#9: Stutz, Jonah, and the pursuit of intimacy
I watched the Jonah Hill therapy movie so you don't have to.
Well, I watched Stutz, the documentary Jonah Hill made about his therapist, Phil Stutz, and — to no one’s surprise — had a lot of thoughts about it. Let’s jump right in, shall we?
Okay.
First things first: what is the point of a movie like this? Certainly not entertainment. The movie was slow and colorless with a soporific score and little to no movement. Like watching a podcast recording on YouTube. The target audience is unclear at best. Of course, the content holds some appeal for therapists, but if a very famous and established filmmaker such as Jonah Hill weren’t behind this project, no Netflix exec in their right mind would greenlight a documentary with “therapists” as a target audience. Yes, I know therapy is having a real cultural *moment.* Yes, I watched Michael B. Jordan be very hot and tell us all he was in therapy during his SNL monologue this weekend. Even so: the movie is boring. Without Jonah Hill, it doesn’t get made. Which begs the question: should it have been made?
But it did get made. And it was made with two intentions: to tell the story of Phil Stutz’s life and relationship with Jonah Hill (not so successful) and to share “the tools” that Phil Stutz has developed over the course of his career with a wider audience because he probably costs about $500 per session to see for therapy (more successful). Stutz names that one of his great concerns in life is that his work won’t “penetrate deeply enough into the culture,” and the film, for better or worse, helps accomplish said… penetration. (It is also worth naming, because I don’t know where else to name it, that Phil Stutz has Parkinson’s Disease, and that his age, illness, and death sort of loom over the movie throughout.)
I found myself watching this movie through two separate eyes: that of a therapist, and that of a regular person watching a pretty boring documentary. So I’ve split this essay into two parts: the criticism part and the tools summary. For the therapists and mental health nerds who read this newsletter and just want the learnings, you can scroll down to part 2 for the tools.
For the rest of you: spoilers ahead.
Throughout the film, there is a palpable tension as Stutz makes bid after bid for intimacy and connection, and Jonah adamantly resists his efforts.
“What if I told you that the more you opened up, the easier it would be for me to take some chances?” Stutz says about five minutes in. His first invitation.
Jonah demurs with a joke, “I’d say you should make a movie about me then.”
This dance continues: bid for intimacy from Stutz, deflection from Jonah, rinse, repeat. At one point, Jonah shifts the chairs from across from one another to next to each other (a real Ruella Frank moment) and confesses something: this movie is bad. “I’ve been lying to you in our private therapy sessions about how the movie’s going,” Jonah explains. “I’m trying to land these massive ideas and also tell the story of your life, but I just feel stuck.”
They’ve been shooting for two years. They are wearing the same clothes to pretend it’s all happening in a single day. Jonah has been wearing a wig. Then, the black and white cuts to color, revealing a green screen, and an office that’s actually a set. Jonah takes the wig off, revealing a buzz cut underneath. He’s been pretending to have the same haircut this whole time. Stutz agrees: Something has to change.
“It has to eventually get intimate - and once things gets intimate you don’t know what the fuck is going to happen. But if I’ve trained you properly, you see it’s not something to avoid. That the failure would be not rolling with it, and not using it to go deeper. The driving force in this whole thing to me is your vulnerability, no question about it.”
Then…
Then!!!!
Jonah PUTS THE WIG BACK ON. We return to the black and white. Because sure, we had an honest conversation, but we also have two years of footage with this wig on, and we might need to cut some of it into the documentary later! Authenticity can only take us so far; we are making a movie here, people.
I’ll be honest, I couldn’t un-see the editing after the wig went back on Jonah Hill’s head. Every time he said anything remotely real or confessinoal and the camera remained steadfastly on a nodding, silent Phil Stutz, I wondered: “Is this ADR? Am I watching and listening to two different conversations?”
“Anything that’s real and that’s profound has to have two not one, because it’s a vibratory thing. Two people can create a field and a field is invisible but that’s the force in the universe that makes things happen,” Stutz explains. Then, for 70% of the shots in the rest of the movie, he is alone on camera, nodding along to noise that — for all we know — could have been recorded off screen, after the fact. (I cannot confirm or deny the ADR suspicion; I can only say it is a strong one.)
Then he does all the emotional labor of creating the field, making it welcoming, inviting Jonah in, over and over.
The real kicker for me is when Jonah brings his mother in for a family session. She listens patiently as he gives a very rehearsed, perfectly crafted speech. It’s exactly the kind of speech an enlightened, been-to-lots-of-therapy 30-something would give his mom on TV. The gist of it is: “I have lots of empathy and understanding because I’m a mature guy. But you fucked me up in childhood, and I want to tell you how you fucked me up. On TV.” Mom takes it well, but Stutz interrupts with a curveball: forget that. “What’s going on between the two of you right now?” He asks, making it relational, making it present (this is the work!!!!). Mom is game; she goes there. Meanwhile, Jonah’s voice goes up a full octave and his posture shifts. He has stopped controlling the narrative — even for a moment — and his discomfort is palpable. This was supposed to be his moment of reckoning with mom, and it was taken out of his control, made intimate and real. “I mean, I guess it’s good for me to get feedback on how you see it,” he squeaks out.
I would be lying if I said this push-pull between therapist and client wasn’t a deeply familiar dynamic, something I sit with all the time. There is a defaulting to content over process that Jonah engages in that felt almost intolerable to watch. The real work of therapy happens in the present — what’s going on between the two of you right now? — but Jonah spent the majority of the movie defaulting to the content of the past, then wondering why his movie about therapy wasn’t turning out better. Because, as cathartic as it can feel to talk about the traumas you experienced in childhood or retell stories of harm from past relationships, the change happens when you show up differently now. This is the actual work of therapy (imo): to integrate the past and, consequently, be able to tolerate and sit with yourself in the present, in relationships, in conversations. The content of therapy (talking about your life/past) serves a purpose, but it is not the goal. The goal is increased capacity now.
And Stutz offers opportunities for Jonah to show up differently so, SO many times: “this is such a nice moment right now,” he says. “What’s going on between the two of you right now?" he asks Jonah and Mom. “What we’re doing right now is giving ourselves over to something we don’t fully understand,” he explains in the wig-on-wig-off conversation.
Ultimately, the structure and premise of the documentary itself detract from its own ability to really go to a relational place. Because the movie is set up to discuss content (“the tools”) the whole shape of the thing is unwieldy, a setup to fail. Whenever Stutz moves in, the film leans away. Wigs and green screens aside, the process happening on screen undermines the messaging about the tools, because every time we think we are about to get intimate, we cut to a little notecard with Stutz’s handwriting, and move into how-to mode.
And how-to mode is actually quite valuable. Even though Stutz’s tools are all amalgamations of things I’ve heard and read before, and they seem to be based zero on the scientific method and 100% on anecdotal success stories, I believe they have value.
I might have felt better about the whole movie if it was packaged more like a home improvement or cooking show: here’s what you need to make change in your life! Do it yourself! And even if they fumbled their attempt to weave personal story and technique together throughout the movie a bit, the ability to access “something that can change your inner state, immediately, in real time” (Stutz’s definition of “a tool”) is pretty valuable in a society that’s constantly hammering our nervous systems with access, information, and overstimulation.
So, as a concession, or maybe just because I took so many notes about the tools and don’t want all that labor to live only in the privacy of my notes, I’ve selected some of my favorite tools from the film and discussed them below.
1. LIFE FORCE
Stutz believes that when you are directionless or mission-less, you can always work on your life force. Working on life force consists of three things: first, improving your relationship with your body through proper exercise, sleep, and nutrition. Second, connecting with people in your life. Third, developing a relationship with your subconscious through journaling or writing. Working on one’s life force helps the other questions of life become more clear, and also allows one to take steps towards feeling better immediately. Life force is quite similar to the behavioral activation interventions recommended by behavioral therapists, but I enjoyed Stutz’s framing of it, because it felt a bit more purposeful than “this will help you feel better!” Framing the work of sleeping well, exercising, eating healthy, and journaling/developing a relationship with your subconscious as mission based, as “these are the things that will help you figure out the other things,” felt more supportive to me than, say, listing activities to complete on a worksheet the way a behavioral therapist might recommend.
PART X
Part X is “the voice of impossibility. It fucks up your shit,” Stutz explains. Part X is a part of one’s self that serves as the judgmental inner critic, the anti-social part of you that wants to make you believe you will fail. We “face” Part X when adversity comes, an idea that Jonah immediately puts into storytelling terms: “we need part X because without it, there’s no story.”
Stutz believes that “there are three aspects of reality that nobody gets to avoid: Pain, Uncertainty, and Constant Work.”
While the only word I take issue with in that sentence is “constant,” I do bump up against the implied battle metaphors, the orientation to one’s problems or insecure parts as villains or foes to be defeated by muscling through. Stutz frames this as the growth work of life. He says: “The highest creative expression for a human being is to be able to create something new in the face of adversity, and the higher the adversity, the greater the opportunity.”
The greater the adversity, the greater the opportunity feels very superhero movie to me. In my own experience, the only “facing” of my shaming, judgmental parts that has brought me any results leans more toward compassionate exploration than hard-won battle, but perhaps this is just me.
What I do like about Part X (more of a concept than a “tool” per se) is its overlap with Internal Family Systems, or “Parts Work,” an intriguing (also: research backed, clinically sound) model of therapy that I’ve written about before (HERE and HERE). When we turn inward and develop the ability to see ourselves as full of complexity, as lots of little parts, we also develop the ability to separate from those parts. The result is that feelings of shame or anger or depression become less powerful, because we don’t see them as *all of us.* They are just parts. We contain multitudes.
ACTIVE LOVE
Active Love is the first of three guided meditations that Stutz uses with Jonah in the film. All three remind me of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) meditations, designed to help us be present with pain and difficult feelings (an inevitability in life) in order to increase psychological flexibility (control what we can control, act in line with our values, let the rest go). Again, Stutz’s tools strike me as not particularly original or empirically based, but overlap closely with concepts I know to be effective and useful. So, I typed up all three guided meditations, should you be interested in experimenting with them yourself or trying them with clients.
“Close your eyes and Imagine you’re surrounded by a universe completely made out of love. I know it sounds nuts but just shut the fuck up, you will do what I tell you. Don’t pre-judge it and see what happens. It’s a world that’s almost dense with loving energy. Feel the love - gently but firmly place it firmly in your heart. And what you do is you see the person you’re angry at, that you despise, and you send this concentrated love towards the other person, you hold nothing back, you give everything. You feel your love enter the other person’s body. It’s very important.
“For a minute you become one. At that minute you feel like: if I can become one with this bastard, I can become one with anybody. And that’s a sense of prowess, of mastery.”
THE GRATEFUL FLOW
The grateful flow is a short but powerful meditation for creating gratitude.
“To start: name four things you’re grateful for, the smaller the better. Do it nice and slowly so you can really feel the gratefulness.
Now, keep naming things you’re grateful for but don’t say them out loud. Just create a stream of gratefulness.
Now, feel that you’re going to create another grateful thought but don’t. Block it, so all you feel is the force that would create another grateful thought. And as it gets stronger, you feel taken over by it.”
Stutz believes that when our thoughts are out of control, the worst thing we can do is argue with them. Not only does arguing with our own thoughts cause distress in the body and nervous system, it does nothing beneficial. But getting to a state of gratefulness can help “break through the cloud,” and “connect to what’s up there.”
LOSS PROCESSING
Loss processing is the final guided meditation, and perhaps my favorite of all of Stutz’s tools. I’ve experimented with this myself and with clients, and received significant positive feedback about its efficacy. Am I falling into the exact trap I’m criticizing by claiming success based on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical research? Sure I am. But I already typed it up, sooo…
“Pick out something you’ve become too attached to. Something you’re loathe to let go of, if you let go something terrible will happen. Now imagine you’re grasping this thing if it’s not a material thing it doesn’t matter just imagine you’re grasping it like you’re grasping onto a branch of a tree. It’s scary, you’re afraid to let go, but you let go anyway. And when you let go you start to fall. It’s not a bad sensation, the falling is slow and gentle to your surprise. But you’re dropping down and you say “I’m willing to lose everything.”
Say it silently, but you really want to feel the intent behind it, and the moment you say it you hit the surface of the sun that was down below you and your body burns up. Now, at this point you have lost everything because the instrument of possession is your physical body, so if your physical body is burnt up, you’re just one sunbeam amongst all these other sunbmeans, radiating out in all directions. And what you’re radiating is a very loving, giving, outflowing sensation. And then you look around and you see all around you an infinite number of other suns just like the one you’re inside of, all of which are radiating outwards. And then you hear the suns all saying in unison “we are everywhere.” And this is called the sun world. All you can do is give, you can’t take, you can’t grasp, you can’t hold onto anything. It’s just impossible.”
In recapping some of these tools, I am reminded that in therapy, as in life, nothing is really new. All of the tools have significant overlap with existing concepts I studied in school, where Phil Stutz’s book was notably not assigned reading. What we need to be well and live fully can be packaged and resold a million ways, but ultimately it involves a combination of forward movement (behavioral theories) + deep inner work (Internal Family Systems, facing Part X) + acceptance of what we can’t control (Acceptance and Commitment Threapy, active love, the grateful flow, loss processing) + brave, authentic, intimate relationships that make up one’s community. the authenticity/intimacy/community piece is where Stutz missed the mark. Perhaps this was inevitable; perhaps the structure of the thing was never built to hold everything I hoped it could. Or perhaps it was possible, in a documentary about a movie star and his therapist, to really mine the depths of their relationship and show us what authentic relational work can look like. And perhaps instead, Jonah Hill chose to put his wig back on.
Thanks for reading! Back in your inbox in two weeks. - Grace