines and the multiverse. The second scene of the movie is the one between Deadpool and Happy Hogan. It’s a very funny scene – I’ll get to that in a moment – but we are told very explicitly that this is Earth 616 – i.e., ‘the Sacred Timeline’. This is the universe in which all of the events of the MCU before the multiverse split happened – it’s the one we know from the movies. But in the next scene we are told (very explicitly again) that we are looking at Earth 10005, and that it is six years later. So we’re in a different parallel universe, and it is this universe that the TVA pulls Deadpool from (and this universe that the TVA wants to destroy (I think – I’m pretty sure)).

So hang on, which universe did the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 occur in? The scene with Deadpool and Happy Hogan occurs in Earth 616 – does it also occur in Earth 10005? The text says ‘six years later’, implying it did (or that this is a pan-dimensional six years), and they reference it later – it’s given as the reason why Deadpool lost his motivation and split from Vanessa. If it happened in both, why show us it in a different universe? If the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 happened in both universes, then why even suggest that our Deadpool is not from the prime universe?

It’s not clear to me at all. Perhaps there’s an explanation out there on the internet, or perhaps it’s all clear if you watched Loki. I don’t know. This is something that should have been straightforward – either the Deadpool we know is from the prime universe or he isn’t.

This ties into another flaw in this movie – which I actually didn’t realise until after I’d finished watching the movie, even though it is quite obvious from the very first scene. It’s implied (obviously) that the Deadpool of this movie is the same as the Deadpool of movies 1 and 2. This movie also incorporates the events of Logan – Logan happens in the Deadpool universe. In Logan, Logan himself is old, as is Charles Xavier, but in Deadpool 2, when we’re in the X-Men mansion, we momentarily see the young X-Men cast. Charles is bald, so it’s after the events of X-Men: Apocalypse, but this means that between the events of Deadpool 2 and Deadpool 3, some 40+ years must have passed, which would not make sense given that none of Deadpool’s friends have aged.

So although Deadpool 3 managed to include itself into the MCU quite well – solving many problems along the way, it was not perfect. This is, in large part, a result of the mess made by other movies. It was always going to be hard to include the X-Men movies into the MCU, because the X-Men movies have a lot of inconsistencies like this. They simply were not as careful with the young-cast X-Men movies as they were with the MCU pre-Endgame.

Something this movie did incredibly well was weaving together all of the previously non-MCU movies into the MCU by the inclusion of characters from those movies. I mean, this was done really, really well – to the extent that this movie was an homage to 25 years of moviemaking. There are too many to list, but obviously having Chris Evans as the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four movie was a stroke of genius. It was a way to have Captain America in the movie without having Captain America in the movie. It was a brilliant twist when he said ‘Flame On!’. It was a nod through the fourth wall to the curious fact that, while Captain America and Fantastic Four were originally not part of the same cinematic universe, they were part of the same source material universe, and having the same actor in two different parts was ironic. It was also great seeing Chris Evans playing quite a different character from the rather earnest Captain America (which Chris Evans seemed to enjoy).

I was also thrilled to see the return of Azazel – though he wasn’t played by the original actor. I was also thrilled to see the return of Sabretooth and Pyro – both played by the original actors – I love that.

An absolute favourite was the return of Jennifer Garner as Elektra. For that alone I have given this movie an 8/10 instead of 7/10. 2005’s Elektra is an iconic movie for me, and I’m a huge fan of Garner’s version of Elektra – I was beyond thrilled that we got one more performance of the character here. (Personally, I’d quite like to see a whole new Elektra trilogy with Garner.)

Reynolds certainly knows what the fans like and want. It was amazing to see Henry Cavill for a short cameo as an alternate Wolverine. Few studio bosses would have had the awareness to do that. Nicepool was also a fantastic addition – Reynolds has the gift of knowing with extreme precision how a line or expression will come across, and that is why he’s able to create and play a character like Nicepool without it breaking the entire immersion.

Reynolds also knew what the fans wanted in terms of fights. We got two Deadpool vs. Wolverine fights – both of which were very creative – and we got a Deadpool and Wolverine team-up against the gang of different Deadpools (which had a perfect conclusion with no-one dying (except Nicepool) and the gang of Deadpools getting distracted by Peter).

Emma Corrin gave an outstanding performance as Cassandra Nova. That is not an easy character to play. Go too serious and the character becomes incomprehensible. Go not serious enough and the character doesn’t seem threatening. With a character like that, it’s not what powers she has that makes her threatening, nor is it how she uses them – it’s her own reaction to what she does with them that makes her come across as threatening.

The character of Paradox was a bit off. He was a very self-aware villain, somewhat over-the-top, and a bit camp. It made his motivation seem unserious. It was probably not helped by the fact that the protantagonist was introduced quite late in the movie.

I think one of the bigger flaws in this movie was it did not seem to fit with what we’ve seen of Wade and Vanessa in the previous two movies. In the first movie we were shown that Wade and Vanessa are very much made for each other. Vanessa dies near the start of the second movie, and the whole movie is about Wade’s sorrow – and then she comes back at the end. I just don’t believe that, after all of that, they would simply drift apart, as is shown at the start of this movie. Vanessa is almost entirely absent from this movie, which just doesn’t seem to make sense.

Something I also didn’t like in this movie was the ‘grotesque’. I have a very specific idea in my mind of what I think of as ‘grotesque’, and it’s often hard to convey, but I absolutely hate it. I would consider that ugly dog to be grotesque. Of course, the point of the dog was as a joke – that Deadpool would have an obsession with something so ugly. But it was still grotesque. I would also consider that flying skull version of Deadpool to be grotesque. I hated that too. It’s just repulsive – in a way that regular blood and gore isn’t. Were it not for these distorted forms, I might have given this movie a 9/10.

Above all, though, this movie is funny. This is possibly the funniest of the three Deadpool movies – the jokes are just packed in. Particularly funny is that second scene between Deadpool and Happy Hogan – an interview for Deadpool to join the Avengers with Jon Favreau – who plays Hogan – being one of the architects of the MCU. I suspect that scene was conceived of long before the rest of the story.

I think a third Deadpool movie would have been better if the franchise had not been included in the MCU – it could have focused much more on its existing characters like Vanessa, Negasonic, Yukio, Domino, Peter, and Dopinder. However, given that it was to be included, it did VERY well with the situation it had. It managed to neatly connect the X-Men franchise to the MCU, bring in Wolverine with a strong motivation (Wolverine as a character always seems to be best when he is filled with regret), solve some of the problems with the TVA, and be very funny. 8/10.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 6 – Nothing happens

Well there’s not much to say about this episode, because nothing really happens. The mystery hasn’t progressed at all – we still don’t know why the Zhat Vash don’t like androids; we don’t know why Jurati killed Maddox or why she’s here at all; we don’t know why Maddox created the twins; and we’re so far away from any connection to Data that I’d almost forgotten he was in this series. In this episode, they go to a place and say some things. That’s it.

There were a few odd moments in this episode – moments that were either unintentionally funny or just nonsensical. They’re all quite disconnected, so I’m just going to do what I’ve done a few times before in reviews, and chuck them all at you in a big list:

  • Elnor says ‘out-butt’ at one point when he means ‘butt-out’. Not sure what’s going on there, but a few moments later he says ‘Was I in-butting?’ instead of ‘Was I butting-in?’. No Elnor, you weren’t ‘in-butting’ … that’s … that’s something very different.
  • Also, Elnor is apparently psychic now – he seems to know what both Picard and Jurati are thinking – but he still has no fucking personality.
  • So far Rizzo has existed just so that Narek has someone he can exposit to. (She also says the occasional incest-y line to him.) Rizzo is played ridiculously melodramatically – it’s like her character sheet just said ‘Disney villain’.
  • When Picard suggests doing things the Qowat Milat way, Elnor confirms that ‘That is the Qowat Milat way.’ … Well thank goodness you’re here to tell us that Elnor … I don’t know what we would have done without you there.
  • The show continues not to acknowledge how much of a twat Raffi is. Raffi’s character seems to be what one might call the ‘traumatised saint’ archetype. I’ve never known that archetype actually work. At one point in this episode she says ‘You know Picard! Every part of that guy that’s not ego is rampaging id.’, and I was surprised that she didn’t explode with the irony.
  • Also, I don’t understand why Emmy (that’s that Starfleet person that Raffi talks to), agrees to give them envoy credentials. Starfleet is dead against Picard doing any of this stuff – wouldn’t someone higher up intervene? And how could the Romulans start a war if Picard didn’t have permission to be there anyway? I thought the Romulan civilisation was now spread across a huge area of the galaxy? I thought their military empire had collapsed? (Was that not what the previous episodes were suggesting?)
  • Soji scans all of her stuff, and the scanner says that it’s all 37 months old. I would have thought that her first reaction would just be confusion – after all, perhaps the scanner is broken – but no, her first reaction is blind craze.
  • I actually quite liked the way they brought Hugh back. He seems to be a lot more similar to his TNG / VOY character than Picard and Seven are. And the ways in which he is different seem to be in line with what we would expect based on his TNG character.
  • We have some fun with words in this episode, in a moment reminiscent of STD. Rios says to Raffi at one point ‘Because you’re a terminal pessimist.’ … um … ‘terminal’? Did you mean ‘eternal’? A ‘terminal pessimist’ is someone who’s going to die from being so pessimistic.
  • They also invented the word ‘protometric’ for this episode. It’s not complete nonsense – it could either mean ‘the first measurements performed as part of a process’ or ‘measurements of proton flux or density’ – so I’ll let it slide, but I do wonder if the writers knew what they wanted it to mean.
  • And then there’s a funny moment when Narek tries to kill Soji: the guard just sees Soji banging on the glass, and looks from Soji to Narek as he has no-idea what’s going on.

Six episodes gone; four left. I am starting to wonder whether we’re going to get any kind of satisfying conclusion to many of the things that have been set-up in this series.