Episode 115: Transcript
Episode: 115: Therapy, good and bad, with Theo Germaine
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else that just blew into the Windy City. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer and occasional get-about about town, and I'm the author of The Unstoppable trilogy, the first two books, Victories Greater Than Death and Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak are out now. And the third book Promises Stronger Than Darkness comes out in April.
Annalee: [00:00:25] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer and my latest book is called The Terraformers. It comes out in January.
[00:00:34] All right, so this week, we're going to be talking about therapy. We are recording here live at Worldcon. So, you're gonna hear audience in the background here. This is only the second time we've ever recorded this podcast live, so we're really excited.
[00:00:53] We're talking about therapy both good and bad. Speculative Fiction is full of stories about heroic therapists like Counselor Troi, but also evil therapists who brainwash and gaslight you. But we're not just talking about therapists. We're going to delve into how a story itself can be very therapeutic for the audience, whether for good or bad. And just a heads up, we're not really going to get too deep into questions of how we define neuro-typicality or mental health or mental illness in this episode. Instead, we're mostly just talking about what it means to have a therapeutic experience.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:27] And to help us discuss this, we're so incredibly happy to be joined by our special guest, the luminous Theo Germaine, who starred in the recent movie, They/Them, as well as the TV show “Work In Progress,” two narratives that deal a lot with therapy. You may also know Theo from the Netflix show The Politican. Welcome Theo!
Theo: [00:01:49] Hi, I'm Theo, thank you so much for having me, both of you.
Annalee: [00:01:52] All right. Thanks so much for joining us. Next week on our audio extra, you'll be able to catch the Q&A that we did with the audience here at Worldcon, that's all the folks here in the audience. And if you would like to clap or scream or say anything right now, let's do it.
[Audience claps and screams happily!]
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] And by the way, I do want to give a shout out to our lovely Patreon community which hangs out with us on Discord and keeps the conversations going all week in between episodes, y'all rock. And if you're here in the audience just raise your hands, if you—yay! Oh my God, Sue, Hi! And Peter, and I saw one other hand over here. And so, you know, anybody who wants to can just give us two or three bucks a month on Patreon and you can be in our Discord and hang out with us. We're just in there all the time.
Annalee: [00:02:47] Alright, let's get started.
[00:02:50] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:03:16] All right, so let's start with some definitions. What do we mean by good therapy? I think it's about creating a more coherent narrative of your life. It's basically an act of storytelling. It's a way of making sense of everything that's happened to you rather than trying to forget about the bad stuff or dismissing your experiences as a bunch of random chaos. A good therapeutic experience makes you feel seen, it makes you feel as though your identity is reflected and recognized in a positive way by other people. Basically, it allows you to see yourself as a whole person, flaws and all, without the distortions of stereotypes or moralistic judgments. So, I guess what I'm saying is that good therapy is a form of storytelling that aims to heal us. To represent us the way we want to be seen.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:09] And one thing I want to mention is that a good representation of therapy in fiction should showcase how much working through your issues is hard work, that takes time. It's not just something where you make a sudden breakthrough and then things are just suddenly all better. When I've had breakthroughs in my own therapy, it's been after a lot of talking through the same issues over and over. And I know my therapist is just like, Oh, this again. But you know, she is very patient. And therapy isn't just necessarily about resolving an immediate crisis. For many of us, it's helped us to figure out who we are and what kind of shape we want to make in the world.
[00:04:47] And okay, Theo, what do you think are the hallmarks of good therapy or good depictions of therapy?
Theo: [00:04:53] Oh, gosh, well, everything that you just said, I really, really relate to and that was a good answer. And I think if you're talking about therapist in particular, like, if you're looking for someone to work with something that I always look for is, is this person really aware of LGBTQ issues? If this therapist is white, are they actually trying to work through and deal with what their cognitive bias might be because of the way society is? Is this person understanding of and pro sex work? Is this person understanding if you have a disability? Is this person willing to be a therapist, but also really be real about what's going on and like, what the current circumstances are of our society? And if they also can understand that they might make a mistake sometimes. And there might be something that you are an expert on, that they are not an expert on, because they haven't experienced it.
[00:05:46] So, it's really getting a sense of validation, but also not being validated to the point that you can't work through your issues, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think those are some hallmarks of good therapy that I like thinking of.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:02] My God, I love all of that.
Annalee: [00:06:03] Yeah, that's really great. And that's part of what we want to talk about today. But first, let's talk about some examples of good therapy in speculative fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:14] So weirdly, superhero comics contain a surprising number of extremely helpful therapists, like therapists and superhero comics are legit. In the Suicide Squad comics that were being done by John Ostrander, and sometimes his wife, Kim Yale, and a bunch of different artists. The super villains and random other expendable soldiers who are sent on basically deadly missions, when they're not off fighting monsters, or, whatever, are taking down Batman, they get sent to counseling with a therapist named Simon LaGrieve, who actually helps them work through a lot of their issues. And this is a really great way that we get to understand these characters better, and we see them dealing with the traumas of being sent on all these deadly missions.
[00:06:57] And meanwhile, in The Incredible Hulk comics, there is an actual super therapist, who, you know how the Incredible Hulk got powers from gamma radiation, and that made Bruce Banner into this giant, green, can tear down buildings, dude? So, there's also a therapist in those comics named Doc Samson, who got super therapist powers from gamma radiation. And he's also kind of strong, but mostly, he just has super therapy powers. He's just like the strongest therapist there is. And the more angry you get, the more therapeutic he gets. And it's just, it's so great.
[00:07:35] And so one of my favorite issues of Peter David’s run in The Hulk, Doc Samson actually does group therapy with Bruce Banner and the two different versions of the Hulk at the time, the gray Hulk and the green Hulk, and the three of them kind of sit and do group therapy. And they work through their issues. And they deal with the childhood trauma that turns them into the Hulk, because they shared one childhood then they become a more integrated individual.
[00:07:59] And I'm actually kind of sad that now in the MCU, in the movies and TV shows, the Hulk is kind of integrated, but we didn't get to see the Hulk go through therapy, they kind of joke about it in the first episode of She Hulk, actually, and Doc Samson actually shows up in the 2008 Incredible Hulk movie, played by Ty Burrell, but he is not given any moments to be a super therapist, and I'm kind of bummed about that.
Annalee: [00:08:21] Also, in She Hulk, it's not actually the Hulk who has had therapy, it's Hulk, who is smart, right, a smart Hulk, which I think is really different. It's kind of interesting to think about how they made that shift from like, this is the Hulk who can deal with his feelings versus, you know, this is the Hulk, who's just smart, I think it says a lot about our values is that we'd rather have a dude who's smart than a dude who understands how to have feelings in a healthy way.
[00:08:51] So, I just wanted to mention that there's kind of two ways that we see therapy in fiction like this, kind of like what you've been talking about with having an actual therapist in the narrative. That's the kind of Counselor Troi model where you actually have someone who's playing the role of an actual accredited medical professional, well, sort of accredited, depending. And this is, I mean, this is what Star Trek does with the ship's Counselors, right? I mean, we see Troi on the bridge, and also on Discovery, there's a really major character who's a therapist. And it's interesting because you don't see that a lot in space opera. It's actually very unusual to see a therapist character.
[00:09:28] However, there's another way that therapy shows up in film and TV and stories, which is when the narrative itself kind of allows characters, or maybe the audience, to work through difficult issues. And this is going to sound really bizarre, but I saw this a lot in late 20th century horror movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, where the monster goes away when you stop fearing him. I'm sorry spoilers for a movie from the 1980s.
[00:10:01] The monster is this bad guy who's hunting these high school students. And they only they only conquer him by conquering their own feelings. And when I was a kid, the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie made a huge impression on me because I was like, oh, yeah, a lot of the bad things I'm dealing with, like bullies, get their power from fear. And if I don't fear them, I can start to ignore them and feel a little better about myself.
[00:10:26] Theo, are there any examples of fiction that you feel like had a therapeutic property or a therapist that you like?
Theo: [00:10:32] Honestly, Star Trek in its entirety is very, very therapeutic for me. But there's a couple of episodes from a couple of the different TV shows in particular that are really, really good. And one of them is from Voyager. And it is season four, episode 12. It's called “Mortal Coil” and it is about the character Neelix. And I don't know who's seen that episode or not. But at the beginning of the episode, he dies. He gets into a freak accident and he has to be brought back to life. And he goes through this, just this intense emotional experience over the entire course of the episode and trigger warning, he makes a suicide attempt, technically, in the episode and he has to be brought back by, I think there's a little girl who ends up like, you know, saving the day who's like, you have to save me from the monsters or something like that.
[00:11:25] So, he's basically like this… it feels like it's this huge metaphor for processing grief and also for like, PTSD, because he's this person who's very bright and very friendly and very warm and is there for everybody, and then this tragedy happens. And not only that, but when he dies, his religion is challenged when he passes away and before he's brought back.
[00:11:48] And the episode for me is so cathartic, because it's like, he still finds his way back to reality and finds his way back into community after this terrifying near death experience happens to him. And I watched that episode, I was watching it again today. I'll just watch it and cry because it's just so good and it reminds me that he really doesn't think that he's worth anything anymore after this thing happens and he can't see life the way it was before this accident happened. And it makes me think about, I don't know, I just really appreciate the way Star Trek dealt with death and religion and the balance between science and spirituality in this episode. If I ever need a pick me up, I will watch this episode because it gives me a sense of hope.
[00:12:37] And there's another one that, it’s Troi. It's in TNG. And Troi and her mom go through this kind of thing together, where it's revealed that Lwaxana has had another child who's passed away. And she feels like she can't move on because of this horrible tragedy that's happened in her life. It's another episode that's about, I'm really interested if anything has to do with grief or has to do with processing loss. Or, I literally could talk about Star Trek all day, honestly. Yeah, yes. So many episodes really, really impact me really positively. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:13:15] Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about how speculative fiction can be therapeutic specifically for queer, trans and non-binary people for a minute. So many people in the LGBT community say they see themselves in stories that have robots and aliens and vampires, just name that magical creature. And I'm wondering, what do you two think? Is it therapeutic for us to see ourselves in non-human or monsterous creatures? Or is that sometimes kind of a problem? Because it's more like, say, robots or a metaphor for gayness and transness rather than just showing us some actual gay humans humping, or gay robots.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:00] I think it's like a lot of things that can be either therapeutic or harmful in terms of like, how much it centers us in our own stories. If a story others us in the process of creating a metaphor, then that is harmful, like so many stories about queer aliens, which serve to alienate us, the viewer, from queerness. But if it's created out of love, and if and it's grounded and rooted in the experiences of queer people, and the experiences of queer people are centered in the story, then I think it can be super positive. But Theo, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Theo: [00:14:34] Oh, gosh. I honestly think it goes both ways for me. Sometimes I'm like, I really feel different and I want to be seen in a character who is different in some kind of way. And sometimes it does feel alienating. Sometimes I'm like, I just want things to feel normal. I don't want queer representation to be like the extra special thing or be—Or, another thing that I can think of specifically, that's not connected to being queer, but there are a lot of black actors or other actors of color who end up playing non-human characters. I think of, God, there's so many examples. It's good sometimes it's like, it feels good. And sometimes it doesn't feel good.
[00:15:17] As an actor, I have the same sort of experience where it's sometimes, if I'm seeking a job, it's like, I want to be the cool, weird alien sort of thing, because we are all aliens, if you really think about it because we’re here in space and earth is so small. And to us, we're normal. But to anybody else who's visiting, we'd be aliens. But yeah, sometimes I'm like, I just want things to be normal. I just want to not feel like I'm different. But I don't know. I think that that the bottom line of that is we just need more queer people that are creating more stories, because we can do whatever that metaphor is the best, I think.
Annalee: [00:15:55] But are there any monsters or otherworldly creatures that you really want to play?
Theo: [00:15:59] That yeah, totally. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Vampires, werewolves. I really have a thing for robots and androids. So, any sort of sci fi sort of thing like that. Any sort of Commander Data-esque character, I would just kill to play.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:20] Oh my gosh. That’d be awesome.
Theo: [00:16:23] So yeah, I'm someone who's very much like, yeah, I want to play all the weird people! But yeah, I also want to be the normal straight man, sometimes. I just want to pick. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:16:33] And also now, I'm like, I want you to be a vampire robot. Like, is that a thing?
Theo: [00:16:37] You know, I'm going to take some notes.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:39] Robot vampire?
Annalee: [00:16:39] Yeah, robot.
Theo: [00:16:41] Yeah, I’ll put robot vampires.
Annalee: [00:16:41] Okay, so a robot vampire could attach to another robot and drain their memory reserves, drain their power.
Theo: [00:16:47] That actually makes me think, do you know the video game Stray that just came out? Oh, my God. Does anybody know Stray? Okay, it's a video game that you play as a cat. And it takes place in a futuristic city. And there's kind of like vampire robots that happen in this video game. The human population is gone but there are robots that are left. And then there are other robots who have, I think they've eaten all of the humans, and now they can eat the other robots. So, they're kind of like parasitic zombie robots. So, like, maybe some—
Charlie Jane: [00:17:16] Wow.
Annalee: [00:17:17] Nice.
Theo: [00:17:18] It's really good.
Annalee: [00:17:21] Yeah, I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, because suddenly I was thinking of like, Rudy Rucker’s robots, which eat human brains. And that's just, that's a whole other situation.
[00:17:31] All right. So, what are some examples of science fiction characters who really made you two feel seen or feel good about your genders? So, I want you to be thinking about that. I'm going to tell you a couple examples that made me excited because I'm really feeling She Hulk right now. And I think as a nonbinary person, for a large part of my life, there wasn't a lot of stuff. There were people who felt nonbinary to me, that had that vibe. And for me personally, that was generally characters like She Hulk, women who were strong and big and could punch things and beat men up or beat up other large creatures, doesn't have to be a man, it could be a large, whatever, non-gendered blob. And so I also really love Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones. She has such enby energy to me, I know that her character is supposed to be a woman, and there's the horrible thing that happens to her character. But when she has a sword, and she's with Podrick, I'm like, this is what I like to see.
[00:18:33] And one other shout out I want to do is to Nicola Griffith’s new novella Spear, which has a character Peretur, who is a version of the Parsifal character from the King Arthur mythos. And that character is also a sword wielding tough woman/nonbinary person. So those are all of my good, yummy, nonbinary feelings.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:03] I mean, I think a lot about the character of Nia Nal, a Dreamer from Supergirl who as a trans woman, her storyline was incredibly meaningful to me. We don't get a lot of trans superheroes in, especially movies and TV these days. We're still kind of waiting for that to arrive, I think. And she was just such an incredible character. Nia comes from an alien species where basically psychic dream powers, where you can have prophetic dreams but also harness dream energy that allows you to do cool stuff, those powers are passed down from mother to daughter. And when Nia Nal’s mom dies, her powers get passed on to Nia, her trans daughter, instead of the cis daughter the way everybody was expecting. So, Nia’s sister doesn't get the powers like she was expecting too. The cisgender sister who was expecting to get the powers is really pissed off and is kind of a jerk about it.
[00:19:57] And for a few seasons after that Nia Nal is kind of working through her feelings, her guilt, her impostor syndrome, about the fact that she got these powers that were supposed to go to her sister. And even though it's this amazing validation for her gender, that it only goes down to daughters and so it was given to the trans daughter. But it takes her a long time to finally believe that she deserves this power and to finally come to terms with her mother's death. It's so good and so well done.
[00:20:25] I also want to just give a quick shout out to Steven Universe, one show that we've talked about on the podcast a lot. So, we don't want to just become like the Steven Universe fan podcast, we kind of do, but we kind of don't. But there's a lot of great stuff about healing from trauma and dealing with hard scary stuff in that show. And, in particular, the episode “Mindful Education” is kind of an amazing therapy session where Garnet takes Steven and Connie into this kind of dreamscape and helps them to deal with anxiety and there's a song that goes with it that I listen to constantly, because it's so therapeutic.
[00:20:59] Theo, how about you?
Theo: [00:21:01] Oh, gosh, well, these aren't like specifically, specifically queer, but it's an example of stuff that I just imprinted on all over the place when I was consuming this media for the first time. And one character very specifically was Sheik in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. I would play this video game all the time when I was a little, little kid. I was like a little, little kid in the late ‘90s. And yeah, when Princess Zelda would turn into Sheik, I was just like, oh, my God, what is happening? Like, I'm feeling all of these things all over my body. I think this is me. Like, I want to be this person. You know that, really. So, she, they, this entity that was Sheik. I just was like, I thought they were super hot and I wanted to be them.
[00:21:49] Something else that I was really, really impacted in the early impacted by in the early oughts was the X-Men movies that came out in like 2002 and 2003. And so many of the different characters in those movies, I just was like imprinting on left and right, whether it was Mystique, just because she can shape shift. Even though she's a bad character. Whatever. You know, she can change all over the place. And I, as a pretty gender nonconforming kid, I felt very validated by that.
[00:22:18] And also the character Rogue was somebody else who I really, really was impacted by. And I think it was because her power made it so she couldn't really connect with people in a way that was… I almost said neurotypical. So maybe there's a metaphor in there. But yeah, X-Men is something else that I was super impacted by and not super queer but felt very, very queer to me in so many ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:46] I feel like the X-Men have been like a therapeutic narrative for a lot of queer people, like I just constantly hear that from, from queer people about the X-Men, specifically.
Annalee: [00:22:54] I really want to talk about the show “Work in Progress” that you were on. I loved your performance. It was so great. And your character, Chris, has this really therapeutic vibe. And it's interesting to see him playing off of Abby who's kind of the main character, or the main person who's having kind of a psychological crisis. And when Chris comes into her life, he has this very therapeutic effect on her and offers her this kind of sex positive queer family, that is a real alternative to the experiences that she's been having. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about coming up with that character, and whether you were thinking about the idea that Chris might be a kind of therapeutic presence in her life.
Theo: [00:23:42] Yeah, I mean, sometimes I thought about it from a little bit more of the position of like, he’s a really, really awesome character. But he still also is kind of like the savior boyfriend who shows up. But obviously, if you've seen the show, by the end of the show, they're in a very different place than they are in the beginning.
[00:24:00] The thing that I thought about the most and working through that was just what sort of character flaws is Chris dealing with? Because you really get to see what Abby is going through throughout that entire show. But you don't ever get to really see what he's going through. And by the end, he's like, you know, I can't do this for you anymore.
[00:24:16] It really made me think a lot about how everybody is navigating some kind of boundary negotiation in their life. And, Chris, very specifically, a way that we're similar is that I think at that point, he really started to have issues with boundaries around Abby. I think that there's a way that maybe she started to lean on him in a way that maybe kind of crossed something that was you know, okay. But he tried to do the best that he could and being like I can't be there for you anymore, but I still care about you, and I love you, but we have to part now.
[00:24:54] That's kind of a different answer. But I was really thinking about what is balance and I was really… Honestly, the show was therapeutic for me in the sense that it really started teaching me about things that I needed to learn about myself and places where I needed to set better boundaries. Because when people are sad and anxious, I, similar to Chris just want to help and just want to fix and just want to soothe and have been in positions before where it's like, oh, no, I have to set a boundary now.
[00:25:24] And sometimes I don't understand that until I see a piece of art that kind of teaches me that and so I didn't expect to be taught so many things by the TV show, which makes me miss it all the more because—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:35] It was such a great show.
Annalee: [00:25:35] It was so awesome. Yeah, it was two seasons of amazing television, which I recommend that everybody go out and watch.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:45] So, what was it like working on that show? And working with those amazing folks? And Lilly Wachowski, and everybody? Were there any impromptu therapeutic moments during the making of the show?
Theo: [00:25:56] Oh, my gosh, well, firstly, it was so much fun working with everyone. I could not believe that I was working with Lilly Wachowski. I was speechless. I still honestly have issues texting her sometimes. Because I'm like, I can't believe that I know you, you're so cool.
[00:26:14] Yeah, she, in particular, was really, really awesome. I had just worked on a different show where there was no [intimacy?] director, there was no intimacy design. Yeah, and I was really uncomfortable, but I was so new to TV at the time that I didn't know how to advocate for what I needed. And something that was really, really awesome and healing to me was working through the intimacy that Abby and Chris have on the show. Not only are they just making out in the back of a car, sometimes, but they're also like, they just have a sex scene at one point during the show, and we had a lot of rehearsals for it. And Lilly, especially, was very much like, we're going to talk through everything, anything that I can do to make you feel safe. If there's anything that you don't feel safe about, if we need to do anything all over again. Even on the day of, after we'd done a few rehearsals, we really, really took our time with it.
[00:27:09] And having a really good intimacy director and somebody who is, especially if you're queer, and somebody else who is queer, and kind of like, gets it. If they're there for you in that way, it really makes all the difference. And that made me so much more confident with things like intimacy on screen, which can be hard if you're a queer person, and you're constantly under some kind of gaze, and people are judging your body because it's different or whatever.
[00:27:39] Yeah, the intimacy design. I mean, it was intense, because there was a lot of intimacy in the show. But the experiences that I had with it were, they were great. Yeah, Lilly was a really great intimacy choreographer and designer.
Annalee: [00:27:53] That makes me really happy to hear. So, one of the other things that happens in the show is there's these moments of trauma, a lot of which are around gender, some of which are just around intimacy. And at one point, we see Abby get misgendered. And it's played kind of for laughs like, not the misgendering, but her reaction, because she has this kind of humorous meltdown.
[00:28:17] And then later in the show, there's a very serious moment where the character of Abby has discovered Chris's dead name. And that was like one of the few things that Chris said, please, I don't want you to know that. And there's this really intense scene when that happens, when Chris realizes that Abby's done that, and it leads to what you were saying with this kind of moment of separation. And I wondered if you could talk about that balancing in the show between humor and seriousness around gender trauma and how you balanced it as an actor and as a show?
Theo: [00:28:55] Well, firstly, I loved the fact— I mean, when we were going through that part of the story, when we were getting ready to film, they were very much like everything is going to be blurred out. Chris’s dead name is not going to be shown anywhere in the show at all. There's an earlier episode in season one, where Abby and Chris are at a wedding together, and they go out to breakfast, and Abby is seeing—the diner is like Chris’s dead name diner, but everything is blurred out. And that part is just really, really funny to me, because it's like, oh, my God, this impossible situation.
[00:29:29] And that kind of feels like a little bit of a balancing act with the stuff that happens at the end, where you really get to see Abby in an impossible situation that's kind of funny. And then also you see her kind of breaking down and losing it and making a mistake and technically doing something that's kind of violent. And I think that that's important to show because we're just in this weird place with queer representation where it’s mostly cis people that are still kind of making all of the decisions for us at higher level television and film and things like that.
[00:30:04] When queer characters are being written, a lot of people will write them all one way or the other. Like, heroes superheroes, angels, no issues at all, flaws. I've experienced that in some work. Or it's totally the opposite, where they're just villains, or they're bad, or they hit all these stereotypes. And Abby's experience over the show kind of puts her in the middle. And that makes it feel really, really real, because it's like, queer people are not perfect. We make mistakes and have trauma and have issues and have anxiety and have places where perspectives fall short all the time. And I don't know, I just liked the way that it was really real, I felt like.
[00:30:46] And it's like, you know, at that point in the show, she's not a bad person, even when that happens. She just really messed up and she was impulsive, and she didn't think. And also, it showed that when you are in a really, really bad place, like sometimes you can do things that you regret, and it does get resolved in the second season, which I think is good.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:09] Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about bad therapy.
[00:31:14] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:31:22] We've got another podcast that we think you'll love. It's called Subtitle and it tells stories about languages and the people who speak them.
Annalee: [00:31:30] If you've ever wondered why some people are so good at learning languages, or thought about how different pronouns are represented in Swedish or Japanese than Subtitle is the podcast for you.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:41] One episode profiles a woman who forgot her mother tongue and then set out to rediscover it. Another is about words that seem programmed to make us laugh.
Annalee: [00:31:52] Yeah, this is an amazing podcast if you're a language lover, so be sure to check out Subtitle with award winning journalists Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay. Listen at Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts.
[00:32:07] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:32:14] Okay, so bad therapy. Bad therapy is in some sense a perversion of the therapeutic process, right? To do harm instead of healing. It's about pushing you into a toxic and unwelcoming narrative, an unhelpful narrative that makes you feel worse. Bad therapy is often but not always nonconsensual, or mandatory. It's often aimed at either destabilizing you or destroying your sense of self, or just forcing you into conformity.
[00:32:45] I feel like the heyday of bad therapy stories is really the 1960s and 1970s. It's just full of like, evil therapists, monstrous counselors, just terrible horrible treatments that people are forced to undergo. Including, you know, stuff like The Prisoner is one that comes to mind where like, Number Six, is given all these like bizarre inhumane treatments to try and break him down.
Annalee: [00:33:13] Yeah, and I think part of this grows out of the Cold War, especially in the ‘60s, where there were all of these fears about brainwashing as well as this sort of dawning realization that advertising was something that was using psychology to lure us into buying things. And at that point, people sort of stopped trusting therapy and they stopped trusting the psychological process that you undergo when you're in therapy.
[00:33:41] And by the 1980s you start having movies like David Cronenberg's, The Brood, where there's this evil therapist who helps one of his clients to deal with her rage issues by encouraging her to give birth to these little tiny babies who represent her anger and kill people and also don't have butts for some reason. Like this is an actual subplot is that the one of the ways they figure out that the babies are going to die is because they can't poop.
[00:34:11] So she's basically—
Charlie Jane: [00:34:12] I mean, I had that therapist once. I had to fire that therapist.
Annalee: [00:34:16] That was terrible. Yeah, exactly. Don't give birth to rage babies with no butt.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:21] I mean, yes. How do I follow that up?
[00:34:27] So, Theo, your new movie, They/Them is all about a queer conversion camp. It's sort of like the horror movie version of But I'm a Cheerleader, kind of. And it's sort of the ultimate in bad therapy. Okay, so what was the process of making that movie like and how upsetting was it to do this, to act this out? And I taught these scenes of coercive, destabilizing counseling? Or was it something that you were able to kind of keep a healthy distance from as you were making this film?
Theo: [00:34:55] Oh, I gotta be totally honest. It was really hard to have good boundaries around all of it sometimes. It's a fictional movie about real things that happen. And I was playing a character who was a lot younger than I was. And so, there was a lot that came up about my past. And there was a lot I was processing about my past at the time. And a lot I was processing about therapy that I'd had when I was younger.
[00:35:27] Yeah, it really was empowering at the same time, though, because it was a reminder of all of the things that I overcame when I was younger. And as much as it brought up a lot of things from the past, it reminded me that I was still here. You know, I had succeeded so much that I had gotten into a place where I was doing a film that was about a lot of things that were connected to earlier childhood experiences that I'd had.
[00:35:50] But yeah, it was hard. It was really hard sometimes, because, especially the therapy scene that happens in the middle of the movie, it's like, how many times has everybody heard something like that to some effect. And I spent so much time when I was younger, being like, this doesn't affect me, this doesn't affect me, this doesn't affect me, this doesn't affect me. And it was a defense mechanism. And you look back and you're like, oh, my God, I was actually fighting through so many things. And all that came up when we were working together last year. Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. But it also was positive.
Annalee: [00:36:27] Yeah, your character bonds with the other queer characters in the show to kind of deal with everything that's happening. And I wonder if there was something similar going on with the actors on set
Theo: [00:36:37] There was. Working with everybody was really, really awesome. And when we were all getting to know each other, we all talked a lot about what our origin stories were, and everybody was kind of dealing with a different sort of thing. And everybody had come out at a different time. And one of the main actors in the movie is bi and she was talking a lot about her experiences that she'd faced as, she was a very femme person. And she was like, people think I’m straight all of the time, still, and it's like, it's 2022. And that's still happening. Like, if you're a femme-looking woman, and you're bi, everyone's like, “No, you're not.” And it's, messed up.
[00:37:14] But, yeah we really bonded a lot. We had a lot of little parties out back of the hotel, we were staying at. One week, a couple of the cast members and I went axe throwing, and it was really cool. It was very, very therapeutic. I recommend axe throwing to anybody if you need a little bit of catharsis. Yeah, we would like go get ice cream together. We went to see Candyman together at one point. Yeah, we bonded pretty well. And it's the project that I've worked on, where I've really stayed in touch most regularly with people afterwards. And I still talk to the writer/director, John Logan, a whole bunch. And he's someone who very much just learning how to be respectful to queer and trans people a lot more. I mean, he's queer himself. But he hadn't really worked with a lot of trans and nonbinary people before, but like he was pretty respectful of all of us. And so it was cool. That was pretty cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:15] That's really good to hear. And part of what I love about that movie is that your character kind of finds ways to rebel against this really oppressive conversion camp led by Kevin Bacon. They kind of escalate and there's the thing where, like, you've been put in the boys’ cabin, but then you put on a dress, and then later there's this scene where you're shooting a rifle. And like, I wanted to hear more about what that was like and did you learn stuff from doing this movie about how to hold on to yourself in the face of terrible, coercive therapy?
Theo: [00:38:48] Well, I there's a lot that I feel like I learned. So, I’m a nonbinary person, I use they/them. And it really kind of solidified to me how much so many things exist in one space or the other space. And if you are kind of different in any sort of way, and you don't fit into one of these two boxes, people kind of just don't know what the hell to do with you at all. And there's a lot of that, that I put on myself where I was like, I must… It’s the way I was internalizing, queerphobia, and transphobia where I was like, you know, something is wrong with me because I am someone who's kind of in the middle. And these experiences really kind of psychologically solidified in my head that it's like, no, you have to live your life. You have to be yourself, even if it's not something that other people think is cut and dry. And it really also made me think about how toxic masculinity works, because the character that Kevin Bacon plays, by the end of the movie, you're like, this guy is dealing with some type of deep, deep horrible relationship with masculinity that has made him secretly very, very antisocial. And what kinds of insecurities is this guy dealing with, that you just never learned about in the film, because he's just out there oppressing queer people all of the time.
Annalee: [00:40:19] So, I wanted to get back to the larger question of bad therapy, because it's also interesting to me that, in the late 20th century, we start to see the rise of Scientology as this major force. It's this really successful cult organization created by a science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and it's explicitly anti-psychology. It's anti-therapy. And yet, as survivors of Scientology have attested in a whole bunch of different places. The whole organization is a giant ball of bad therapy, it makes people's problems worse, and also destroys their finances.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:00] Yeah, I had one experience with Scientology, which actually reminds me a little bit of the conversion therapy in They/Them when I was 18 years old. I was kind of, in a place where I was trying to figure myself out. I was away from home. I was kind of just like, I was traveling and kind of confused about a lot of stuff about myself. And someone on the street asked me if I wanted to take a free personality survey, and I thought why the heck not, that sounds interesting. I was sort of like, yes, new experiences, let's have new experiences.
[00:41:34] And so I was taken into this tiny airless office and given a test with like 100 random questions, many of which really made no sense whatsoever. And then I was shown a movie about Dianetics, after which my test results were revealed. And they showed me this chart with this huge chasm in the middle that was like this gaping hole in my personality that could only be filled by, you guessed it Scientology. And they kind of like, basically like a sinkhole, in my sense of self subsidence.
[00:42:05] And this really intense woman who actually reminds me a little bit of a woman who does the therapy session in that movie, told me that I was obviously a really bad person, and that I must have done something really terrible and I needed help. And that there was something really wrong with me, and it played into all the anxieties I already had, that I was kind of like, still kind of in denial about. And it took a lot for me to just walk out of there and be like, “No thank you.” And it kind of freaked me out for a long time after that. And I later talked to people who had gone through more of that. And they were like, yes, it's just, that's the beginning and then it just gets more and more intense from there.
Annalee: [00:42:43] Yeah, there's a way in which Scientology is a science fiction experience that's designed to create this bad therapeutic result, which makes you incredibly codependent with the organization.
[00:42:57] So, to return to actual science fiction narratives, as opposed to walk-in science fiction narratives like Scientology. Theo, are there any fictional stories that you think of as having really great examples of bad therapy other than They/Them, which we've already delved into?
Theo: [00:43:16] So I thought about the first thing that I ever saw that had any mentions of therapy in it, which was the 1991 movie, What About Bob? And this movie, like very specifically, to me, the therapy in it sucked, because it showed that even a trusted professional can be completely egotistical and have his head completely up his ass and not really care about his clients. And it was meaningful, because there's a couple things that the therapist did actually say that I use to help me if I'm feeling really anxious, which is the whole baby steps sort of thing. And sometimes if I'm like, oh, no, I can't do anything, I'm so sad today. I'll think about you know, baby steps to the door, you know, baby steps of the hallway, baby steps to getting outside, you know, baby steps to do you know, breaking everything down to try to deal with a sense of overwhelm that you might be experiencing. But also, like, yeah, I don't know, this question was kind of hard for me to answer, honestly. I want to be real.
Annalee: [00:44:23] It's hard to think about because it's like, remembering terrible experiences of therapy in fiction.
Theo: [00:44:29] There really is like, so much like, especially if you think about how mental health is treated in media. It's like, everything sucks, and there's so much stigma and there's so much bad shit that Hollywood is perpetuating. So maybe there's too many examples for me to think of. I don't know why What About Bob? keeps coming up, but.
Annalee: [00:44:49] What about you, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:44:51] Yeah, I mean, I often when I think about really bad therapy, I think about Star Trek. Actually, we're just coming back to Star Trek again. And Star Trek has you guys like really positive or presentations of therapy, including Deanna Troi, whom we've already mentioned, and who is amazing. But there's also… Okay, in the original Star Trek, I mean, there's a bunch of episodes of Star Trek where something terrible and mind melting happens or people are like, subjected to something. But I always think about the original series episode “Dagger of the Mind,” where basically it’s like a prison planet, there's a penal colony planet. And Kirk goes down alone, of course, like he always does. And, you know, because that's a good operational safety protocol. And like, basically, there's a machine that supposed to kind of help people deal with their issues that is supposed to be like a therapy machine, but the evil dude has like, cranked it up to the wrong setting. And it just like, eats your brain instead of giving you therapy. And at one point, they give Kirk false memories using it. It's like a really creepy episode, actually. It's actually a very, like, weird messed up episode. And like, it's definitely explicitly about our fears of brainwashing, like we talked about earlier, but also of just like, therapists kind of like screwing with our brains in some way. I think ‘60s, again, is peak fear of that.
[00:46:13] But then in recently in season two of Star Trek: Picard, and I apologize, this is going to be spoilers for recent stuff. So cover your ears, if you haven't seen season two yet. But in season two of Star Trek: Picard, there's a whole thing where Q pretends to be a therapist in order to kind of mess with… So Picard goes back in time to like 2024, where his ancestor, who's also named Picard, is supposed to fly on this mission and go to Europa and find some scientific discovery that helps propel us towards the utopian future of the Federation. But Q has decided to screw with this for some reason, and Q can’t use his power so he pretends to be a therapist, and he basically goes in and kind of manipulates Picard's ancestor and kind of plays on her insecurities and convinces her that she actually can't do the thing that she's supposed to do. And it's actually kind of unsettling.
[00:47:06] In researching this episode, I found it came across a 2014 paper by a psychologist complaining about negative depictions of psychologists in pop culture. And I hadn't fully remembered until I read the paper how many of Batman's villains are evil therapists, including Scarecrow and Hugo Strange? And it's sort of interesting, because Batman is this guy who had a horrible trauma as a child, and he's dealt with it through pure rationality. But then he goes and fights therapists, that’s whole thing is like, I don't have to have therapy. I've just mastered my trauma through rationality. I'm now going to beat up therapists. That's all I wanted to say.
Annalee: [00:47:42] Yeah, I mean, there's definitely therapists that I've been wanting to beat up, in some recent TV shows, in particular. So one of the things that drives me nuts, and this is a trope that you see a lot in science fiction, where there's some woman who has a superpower and it must be controlled by some dude, named Xavier perhaps. Or perhaps someone who is in the Umbrella Academy. And so one of the tropes you see is, as I was sort of sub-tweeting, sub-potting is Jean Grey, constantly having her mind invaded by Xavier, and he's like, look, if I don't do this, you will become OP, overpowered, and you'll destroy the world.
[00:47:42] And the thing that I thought was so interesting on Umbrella Academy, which is another sort of superhero show, which has X-Men-like qualities to it, is we have the character of Victor, who until recently was basically the Jean Grey character. The dude who's in charge of the Umbrella Academy has put various blocks and drugs into Victor's system in order to prevent them from blowing the world up. And then when Victor transitions into being a guy, all that evaporates. Suddenly, we're no longer worried about Victor controlling his special powers. You know, it was only when Victor was living as a woman that that was a concern. And so I think, the more I've been sort of immersed in these kinds of narratives, the more I just see that coming up again, and again, where you have a woman or someone else who has a marginalized position, who just has to be controlled by a white man, by going into their mind and setting up blocks.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:28] Theo, I was wondering if you saw the most recent Matrix movie, Matrix Resurrections and if you had any thoughts about like Neil Patrick Harris's character in it, who is an evil therapist.
Annalee: [00:49:40] Very evil.
Theo: [00:49:41] Yes, I did. And I was totally tricked by him when I saw the movie. At first, I think the first scene that they have, as you're kind of figuring out what the plot is, he seems like a really good guy at first. You’re like, oh, maybe he's helping Neo out and then he really scared me when he ended up being a bad guy. I didn't see that coming, but if I look back, I'm like, I probably should have seen that coming.
[00:50:07] I think the thing that was particularly scary about him was that, like, they picked Neil Patrick Harris to play this therapist, and he's this nice guy. Like, he's even queer. And he really, you know, seems like he's here to help out. But, yeah, I really liked that casting choice, because it was very much like looks can be deceiving.
Annalee: [00:50:24] So let's finish up by talking about how the process of writing and acting and creating can be therapeutic. I want us to just throw off this bad therapeutic feeling. And each talk about something creative we've worked on, that was therapeutic. So, Theo, is acting ever therapeutic for you, what's that, like?
Theo: [00:50:43] Acting is totally therapeutic for me, sometimes. I am always looking to see if I can learn how to be a better person. That’s something that's very, very important to me. And I really identify as an artist and art makes a lot of sense to me. And sometimes I feel like I can't learn something the right way unless I see some type of example of it, if I see some type of representation, or I see or consume some type of metaphor. So, I always feel like when I'm really digging into a character, and I'm learning their psychology, because I always love doing a psychological profile of the characters that I work on. Sometimes they even have done what their zodiac sign is and what their favorite color is, and stuff like that. I always end up learning something about myself.
[00:51:37] So yeah, I guess acting is kind of therapeutic and can be kind of a release. And sometimes helps me. Like, I grew up in a family where we couldn't express any of our emotions. And so sometimes acting helps me learn about emotions, if that makes sense. Super therapeutic. I love acting.
Annalee: [00:51:57] Charlie Jane, what about you?
Charlie Jane: [00:51:57] Yeah, I obviously wrote a whole book a while back about how writing can be a source of healing during horrible times. It's called Never Say You Can’t Survive. And you know, for me, it's been really positive in a couple of ways to think about that. One, I've been, first of all, I've been thinking about trauma and how we heal from it and how it's not this simple, straightforward process of detective work. It's a really complicated… You have to kind of grapple with it. But also, I've been actually blessed to be able to write a lot of queer and trans superheroes lately. And that’s just felt really healing to me on multiple levels during this horrible time we're in.
[00:52:32] How about you Annalee?
Annalee: [00:52:33] So, my previous novel, my latest published novel, Future of Another Timeline, was very therapeutic for me, because it's partly about my own experiences growing up. It's set in Irvine, California, where I grew up. It deals with some of the issues with abuse that I experienced in my family. And I actually went back and read my high school journals before writing it because I wanted to remember what it felt like to be inside my teenage brain, dealing with having an abusive dad and all the other things that come with being gender-weird in high school. And I actually talked to some of my old high school friends about their experiences. And it was really good to turn my experiences into a coherent narrative, even if it was actually quite fictional, because I actually am not a murderer or a time traveler. So… that you know of. I am, however, a vampire robot. So…
Charlie Jane: [00:53:34] I think that what we're realizing here is that narration can be a form of therapy in itself, either good or bad therapy. And what matters is who controls that narrative? Do we have agency over our own stories, or someone else trying to tell our stories for us, brainwashing us into kind of believing bad things about ourselves and our communities?
Annalee: [00:53:51] All right, well, let's finish up on a somewhat happier note. Theo, why don't you tell us what's coming up next for you and what you're working on right now?
Theo: [00:54:01] Oh, gosh, well, I can't like really talk about it. But I wrote a book.
Annalee: [00:54:04] Yay!
Theo: [00:54:05] Yeah. And it was very therapeutic working on and we're still working on it. Yeah, I'm really excited and hope that I can get it published. But other than that, my partner and I are just trying to start our own podcasts. And we've been working on this big sci-fi universe for the past couple of years. And doing a lot of writing, honestly, because I don't just like acting. But in regards to acting, just trying to get another really cool job.
Annalee: [00:54:40] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:41] Nice.
Theo: [00:54:41] And writing some music too. I just like writing and making all kinds of things, honestly.
Annalee: [00:54:46] That's the best. All right, well, we're going to be looking out for your podcast coming up.
[00:54:50] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:54:54] Thank you for listening to this special live episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. Remember you can find us on patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and on Twitter at @OOACpod. Thanks so much to our incredible, valiant producer Veronica Simonetti. Thanks so much to Chris Palmer for the music. And thanks to all of you for supporting us. We'll talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Bye!