Stutz: What's Love Got to do With It?

 Stutz, Film, Jonah Hill, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, Tools, Psychotherapeutic Action

There was a bit of buzz around Stutz on the analytic list serve.  Since I hadn’t seen it, I didn’t quite know what to make of the comments, but people seemed a little up in arms around it.  Then one of my students recommended that I see it, so I talked the Reluctant Wife into watching it on a stay in Friday night date night. 

I have to admit that I can’t give a complete report on it, though, because I fell asleep for a bit in the middle of it.  The next day, the Reluctant Wife mentioned to her mother that we had seen it, and the Reluctant Mother-in-law also watched it and she too promptly fell asleep. 

I note our parallel soporific experiences of the film not as a condemnation of it, but actually as a sort of recommendation.  The vibe of this movie is very serene and the pace is slow.  It is a documentary of sorts, and what it intends to document, the treatment of Jonah Hill, is not what actually gets documented.  We watch a blossoming of not one but two people and this occurs at a lovely pace with just a few plot twists and turns.

Jonah Hill, the patient, director and star of this film, is an actor that I have enjoyed seeing in a variety of films; The Social Contract and Moneyball come immediately to mind (and, interestingly, neither is a film that I posted about).  In both films he played a character who was socially isolated and viewed the world through a judgmental lens – inhabiting an aloof space that included a certain level of touchiness.

While Hill was playing a role in these films, his playing of that role seemed deeply rooted in who he was as a person – the round kid who was used to being excluded from cool social things while being smart and acerbic enough to stay in touch from a distance and to make things happen – in the Social Contract, to found Facebook and, in Moneyball, to supply the statistical knowledge to be able to disrupt the old school scouting machine of Major League Baseball and support a new way of valuing players.

Some time after making these films, Hill went into psychotherapy with Stutz, a therapist to the stars in LA.  Hill found the treatment so helpful that he decided to make a documentary about it while continuing to be in treatment. 

The first thing that is remarkable about this film is both Hill’s acknowledgement that he was playing to type in those films, but also the ways in which that type has been altered as a result, at least in part, through his relationship with Stutz.  Hill is physically trimmer and is upbeat.  At times his mood feels a little forced – as if he is agog – in love with life, but also with Stutz, and working hard to maintain the belief that he feels better, but he seems to actually have a range of feeling states that seem quite genuine across the arc of the film, and they seem to be at marked variance to the person I have come to know through the parts he has played.  Jonah Hill seems younger and more buoyant than I have seen him in films.

The second thing that is remarkable is the way in which the making of this film openly articulates what is known as a dual relationship.  Stutz shifts from having one relationship with Hill – psychotherapist – to having at least two – psychotherapist and costar in a documentary film, but in fact there are many other relationships that emerge.  At times, Hill is serving as Stutz’ psychotherapist.

Phil Stutz is an interesting character – not one that I have heard of previously.  He co-wrote a book on his technique, called The Tools, ten years ago.  The book has recommendations from Gwyneth Paltrow and Drew Barrymore.  Stutz himself is a nicely centered person – self assured without being cocky, he is comfortable saying what he thinks – and somewhat formulaic in his interactions. 

In fact, the film starts out as if it will be bracingly formulaic.  We are in a therapy session.  Hill and Stutz are facing each other in Stutz’ office.  They are engaged in a conversation that is filmed in black and white.  But there is something weird about it.  Though they are facing each other, some of what they say is filmed from directly in front of the speaker – but there are no cameras evident.  Though this seems like an organic interaction, it can’t be.  It feels simultaneously too real and oddly staged at the same time.

Thankfully, Hill breaks the fourth wall, reveals that we are not really meeting in Stutz office, but in a green room that allows them to paste the office on later, that shooting has been going for some time and that Hill is feeling lost in the middle of a project that may have seemed simple enough to begin with but it has become huge and he is disheartened by the enormity of it.  The somewhat forced happiness he was professing at the beginning of the film disappears, and we are treated to a new, more integrated version of Hill, but also of Stutz.

Often in films about therapy (Don Juan DeMarco comes to mind as an example of this), the patient changes when there is a change in the therapist, a change that is instigated by the work of the therapist with the patient.  I have speculated that this has to do with a fantasy on the part of the patient that they are repaying the experience of being cared for by the therapist with caring for the therapist.  That, and so much else, gets enacted in this film.

Hill asks Stutz about what brought him to therapy, what his childhood was like, and how he came up with his approach to treatment.  He also asks him about his Parkinson’s diagnosis – the tremors of which are apparent from the beginning of the filming.  Hill doesn’t just collect this information, but puts it into effect, noting that Stutz is stuck in his current relationship and is afraid to be more fully present in that relationship.  They turn the tools onto the teacher so that he can wrestle with his demons and Hill clearly gains satisfaction when the therapist has taken his advice.

Stutz, who is working from a psychodynamic framework, is altering two parameters of treatment here.  The first is anonymity; and the way to protect anonymity is to avoid self-disclosure.  In classical psychoanalysis, the analyst is a hidden figure that is all but unknown to the patient.  The intent is that the patient will be able to project onto the analyst the unconscious transference – the remembered aspects of past relationships that always interfere with our being open to new relationships.  Of course, the idea that they always interfere clarifies that even if we are not unknown to our patients, transferences will emerge.  It is presumably easier for the patient to see that he or she is generating them if the analyst is not playing a part in the interaction.

Contemporary psychoanalytic theory does not prevent us from self-disclosing.  In fact, not disclosing creates a certain persona (one that is lampooned in New Yorker cartoons); it does not create a true blank screen for the patient to project their inner worlds upon.  It turns out that Stutz and Hill share important early losses – both lost a younger sibling in childhood and dealt with the emotional family fallout from that – and part of Stutz’ ability to empathize with Hill likely comes from shared aspects of their lives.. 

In his book on Group Psychotherapy, Irv Yalom noted that group therapy has two advantages over individual therapy.  One is the sense of universality – the patient is in contact with other people like him or her.  Instead of feeling like a unique object of interest, they realize they are part of a community of individuals with shared dilemmas and historical antecedents.  Turning the tables on the therapist and having the therapist disclose more about who he is allows Hill to engage in a very small group psychotherapy – he joins a group of two.  

The second advantage that Yalom points out is that the patients in group therapy get to act the part of the therapist.  This is, Yalom believes, curative.  Feeling that I can help someone else improves my sense of efficacy in general and gives me a sense of value – I feel better for having helped others.  Again, by allowing the documentary to be made and answering Hill’s questions, Stutz offers Hill the opportunity to participate in a group experience where Hill can be the treater.

The second major parameter from classical psychoanalysis that Stutz alters is that he offers direct advice to his patients.  This is not new.  In the middle of the 20^th Century, Robert Wallerstein followed 42 patients in treatment and reported that the supportive aspects of treatment (including giving advice) were more reliably related to outcome than the more expressive aspects of treatment (giving the patient interpretations). 

Stutz starts his treatments by telling his patients that the first step to mental health is physical health – and he tells them to improve their diet and to exercise.  This is sound advice.  Since the 1980s we have known that aerobic exercise is as effective at combating moderate levels of depression as antidepressant medications.  I think both give patients a more stable psychic floor from which to do the difficult work of psychotherapy.

The “tools” that Stutz offers are packaged with his particular language, but are connected conceptually with well known psychotherapeutic interventions.  What appears to me to be unique about his approach is twofold.  First and foremost is his comfort – with himself and with his patients.  He feels as unflappable in his virtual office as in his real one, even though the virtual setting, once the false backdrop is peeled away, feels harsh, cold and uninviting, Stutz is still present.

The second unique and fun aspect of his interventions are the drawings that he makes.  His pictorial representations of the tools – very spare and conceptual – afford the opportunity for the patient to internalize the message that he is teaching in a novel manner – to give a visual representation to something that he is delivering verbally.  Our brains are built to integrate material cross modally, and his drawings nicely exploit this ability.

Change is difficult to make.  We resist change.  Offering a schematic – quite literally a different way of looking at a novel solution to a problem – allows us to inhabit a non- linguistic space from which to think about how best to solve that problem.  I think it may arouse in us a different, more pragmatic self – one that is used to solving problems – like geometric and architectural and electrical problems, not getting mired in them the way that we sometimes do with more verbally mediated problems.

The drawings also serve as transitional objects – something that we can quite literally hold onto from the session to remember our connection with the therapist and with the solution to the problem.

This films breaks all kinds of norms – stretches all kinds of therapeutic parameters.  On one level, it is a film where a grateful patient shares with the world the process that has been life changing for him.  He is able to do this because of the manifold privileges that his abilities, craft, and resources afford. 

He is also able to have a different kind of relationship with his therapist than most people are, in part because he has something to offer in return – fame, a platform to immortalize a person and his version of a method.  Or does he?  Wouldn’t Stutz have answered the questions if Hill had posed them in the course of his therapy?  Isn’t therapy always a more mutually determined and mutually rewarding undertaking than it might seem?  (And here I don’t mean to minimize the challenges, including maintaining radio silence about one’s own issues so that the patient can better articulate theirs).

But would Hill have known that he was as special to Stutz as Stutz was to him without having made this film?  Isn’t that part of the very issue that brings Hill to see Stutz?  Doesn’t Hill doubt that he is beloved for who he actually is rather than for the person he has become and that he enacts on the screen?  Can we ever be known and loved for who it is that we actually are?

What, then, distinguishes psychotherapy from all other conversations?  In my small college, we were assigned grades but it was considered bad form to look at them.  Instead of grades, our professors would talk about us in the third person in our presence, describing our strengths and weaknesses in the classroom during the term.  One fall, I did particularly badly in class, so they decided I would need to be reviewed midterm during the spring.  Well, at the second, emergency review, my performance had improved tremendously.  One of my professors attributed that to my having fallen in love.  The Dean, who sat in on the conversation, stated that he had never heard love talked about in a formal setting like this.

Hill’s transformation is clearly driven by many things, but one of the chief components is his love for Stutz.  The film allows Hill to realize that Stutz loves him, too.  He becomes Stutz’ favorite son, as it were.  Part of the challenge of therapy is knowing that this is the case – not just that we love our therapist, but that our therapist loves us, warts and all.  But that can be a really hard thing to know – short of, and maybe especially if, we come to know them.

 

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