Therapists Review Movie Couples, from 'Twilight' to 'La La Land' | Vanity Fair

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- I'm not gonna tell you to get a divorce,
but I'm sure as hell might be thinking it.
I'm Laura, I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
I'm also a certified Gottman therapist and cohost
of Marriage Therapy Radio.
- Yeah I'm Zach, I'm also the cohost of
Marriage Therapy Radio with Laura.
I have a couple's therapist and private practice in Seattle,
I'm also a certified Gottman therapist.
- Today we're gonna be analyzing romantic relationships
in some popular films.
[music]
[Laura] All right, so this is La La Land.
Mia is an aspiring actress and Sebastian
is an aspiring jazz musician.
Sebastian has gained a steady job by joining a touring band.
Mia turns down his offer to come on the road with him
because she needs to rehearse her upcoming one-woman play.
- Yeah, but can't you rehearse anywhere?
- Anywhere you are?
- I mean, I guess.
- Um, well all my stuff is here and it's in two weeks
so I don't really think that would be...
- Okay.
- The best idea, right now.
But, I wish I could.
- Okay, that's crap.
Whenever people say, you know, I just wish I could.
Make it happen!
Don't say I wish I could if it's an empty wish.
- Do you like the music you're playing?
- I don't...
I don't know,
what it matters.
- Well, it matters because you're gonna give up your dream.
I think it matters that you like what you're playing
on the road for years.
- Laura how many times have you heard couples come in
and say, we don't even know what we were arguing about?
- I have no idea, yeah, every couple.
Every couple.
- I think that's what's gonna happen here.
- And now you're gonna be on tour with him for years,
so I just didn't...
- I don't know, what are you doing right now?
Why are you doing this?
- What are you doing right now?
Yep.
- I thought you wanted me to do this, it just sounds like
now you don't want me to do it.
- As a therapist, when you're watching couples
do exactly what this couple's doing, do you ever feel like
you're kinda getting swept up in a tornado
and you really can't track, and you're just like
wait, what's going on here? [laughs]
- If this was happening right in front of me,
I would let it play, and eventually I would say,
do you guys have any idea
what you're talking about right now?
And they would stop and it would jar them.
The other one that I would say is,
do you have any idea what the purpose
of this conversation is?
Like, they never know why, because I don't even know
what the end of this conversation is gonna be,
apart from disaster, because they don't have
a shared goal, they don't have a shared understanding
of what they're trying to accomplish together.
And that becomes apparent because he plays this card
which is, well I did what you wanted, so why aren't you
going to do what I wanted?
They're no longer talking with each other,
they're only talking at each other.
- Take what you've made and start the club!
People will wanna go to it.
- Where should they have stopped?
Because there in an important stopping point
that couples need to recognize
where they're no longer having an intelligible conversation
- Well, your question about when should they have stopped,
it's kind of like asking;
when should we parachute out of this plane
that's about to crash?
- [laughs] Yeah, yes.
- Anytime before it hits the ground.
- I'm gonna finally have something that people enjoy.
- Since when do you care about being liked?
Why do you care so much about being liked?
- You're an actress!
What are you talking about?
[scoffs]
- Yep, shots fired.
- Yeah, if he says,
"I'm sorry, hold on, let me go compose myself real quick,
I shouldn't have said that."
- What you're saying is this would be
the opportunity for repair.
- Yeah.
- Instead he's...
- Maybe you just liked me when I was on my ass
'cause it made you feel better about yourself.
- Are you kidding?
- No.
- I know that guy very well.
- Yeah? [laughs]
You do.
- I think it's interesting and actually quite brilliant
that they wrote in this fire alarm,
because I think we need this idea of this fire alarm
or this like, third thing to pull us out
of whatever's going on,
and I just think that if you think
of a fire alarm its like there's this...
- Where's she going?
What is she doing?
Wait, no!
- What?
Don't.
Stop!
Come, [sighs]
- So she leaves.
You wanted her to stick with it.
You wanted her to help him.
- I, like I said, this literally ends in a disaster
but no that fire alarm was brilliant.
- After the moment that they've already hurt one another,
then you get this fire alarm
and I just wish that the fire alarm
had gone off like, two minutes earlier.
- The methodology that we come out of
which is the Gottman Method,
has this idea that there are four
sort of relationship destroying behaviors,
and they were all over that conversation.
His defensiveness, her criticism,
when he goes, "You're just an actress,"
there's contempt, right?
Which is problematic.
Some of us have to choose what's called stonewalling.
Which is what she did, right?
She just went totally inside and then left the room,
and none of that makes room for a relationship.
- If you recognize that these four things
are part of the relationship,
then it's probably in your best interest
to rain them in and figure out
how you can do something different
other than what's going on.
- You know the first time we met,
I really didn't like you that much.
- I didn't like you.
- Yeah you did.
- So this movie is, "When Harry Met Sally".
Harry and Sally, you know,
they have different ideas about relationships.
Harry thinks that men and women can't be friends
because the sex part gets in the way, but sally disagrees
and they enjoy a friendship for a while
and then they become really close,
and then they sleep together,
and this clip in particular
is one of my favorite clips of all time,
so here we go.
- Put your names in you books right now,
before they get mixed up and you don't know whose is whose.
Because someday believe it or not,
you'll go 15 rounds of a, whose gonna get this coffee table?
This stupid, wagon wheel, Roy Rogers,
garage sale, coffee table!
- I thought you liked it.
- I was being nice!
- Okay, and this is one of
the greatest lines in all of cinema.
- I want you to know, that I will never
want that wagon wheel coffee table.
- Look at them.
She's looking up at him, she looks at him lovingly,
she has this one liner,
and oftentimes just those one liners of humor
is enough to diffuse a lot of tension in the room.
So I love that moment.
- You never get upset about anything!
- Don't be ridiculous.
- What?
You never get upset about Joe,
I never see that back up on you,
how is that possible?
Don't you experience any feelings of loss?
- Isn't it true that when one person in the relationship
is internally just having a meltdown;
don't you love company in your meltdown?
He like draws her in,
and now all the sudden they're in a conflict.
Like, first he starts off
by exploding on his friends, she doesn't budge.
She stays cool, calm, and collected
and she extends the grace.
- He just bumped into Hellen.
- [Laura] Then, he sucks her in and is like,
"No, I mean I'm in this place and I want you to join me."
It's hard.
It's hard to stay away from someone
when they want to bring you into that tornado
of frustration and anger.
- It is, and what's really cool about this scene
is what happens next because
I think this is the heart of what we're trying to
invite couples to think through.
- Are you finished now?
- Yes.
- Can I say something?
- Yes.
- I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
- That's the parachute right?
Like that's the ability to say
all right, this is the fire alarm.
This movie is about their friendship
and its actually what brings them at the end
to a successful relationship.
They weathered through lots of relationship
bumps and curves and turns
and were able to repair with some consistency,
and she lets him.
Which I think is really great.
It's the friendship that pulls them out of the conflict,
and allows them to repair quickly
before doing damage,
before getting to that place where they end up
stonewalling and creating this chasm between them.
Some of the best advice I ever got
was marry your best friend,
and so when I was in the single world
I just kept thinking,
I might not feel the fireworks
but I love this person for who they are
'cause they're my best friend
and I think that's a really great place to start.
- Just want you to know,
I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table. [laughs]
- Double or nothing.
- [Laura] Okay so this is Love & Basketball.
Monica and Quincy were childhood sweethearts,
both set on becoming pro basketball players
and they both go off to USC where Quincy finds success,
while Monica struggles for play time.
Quincy struggles to deal with the media attention
and butts heads with his dad
about finishing school before going pro.
Quincy feels Monica was not there for him through this,
and the couple splits up.
- Can we talk?
- Talk to your new girlfriend.
- Look, I took the hoe to Burger King.
- [scoffs] Cheap date.
- Well at least she had time for me.
- So you messed around to prove a point?
- Man, what I just say?
Man you got your head so far up your ass
it took a cheap date for you to notice me.
- What Q man,
did I forget to kiss your ass like everybody else?
- You forgot to be there!
- All I think we all want is love and attention
and we want our partner to see us
and what I get from that one line is
that he feels that he's been neglected or unseen.
- If we're gonna be together I have to be able to trust you.
- He's backing up to drop this bomb
and I get the sense he doesn't feel
that sense of security and safety.
He's literally giving space
because he's about to drop the bomb
that we're breaking up.
- I'm not asking for us to be together.
- What?
I mean, whatever I did we can fix this.
- I don't think so.
- You don't think so?
- This idea that if this couple
showed up in my office to have this conversation,
again, I would let it play
and at the end I would probably say,
you know what guys?
You're probably right.
It sounds like you don't have
the total trust and commitment
that would be required for you to really make a run
at a successful long term relationship.
This is similar to the La La clip in this way.
They are both more committed to their own dream
than their mutual dream.
I think where it differs is that,
in the La La Land clip,
they are going at each other.
In this way, there's also like,
actual listening to one another
and responding to what the other was saying.
She says, "We can fix this,"
and he actually has a thoughtful response
which is, "I don't think so."
It's not a fluttered or escalated response
and that's where I think the two clips are really different.
- I agree.
You know, the La La Land is just two people in a monologue,
they're talking for the sake of talking,
there's nothing, they're not responding to one another.
It's not a dialogue.
This one's definitely a dialogue.
- I'd still like us to be friends.
- Friends?
- Look, I'll see you around.
- [Zach] In both cases,
the scene ends with somebody walking away.
I would say, sometimes you do need a break.
Sometimes you need a break from the moment,
or even from the relationship
but there's no reason to be impolite about it.
I mean, if Laura and I were just having dinner
at my house and she decided that she was done with dinner,
it would be very impolite for her
to just grab her purse and leave
and not say goodbye or thank you or whatever
and that's what happens in the La La Land clip,
but in this case, at least he's polite about it.
Starting from as Laura acknowledged like when he backs up.
- They both know what it took to get to where they're at
and what each other's dreams are.
Like he's aware that she's fighting for a dream
and he can probably understand
to some degree why she can't be there for him,
and at the same time it doesn't make it any easier.
- It might be too late for my soul but I will protect yours.
- [Laura] Okay so this The Twilight Saga,
it's the Eclipse version.
This is a classic love triangle between Bella,
she's a teenage human,
and Edward a vampire,
and then there is Jacob a werewolf
and Jacob confesses that he's in love with Bella
and forcefully kisses her.
Edward later threatens Jacob
and tells him to only kiss her if she asks for it.
- And you need to know,
- Oh man.
- that I'm in love with you.
- I really believe him too.
- And I want you to choose me.
- They both look like they're in so much pain
to be talking about love right now
but okay go for it guys.
- Flesh and blood and warmth.
- And assault.
[laughs]
- I think he's been watching too many Disney movies.
He's like, "If I just kiss her,"
and I think that's what he's going for, right?
Like he's ultimately trying to convince her
that if I just kiss you,
he's been watching 1938 Cinderella.
That's what he's been watching.
FYI it's not okay to put hands on your partner,
male or female.
I just think that's it's important for us to mention that,
that these young girls that are watching this,
and young males,
they might think it's okay to just punch someone.
- To me this entire clip and this entire series
is about boundaries.
Where they are and where they should be
and she's trying as best she can
to establish a boundary for him
and he just clearly oversteps.
- She's expressing, she says,
"I don't feel that way for you," and he argues.
He argues with her.
I don't believe you.
I don't believe that that's really how you're feeling.
You don't get to argue with somebody else's feelings.
Like, those are their feelings,
and I often find that's where couples get really stuck.
Is feeling like you have a place to argue your partner
out of their feelings, and you just don't.
That's how they feel.
- When that shows up in my office
people will say something, "I feel, blah, blah, blah,"
and somebody will say, "That's not true,"
and I'll often go, well it's true that they feel that.
People get into trouble though when they say,
"I feel like," or especially when they say,
"I feel like you,"
'cause that's generally is no longer a feeling.
It's more of a judgment.
Both parts of this clip are about boundaries
because if you can't honor your partner's boundaries,
you're not a very trustworthy partner,
and then I think by this point Edward and Bella
are sort of the chosen pair.
All Edward is doing is trying to establish
a very clear and appropriate boundary.
A boundary of consent,
which Bella was able to do for herself.
- Don't do this to him.
- She's not sure what she wants.
- Don't do this to him.
- Then let me give you a clue,
wait for her to say the words.
- Fine.
- Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world,
she walks into mine.
- Lets take a look at Casablanca.
Basically Rick is an American expat,
he's running a night club, gambling den
in Casablanca during World War 2.
He meets and falls in love with Ilsa
two years earlier in Paris
and she didn't tell Rick
that she was married to a Check Resistance Leader
who she believed was dead,
and when she learned that he was alive,
Ilsa left Rick with no explanation.
Then, Rick comes to possess letters that allowed
carriers to move freely around occupied Europe,
and Ilsa and her husband need these letters.
- I'm sorry but, you are our last hope.
If you don't help us Victor Laszlo will die in Casablanca.
- What of it?
Now if you...
- Is that a gun in her hand?
That ought to motivate him.
- She needs the letters.
- I tried everything, now I want those letters.
Get them for me.
- I don't have to, I got them right here.
- She's making what's called a bid.
She's saying, "Hey I need something from you."
When somebody makes a bid in your relationship,
you have options.
You can turn toward them or you can turn away from them.
Incidentally you can also turn against them,
but in this case she says, "I need something,"
and he literally turns his body.
Boom, turn away.
So, the premise in couples therapy anyway
is that if you're gonna have a healthy relationship,
you need to learn how to turn towards one another.
Because turning toward, creates more turning toward.
Turning away, creates more turning away.
Watch this, go.
He turns away, she turns away.
Now we know that she's going to grab a gun
which is now the escalation.
Now she's turning against.
In the context of this clip, he turns toward right?
He actually moves toward her.
He diffuses the turning against
with some courage and some patience.
Which is what Ryan Gosling did not do in La La Land.
He puts the gun in his stomach
but what he's done is he turns toward
and regardless of whether she's married so somebody else,
she now also turns toward.
- Yeah I mean, watch how quickly it deescalates.
The moment he turns toward her, her gun goes down.
It's literally just deescalates the whole situation.
That's the mechanics of this scene
that I think is really clever
and pretty consistent with the way we
try to get couples to treat one another.
- Do we ever really pull guns out like that in conflict?
No, but we absolutely have weapons that we pull out.
- Well, Ryan Gosling did right?
He said, "You're the actress!"
That might as well have been...
- That's a weapon, right?
We use our words as weapons toward our partner.
We escalate things, we basically say,
"Hey, you're not listening to me, this is really important,
and maybe that will wake you up.
Maybe you'll recognize how important
this situation is to me."
but physical violence, verbal weapons,
they're all the same.
She's a hussy.
Balancing two men at the same time.
- [screams] Oh my God!
- This is bad moms.
Amy is married with two kids
and she's feeling overworked and unvalued.
Hello!
Her husband Mike is ungrateful and resentful of her
and they decide to attend family counseling.
- With Wanda Sykes, who is amazing.
- [laughs] With Wanda Sykes as a therapist.
- Mike, Amy, I want you to look at each other
and say three things that you like about each other.
- I like your spaghetti, and you make pretty good calzone;
was that three?
- That was like one, and then one-A.
- [laughing] I love that.
I love that she says, "One and one-A,"
'cause I do not let people off the hook in my sessions
and I would have been like okay, so where is like,
two and three.
- Part of what's challenging about being a therapist,
watching therapists on television,
is that they're not designed
to actually be of help to the couple,
they are designed to create comic relief.
You're exactly right.
She moves on way too quickly
if she's going to be of help to this couple,
and I think what she does next
kinda makes me groan because
this I don't think works at all.
- Lets try some roll playing, all right?
Amy, I want you to pretend to be Mike,
and Mike, I want you to pretend to be Amy, okay?
- [imitating] Hi, I'm Amy.
All I did today was, I rubbed lotion on my face
and talked and talked and talked and talked.
- Okay.
- In theory, she's chasing empathy right?
In theory she's trying to get them
to have some empathy for the other.
You have to get by in that
these guys are actually interested in empathy.
- This is the problem.
Here's the bottom line.
She's a perfectionist.
So what's the point of even trying.
- How is that a problem?
- And she hasn't given me a blowy
since my birthday five years ago!
Which is so not cool!
- Hold on, one second.
- [laughs] This cracks me up because inevitably
you have clients that are going to turn,
like they are done talking to each other
and then they turn to you like the ref.
Like, okay what are you gonna do about this?
Or like, now that I've got your ear,
let me tell you about all the ways my partner is failing.
- Remember when I said that all marriages are saveable?
Well it ain't gonna happen for you guys.
- So what do you think we should do?
- Well as a therapist,
I'm not allowed to tell you what to do,
but as a human being with two fuckin' eyes in my head,
yeah, I think you should get divorced.
As soon as possible.
This is catastrophic shit.
- I'm not gonna tell you to get a divorce,
but I sure as hell might be thinking it.
We're absolutely thinking sometimes like,
this is a shipwreck.
This is going down, down, down, down, down, down
and I want to tell them so bad so abandon ship
but you just don't.
- [Zach] I think she really does let this couple down
because she gives up on them before she should.
- So do you think that Wanda Sykes is a good therapist?
- No.
I think she's a great comedian.
- I think she'd be a good individual life coach
'cause that's where I think you can speak
a little more fluidly and openly like she says,
but in couples therapy, that was not good.
The couples therapy at all.
- I hope you're happy.
- So this movie is Hope Springs.
The couple is Kay and Arnold
and they are both devoted to their marriage
but they're in need of some help to reignite the spark.
Kay tells Arnold she wants him to undergo
a week of intense marriage counseling
in a Maine coastal resort town.
Arnold however, denies that their marriage
is in need of help
and here they are in the therapist's office regardless.
- Arnold, lets talk about you.
What do you enjoy sexually?
- Sex.
- I am going to ask you to get more specific.
- Okay fine.
- Was oral sex an option?
Is that something that you would do regularly?
- No, I don't, no.
- I was not very, [clears throat]
I was not comfortable with that.
- Giving or receiving?
- Huh?
- [Laura] [laughs] I love that he specifies.
- The other thing that I would note about Steve Carell
who, in talking about sex, he's not sensationalizing it.
He's just saying, "Hey, what's the deal? What do you like?"
and Arnold's trying to rile him up, right?
He's like, "missionary position,"
and he's like, "oh what about this?"
- Use medications like Viagra?
- No.
- As we age, sometimes it becomes...
- It works.
- What would you say was working in your sex life?
When you were sexual together.
- Great question.
What was working.
So, so often couples come in and they
are so focused on what's not going well.
I instead like to flip it and say, "What was going well?
What did you enjoy?
What did you like?"
and it just kind of shifts the entire dynamics.
So far, Steve Carell is crushing it.
- Where there things that you wanted to do but didn't?
- I'm not really coming up with anything.
- There are no wrong answers here.
- Do you ever say that in your practice?
I've seen that several times in these clips
where therapists are saying there is no wrong answers.
Do you ever say that Zach?
- Not really.
- No, I haven't either.
- Not that there are wrong answers, it's just cliche.
I don't use it.
- Yeah.
- Do you have fantasy's
that you didn't feel comfortable telling her about?
- Of course.
Well, I guess I used to think about Kay giving me an oral
at work, under the desk, at tax time.
- Here's what I think is happening
and I do this quite a bit,
he's talking to Arnold,
but he's really talking to Meryl Streep
and if you watch her, she is aware
that she's getting information that she never had before,
in a way that she's never gotten it before.
- It's like you're modeling
and teaching the other person in the room, Meryl Streep,
how to get more information,
more access, and how to normalize that conversation
and how to make it comfortable for your partner.
- Steve Carell's bias toward curiosity is really helpful.
I think he plays kind of a columbo almost,
like he plays a detective.
Which is why I think there's gonna be some
'ah hah' moment that neither one of them see coming
but that he's probably had a beat on for a while,
and Wanda Sykes is more of like you said,
more like a life coach.
Who is trying to motivate
very specific change in a hurry.
Which is why there's exercises,
let's try this, let's try that.
The couple she's working with
just wasn't admittable to that.
In both cases, the couple used that room to have
conversations that they weren't having on their own.
So in that way, the movies got that right
and that's designed to drive plot forward.
The real question is
what does the therapist do to
facilitate health and healing,
or just to bring reality to bare.
- Don't say a word.
- That was fun.
Thanks Laura, thanks Vanity Fair,
thanks all of you out there in the intertubes
who are watching us talk about movies.
It's always fascinating to me to learn more
about relationships and therapy
and I'm glad to do it with all of you.
- Thanks Zach.
Thank you for all of our viewers,
and thank you to Vanity Fair
for having us on and being able to take a look at some
interesting representations of therapists in film.