The New Celebrity

No, no, no, no, no, no.

But, fine. Because I am also a student of therapy, and because I have recently adopted the contract of “yes, and…”…fine. 

It’s fine that valuable resources went into the production of Jonah Hill’s recent film, Stutz. It’s fine that, in addition to all the things that exist in this physical realm already, Hill has created the addition of this thing. This predominantly black and white, meta/post-ironic/post-modern, patriarchal, capitalist, cleverly-edited and produced thing that presents the illusion of altruism. Is it annoying? Yes. Yes, and it’s fine.

I will not knock someone else’s personal growth and celebration of self. I will not knock him nor his shadow. 

In fact, let us celebrate what Stutz has done for the benefit of our society. The most striking development is how the documentary/biopic creates a feature length film about self improvement that is fun-spiring to watch while also catering to the needs of a breadth of divergent learning viewers. The film uses animated drawings to emphasize one of Stutz’s most notable therapeutic “tools”, called “the cards”. Not only that, but it makes the idea of therapy and self improvement approachable for America’s shadow-self: the “rich, white, straight, cis man.” That list of identifiers is like pulling the trigger on a cultural magazine. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Good thing they’re only words. Thanks to this film, those words can be processed in therapy now that everyone can feel worthy of needed change. Hill shows us this by letting the audience know pretty quickly that he is eliciting a generous amount of transparency. He steps into the role of the vulnerable guy, broken down in pursuit of saving us. 

So why is that annoying?

Well, who do you think he is saving us from?

Ourselves. He’s saving us from ourselves, and I can recognize this display of patronizing but wanted information, because I have been doing the work on my own also. I have been in therapy since 2011. I’ve had different therapists, most of different credentials, and sometimes I’ve had multiple therapists at once. One time I had four therapists at once. They all did different things, and I did feel they all were necessary. I still feel that way. I’ve got a lot going on, and I’m trying to make it feel okay. Right now I have two therapists. I’m taking a two week break from both. 

That’s it for the string of “I” statements. The purpose of talking about my history in therapy is to let you know that my statements come from a knowledgeable place. A place of first hand experiences and outside research from a variety of sources presenting a range of perspectives.

A cognitive therapist, generally, works to act as your mirror. They help you reflect, observe, and process the everything you take in everyday, so the way you proceed with your life feels in your control. A therapist is you, and without you. A reflection with help. A guided mirror.

Hill is demonstrating how to save us from ourselves. The mimic is performing our fantasy: What if we actually got help, and started doing the work, and letting ourselves be vulnerable and at fault? What if it’s okay that we have faults? What if I work on those faults? What if they’re really big faults? Can I handle really big faults? Will I be successful if I welcome all of that in? Jonah Hill says yes, you will be. He says you’ll be fine.

Throughout the film, Hill comes up against challenges and overcomes them, effectively showing us how to confront our sore spots. That’s great! The saying “we are our own worst enemy” doesn’t persist through oral tradition without reason. It’s because we are our own worst enemy, or at least we have the capability to be. Self-critique is a consuming emotional process that only we can control for ourselves. We are likely our own worst critic because we are also our biggest fan. No one else’s praise and admiration is ever going to be more significant to my sense of self worth than my own. 

Stutz doesn’t celebrate us though. It celebrates Hill’s cognitive therapist, Phil Stutz. Rightly so; if you don’t instantly fall in love with Stutz then you need to go to therapy. He’s a critic in pursuit of love and light. He’s a therapist who breaks the fourth wall and becomes our mirror and says “I love you”. 

But then, so does Jonah Hill, after Phil Stutz does. Instead of the celebrated, central figure of the film being our lasting note, Hill jumps in, also breaks the fourth wall and spikes the camera, and reminds us with his final proclamation of love that we need to save ourselves from ourselves. 

We are the original critics, and unlike Stutz, Hill implies that the collective, societal “we” are not in pursuit of love and light. 

It feels like he might be right about that. A critic’s objective becomes incredibly important when they start presenting judgment instead of possibilities. Hill leaves the viewer to infer that we must be in need of help. Otherwise, why would a famous actor want to make a film that presents successful tools for mental and emotional health?

This question is actually more crucial than it appears. 

Up until, what feels like, very recently, western society has celebrated the public role of the actor. Consider the very essential role of the actor in our society. Their job is to portray real emotional narratives in fantastic worlds. Yes, everything on the screen is fantasy, and it is structured with our real experiences. Historical, realistic, biography— as long as it is portrayed by an actor, it is a fantasy. It is an imagined mimicry of something real. Look at what Nathan Fielder is doing with The Rehearsal. Everything performed by an actor is only ever based on something real, and that real thing— an important life event, a significant emotion, the story of a relationship— is what I call reason and truth. Something that was felt by someone real, and offers relatable experiences and emotions. 

The mimic performs empathy. To learn to be an actor is to hone the skill of empathizing with a universe of personal and imagined experiences. If we’re going to relate to something, though, and practice empathy, then that something needs to be beautiful. 

Aye, there’s the rub. 

The mimic started mimicking only one kind of beauty, only one kind of experience, only one kind of voice and meaning. Why? Money, sex, and power. And rich, white, straight, cis men.

The mimic was controlled to stop giving us all of the reason and truth, and we became aware of how our celebrities’ voices of reason and truth are actually curated with erasure and restriction. Especially since America’s 2016 election, it’s become clear western society does not like obscured and restricted truth— but we’re also very impatient, so we start making up the truth to pacify our demands for more “truth”, more “truth”, and even more “truth”. Read Paranoid and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. We are really testing the meniscus containing our collective state of paranoia as we constantly scroll for more and more information, only possibly getting closer to the real truth and disproving all the information we’ve taken in before. 

Instead of helping the once-celebrated mimic though, we abandoned them to Hollywood’s manipulation and turned to celebrate someone else. Someone who speaks with reason and truth about what society needs to get better. Someone who proses on what society needs in order to be more connected, at peace, and open to love.

The critic. 

Before watching Stutz, I listened to the sensational, new podcast Death of an Artist, hosted by curator and cultural critic, Helen Molesworth. Molesworth is one of my “many gendered mothers”, a phrase I love and borrow from Maggie Nelson, another of my many gendered mothers. It’s a moniker reserved for people I greatly respect, look to, believe in, and borrow smart and good-feeling ideas from. They are my intellectual lineage. I have listened to most interviews and projects that Molesworth has done, and Death of an Artist struck me as different. There was more gusto in her voice, more intrigue in the dialogue, and more stock vocabulary and power words in her script. 

A brief pause to say: this is not a critique or commentary on the content of the podcast. The truth of Ana Mendieta’s death has been smudged and erased by the controlling distortions of money, sex, and power at the hands of rich, white, straight, cis men. (This recurring point is not to reinforce a theme. It’s to continue pointing out that those words feel uncomfortable as long as they are being performed to be uncomfortable. To the people who feel they subscribe to any of those identifiers: start forgiving yourself, forgive the people who came before you, forgive the world around you, and start doing the work. Please. We need you.) 

Back to Death of an Artist. Molesworth brings up important cultural questions, interview’s significant Art professionals, and makes the true crime podcast as thrilling as the genre assumes. From the perspective of someone who has read and watched Molesworth’s career since her controversial firing from MOCA Los Angeles in 2018, I know that she’s always been a bit of a rockstar. She’s cool and uses slang, but in that way that feels a little funny, like when your mom uses hip jargon. She’s funny because she’s a little embarrassing but makes it cute and smart. She takes risks, makes messes, and has exquisite, punk taste. Helen Molesworth keeps it fresh. That’s why she is the perfect candidate for the first, real celebrity critic. Based on her seemingly reinvented tone for her recent podcast, it seems like Molesworth knows it too.

I know there have been famed critics before, but celebrity critics were only really considered celebrities by the audiences who cared about critics’ opinions for anything beyond the new blockbuster season. A critic was someone who learned, and read, and wrote, and had lots of money because other people with lots of money loved to support exclusive taste and value. Now, most people learn, and read, and write, and money has way less to do with education today than it used to. Significant cultural information is available to the average anyone via their personal screens, and criticism is not a practice that can qualify as exclusive anymore. Anyone can have an opinion and tell the world today! This is further reinforced by the aforementioned impatience for more information, regardless of its quality of truth. All a part of the process of pop culture.

Keeping this context in mind, I’m really concerned about whether critics know how much more responsibility they are gaining as information becomes more and more globally available and “transparent”. Do critics know they are the new celebrity? Does Jonah Hill know this? Does he want to be a critic? If we briefly scan the progression of stand up comedy from George Carlin’s infamous monologues to the heart wrenching story telling of Hannah Gadsby in Nanette and every Netflix special of Dave Chapelle, actors of that genre seem to see the shift. 

I don’t think Jonah Hill is a critic. I think Hill wants us to save ourselves from ourselves because he is an empathic individual who knows first hand how we are our own worst critic, and he’s saying this at a time when we, in western society, have shifted to celebrating the pop cultural critic. 

As we move into this new era, mimic to critic, I remind you to be wary of one of Stutz’s most important lessons, which is identified as “the shadow”, or if you’re a witch you already know about this concept and refer to it as “the shadow-self”. Our shadow is the part of our soul, spirit, identity, what have you that we try to obscure— it is our personal reason and truth that we keep out of sight because of shame, guilt, or rage. There are so many reasons to manifest our shadow-self. Our shadow is uncomfortable, and needs radical acceptance as much as any other part of ourselves. 

I suppose this is all to say, I’m worried. 

I’m worried we will become intoxicated with the power of criticism and the high that comes from teasing things apart, in hopes of fully understanding, and disregarding the disfigured carcasses left behind. I'm worried it still takes a rich, white, straight, cis man to finally get the world interested in vulnerability and empathy. I’m worried Jonah Hill is going to make therapy cool and western society will become even more isolated as we get lost in the black holes of our psyches. I’m worried the general viewer is going to watch Stutz and think Jonah Hill is celebrating the practice of therapy instead of celebrating what therapy does— help us feel better, and in control. I’m worried we will all start getting too excited by the possibilities of finding out how we’re wrong and not how we can be helped. If you go looking for anxiety, you will find anxiety. I said I was taking a two week break from my therapists— this is why. 

Maybe, since we’re here, sort of before the mimic gets put to bed and the celebrity critic takes off, and before Helen Molesworth is sporting Balenciaga on the cover of Vogue; maybe, we can pause, reflect, and make some changes. Maybe we can remember that the critic is only one part of us. There is also the shadow-self. The part of us that mimics what we need but are too ashamed to ask. The part of us that deserves as much love and light as the parts of us for which we are excited. We don’t need to swing so drastically in the other direction, from celebrating the mimic to celebrating the critic. There is a place in the middle, and it’s fine.