Speaker 1: Welcome to Popcorn Psychology, the podcast where we watch blockbuster
movies and psychoanalyze them. My name is Brittany Brownfield and
I'm a child therapist and I'm joined by Ben Stover,
individual therapist, Hannah Espinoza, marriage and family therapists. We're all
licensed clinical professional counselors also known as therapists who practice
out of Chicago. Even though we are licensed mental health professionals,
this podcast is purely for entertainment purposes and to fulfill
our love of dissecting pop culture and all forms.
Speaker 2: Please remember that even though we are all licensed therapists,
we aren't your therapist.
Speaker 1: If you are struggling with mental health symptoms, please find
a local mental health provider. Spooky Season, Today we are
talking about Jordan Peele's Nope after random objects falling from
the sky result in the death of their father, ranch
owning siblings oj Emerald Heywood attempt to capture video evidence
of an unidentified flying object with the help of tech
salesman Angel Torres and documentarian Antler's host. Today, we will
be talking about Ojy and Emerald's relationship as well as
Jup's trauma. Then we will have treatment and final thoughts,
like always. One of the first things I wanted to
bring up to start the episode is that in the
opening scene of the film, we see Ojy and Emerald's
dad die. Yeah, freak accident of things falling from the
sky goes right through his eyeball coorder or nickel, and
that's it. That's all she wrote. And so part of
what we wanted to talk about and what we see
in the film is the family dynamics and how they
change after losing the head of the household. Yeah. So
the movie goes really quickly into six months after the
dad's death. The opening scene is the death, and then
we are right into six months later where we're introduced
to Old who has kind of has classic younger sibling
energy tendencies, and Og who is sort of like classic
older siblings tendencies.
Speaker 2: Yep on time serious, focused on getting the test done,
adherent to the family story, the family traditions, and the
younger sibling who is constantly late and disregards pretty much everything,
but also can turn it on and be the face
that the older brother cannot be in this family.
Speaker 1: And I think something we're also made to believe right
away is that the family business which is wrangling animals
for Hollywood productions, is struggling. It seems like they're not
booking as many gigs or they're just they don't have
like the reputation that they had, like when their dad
was around. Like their dad can kind of do everything
he could both think the wrangler and the showman. I
think the dad is the one who cultivated most of
their relationships. Yeah, most of the working relationships with Hollywood
and setting up gigs and setting up different things.
Speaker 2: Seems like the dad was really fully aware of that.
Show businesses of relationships and a results business. And it's
a ass kissing business. It is a respecting people's time
when they don't respect yours, respecting people's power when they
don't respect yours. Managing to say yes and keep everybody
safe and tell a story and make people feel good
about themselves when they do dumb shit. And we can
see very clearly Ojay is not good at half of that,
and his sister isn't good at the other half. Fortunately
they're both good at their own unique things. Oja is
great with the animals. Oj understands the safety pieces, but
he can't communicate with people. He is very reserved and
shut down, very introverted. He would prefer to be anywhere
else than on a stage with light shining on him
and people looking at him, where his sister yearns for
it lights up under it. But she can't be on time,
She can't respect people's space, people's business. The fact that
these studios cost money to be in, that stars cost
money to have around, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Oj couldn't be less interested in that shit. All he's
trying to be is, hey, we'll get you a shot
with the horse. Don't do dumb shit with the horse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is another classic movie. This could be on
the Bengal board of this podcast, which is me saying
we don't see a lot of these characters prior to
the events of the movie, and that we don't get
a good sense of what their personalities were like prior
to their dad's death. Right, Because something that is very
notable about Oja right away, kind of going off of
what you were talking about Ben, is the house shut down.
He is that he doesn't really make eye contact. He
seems socially anxious and like you were saying, I think
Hannah shut down, And it does make me curious how
much of that is post his dad's death and how
much of that's just how he presents, because my assumption
is based on the reaction the director has that opening
scene that OJ maybe never had the best people skills,
because when they were like, oh, it's the dad died,
it's just OJ. Now, that guy was like, oh, oh,
that's a shame.
Speaker 2: I think that's likely. I think the dad was a
very complete Hollywood person and could do all of these things,
but his children are not. And I think it's very
likely that OJ has always been a little bit more
introverted and interested in being with the animals and doing
things and doing things the right way and just focused
on nose to the grind getting stuff done, and the
sister has always been more interested in the show business
side of it and isn't so attached to the animals.
You can see throughout the course of the film she
never goes up to the animal. She's not interested in
their will being, She's just interested.
Speaker 1: Well, I think I think that Emerald refuses to work
with the animals because she was not allowed to be
trained to work with the animals, and so I think
that because of that, she is taking out on oj
the choices that their dad made about who got to
get trained to be with the horses and who got
to do the other part. Yeah, and so I really
feel like she does it out of spite. He asked
her to help multiple times and she won't even consider
won't even consider it. She will like literally act like
she can't hear him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know, Spikee doesn't seem like it fits
her character as much as resistance to like protection self protection,
I'm not. I'm just done as opposed to like fuck
your spite's like fuck you.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a fuck you. I think she's
a that Like I think she's stuck in almost like
a teenagery mindset about it. Yeah, Like she there's a
part of her that's very much stuck in that story
she tells about Jean Jacket the horse, Yes, where she's like,
at that time, dad chose to not train me, and
he was gonna finally like kind of loop me into
the fold as part of the group of the two
of you, and he didn't, and he trained you and
said and he took my horse. And there's a story
she created in that moment about that event that she
seems very stuck in well, she's stuck. She's stuck as hell.
Speaker 2: She's stuck. But it's more angst than it is spie.
Spite is more in that fuck you dad trained you.
And I don't think she's holding that energy towards him.
Speaker 1: She might have, I mean, she does say dad loved
you more than me. I will. I think what been
saying is she might have energy towards their dad, or
maybe when he was like, you don't, But you don't
feel like she's she's taking out an OJ. I think
she kind of does in a very sibling esque way
where you can be having hard feelings instead of recognizing
that you're just in pain, you're kind of like taking
it out on the other simplane. Absolutely, And I think
that's also not uncommon when you have unresolved beef with
a parent who passes that she doesn't really have the
opportunitymore to hash that out with her dad. They never
got to a point where she was let into the
fold of the training. So this is an unresolved story
for her, and so where does she put that energy?
But an OJ who doesn't feed into her really, which
I think maybe that's why it's hard to they don't
get a lot of active conflict because he doesn't really
do that.
Speaker 2: He doesn't feed into anybody's anything. He says, Nope, he
is aware. He reads animals, he reads behavior. He is
a behavior expert. He reads it and interprets it, and
he knows. Nope, you see it. That's his recurring things.
Why is the title moment? Nope?
Speaker 1: And I think that Emerald and no Jaer is such
like good examples of what happens between siblings when they
no longer have sort of their like they're touchstone, like
the thing that connects them, which is their parents. When
your parents run around to keep you connected to each other,
you now all of a sudden now have to figure
out how to be connected on your own, Yeah, and
communicate more intentionally. The feeling I got is, even though
they are working together, they don't feel like they talk
a lot. They feel really distant. They don't feel like
they're on the same page, to the point where I'm like,
do they work together or she just helping him out
like post his dad's debt to do kind of like
the Razzle Dazzle, because she seems so disconnected from yeah,
the business.
Speaker 2: Well, they have clear different attachments to it. When he's like,
stop acting, Like if this is your sidegig, she said
straight up to him, this is my side gig. Her
acting and all her other stuff that she's trying to
build for herself in her mind is her business. So
I think recognizing that when you have a family business
and the figurehead passes away, there's often a very different
sense of connection and a connection and attachment to the
business and the relationship people had with it and why
they're trying to keep it on. She wants to keep
it on because it's paying the bills, whether she wants
to admit that in her angsty self or not. I
don't think her anything is taking off, or she wouldn't
have been sliding that in in the classic Hollywood actor
way of like, by the way, I also wrote a screenplay,
and I'm a director, and I'm an actress, and I
do all these things and I can do everything. Please
just God hire me so that I can make my
dreams come true. Thank you. Your bill is forty seven
to fifty, but he is clearly rooted in it. It
means a lot to him. He is connecting to that
as his way to honor his dad and keep the
family business alive, where she just wants the story to
stay alive.
Speaker 1: I think she does like the razzle dazzle of the
story of that we're connected to, like the great great,
great great great our great grandfather is the guy who
was the first person on a film, And I think
he just is like, yeah, like you're saying, this is
our family business, and I'm just trying to what does
he say, I got mouse to feed? He seems very
rooted in the work ethic part of it, like keep
your nose to the grindstone, trying to keep this farm afloat,
trying to continue stability. Probably also honor our dad by
not dive bombing his long, long, long generational family business. Yeah,
like the first year of him passing, and how he's
actually not quite able to do that because he's having
to sell all the horses, which is so sad, and
that he's not telling her about that either.
Speaker 2: No, he's not. And it's clear that they're not partners,
that they don't trust each other, they don't have the
same sense of connection to things. And it is a
routine problem when there's been a death because generally speaking
that whoever's the head of the family has the keys
to the kingdom and runs it their way, and everything
runs through them, and they know all the secrets, they
know all the ins and the outs, and they let other
people in. But once they go, if other people aren't
finding their life's purpose by doing what they did, and
it and or it doesn't work for them the same way,
because they're an entirely different person, and it's an absolutely
unreasonable expectation. Lots of conflict, lots of struggles. How many
times have we encountered clients who come in after there's
been a death and their whole family just blew up.
Speaker 1: I also think when people are in are experiencing grief
symptoms in general, during that time when everything you know,
a lot of decisions have to be made after someone passes,
and especially if you have a business, and so because
so many decisions have to be made at once, there
always ends up being a head person who just who
either knows the business the best or everybody trusts the most,
who ends up taking it over. And that is the
person who does everything with it. But that it often
almost always creates a conflict.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because all those decisions have to be made, Yeah,
when everyone is still dissociated. Yeah, and they're only coming
in and out of being in pain being especially when
it's a sudden death like this one. This wasn't planned for.
Dad was clearly still actively working and planning to work
for a while. He wasn't handing over the keys.
Speaker 1: I wasn't retired in anyway it seemed yet.
Speaker 2: Nope, and didn't seem like he was even thinking about it.
Speaker 1: Definitely not.
Speaker 2: And when that happens, that sudden death leaves more dissociation
as opposed to people who have had the opportunity to
slow grieve. Where you see someone deteriorating, you see someone
not being themselves, not being capable, so you naturally have
to start taking on a new role. None of that
happened here. So the two children are struggling greatly with
picking up the pieces. And when someone dies and you
have to make all those decisions quickly while you can't
even tolerate your own pain or reality because everything is shattered.
You're making no decisions with parts of yourself, and that
usually doesn't represent the full spectrum of your personality, your wants,
your desires, your needs. You're just doing whatever you feel
like you had to do in the moment and might
resent that choice later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes me curious with OJ's presentation, it's
the culmination of the grief we're talking about. Maybe this
is also of his natural personality being more introvert and
uncomfortable being on stage literally and then two burnt out.
We're seeing him at the tail end of like six
months of taking over the family business and making all
those decisions not planned and not doing it as well
as he needs to because he doesn't have the showman
part of it and the relation part of it, and
because he can't rely on Emerald, and so he is
having to make all these tough, really sad decisions. And
I would imagine that's also part of the ongoing grief
for him. Is am I going to also lose my
dad's farm. I'm losing all his horses, peace by piece,
and I'm hoping I can buy them back one day
from Jupiter Jupe, but I don't know that, and I
can't rely on my sister. So the pressure of all
those decisions and stress, how could he not be maybe
even making silly mistakes, like even in the opening scene
on this film set, I wonder too, with like not
maybe handling that well, if that's also part of him
like not very being not very present m hm, and
maybe not being as assertive about those directions as he
needs to be, because when you go through something like that,
your brain is like not with you all the time.
Speaker 2: No, he's I mean, that's what dissociation is, right, he's
only running in safe mode if he's struggling to cope
with the guilt and the loss and the loss of
those horses that he's clearly attached to each one of
those that he sold. I'm sure he knew their name.
I'm sure he had a relationship with them. I'm sure
he fed and raised them, and letting go of each
one probably broke his heart into another fragmented piece.
Speaker 1: What's awful is he doesn't even know that he's selling
those horses to be fucking alien food. Yeah, and that
he's never he was that jupe guy, was never planning
to sell those back to him, Oh no, because he
was to feed them to it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's not great, and for him to be experiencing all
of that that would lead him to be even more
shut down, even more fragmented as he's struggling to grapple
with his own grief. And failures in realizing he can't
be his dad, he can't be like him, He can't
just turn on all that stuff. He needs his sister
and she won't show the fuck up.
Speaker 1: Before we jump into Emerald, how about we take a
break here. Also, if you would like to at this
time leave us a rating and review where every listener podcasts.
I really appreciate it is the best way for new
people to find us, and we always appreciate them and
read them. Thank you.
Speaker 2: And speaking of those, we mentioned our lovely bingo game
that we always reference as if it's an actual real thing,
Well it is now one of our kind listeners. Eva
made one for us and we'll be happy to share
it with you guys. So hopefully you guys enjoy that
and enjoy her work because it's a really great culmination
of all the nonsense that you hear from our mouths
all the time. And somebody really cared a lot about
the show, took a minute to make something like that
for us, and we really appreciate those kinds of things.
Wanted to throw shout out to Eve and say thank
you for that.
Speaker 1: You can find it on our Instagram if you're interested.
Emerald kind of the same with OJ. I sort of
want to give her the benefit of the doubt. Is
I wonder how much of what we're seeing of her
now is maybe also a product of losing their dad
and feeling aimless. And that seems like she's maybe sleeping around,
She's maybe doing a little like being very cavalier, smoking
a lot. She's vaping a lot in the movie. I
don't know if she's vaping weed or just vaping nicotine.
That she seems to be kind of just acting, yeah,
acting young, just acting unreliable, and drinking a lot. She
drinks a lot in the movie too. She has a
lot of goofing off, And I wonder how much of
that is how she's always and I assume it is
just the way that OJ treats her. But I also
wonder if a lot of those things have exacerbated at
this time where her dad has died and she doesn't
get to, like I said, resolve all of those loose
ends she had with him about who she is within
the business and who she is to him, and yeah,
what is her relationship to this work and does she
want a relationship to this work? And it's all just
hanging out there and she can't really take a break
to figure that out because Oja, like you said, Ben
needs her.
Speaker 2: And she needs him because her stuff isn't working. Getting
anything to work in Hollywood is extremely difficult. It's not
a slight on her, it's just it's extraordinarily difficult. Most
people fail, and being an actor or anything involved in
show business is an act of accepting rejection permanently, and
many people struggle with that, particularly because they tend to
be folks like myself who thrive on attention and need it,
going with.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that's what you're in a savent.
Speaker 2: I am an attention horror and I am accepting of
that fact. Anybody who knows me understands that, and it's okay.
But the people who really thrive on that, and it's
their business to do so, need it and they don't
function well without it, and if they can't find a
way to do it in a way that provides for them,
they set up complexes for themselves. And she is very
clearly an embodiment of that, which I'm sure Jordan Peel,
being someone who likely struggled to find his footing, understands
full well because he's both lived that life and now
made it on both sides of the camera, and I'm
sure writing her is an homage to that. But people
who get into that place will often resentfully do the
thing that makes some enough money to survive, and I
think that's very clearly what we're seeing her do. She
has a resentful, angsty relationship with the business. She couldn't
resolve the things with her dad that kind of broke
her meaning and purpose to it. So she made her
meeting and purpose trying to be a showbuz person and
it's not working for her yet. But she's also not
working this job in a way that's going to work
for that business, and that leaves her kind of stuck
in the middle in a very teenager replace and we
see her seeking escape quite often.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I wonder even she has undiagnosed ADHD because
the way she comes off to like when they go
meet with Jube and she wants up asking questions and
she's walking around his office and she's spoken its uf
interrupting and not there, and she's never on time, like
I think there's also a possibility that she's got these
other parts of it, and that would obviously make a
career where you have to be your own boss. Whatever
she's going to do very difficult. I want to give
her the best of the down. Say, maybe she's undiagnosed ADHD,
and not that she's just like a thoughtless, immature asshole,
because that is how she comes off or the beginning scenes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, if she has ADHD, which is a
plausible explanation for her behavior, I don't think she's I
don't think either of them are broken assholes. I think
they're just representations of personality types and that some people
just are the way that they are. There may be
dysfunction in things. I think the evidence for her behavior
of interrupting and being late all the time and being
unable to focus and liking to do lots of things.
Speaker 1: And not able to remember like the one important thing
about the speech she gives, which is safety protocol.
Speaker 2: Yep, she definitely covered none of that. Definitely. Don't stand
behind the horse.
Speaker 1: No, look, don't make contact. Oh look at the horse
and the eyeballs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and those don't.
Speaker 1: Put a fucking flash in their eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Those are a mirror, Yeah, a big mirror. Yeah, that's
what it was.
Speaker 2: Don't do the things that are jumb but she could
only cover the story why are we important? Yeah, which
left everybody else in the room going narrowing their eyes
and looking at it. Wasn't okay, so we're just good, cool,
We're good, we can do whatever we want. That went poorly. Yeah,
hallmarks of ADHD, but also hallmarks of people who are
more of the extroverted type of personality. Say, where's the line?
She may be across it, but you may even know
other people who don't have an ad she that aren't.
Speaker 1: What I was thinking about, Emerald is that I also
wonder if she is. And you guys can tell me
what you think about this, because I think the experience
that happened where the dad didn't end up training her
was also when she was young, and so I wonder
sometimes when parents die, sometimes people can regress a little bit.
And I wonder if she's kind of regressing back to
this point in her life where she had a lot
of options or she thought that she had options that
she would be able to do. So she's kind of
like stuck. Her part is kind of stuck in this
younger kind of frame of mind because because what I
do feel like and I totally agree, like I don't
think that she's just a self centered prick like I like,
even though I literally because I say that too, because
the arc of the story proves different. You gets stuck
at an age, right, so you get stuck at an
age where you experience this original trauma. And so I
wonder if a part of her behavior and the way
that she's kind of regressed a little bit has to
do with that, that that is the time where maybe
it felt like she had more options and more things
that she could do, and now she's in a place
where she can only do certain things. Too, she's definitely
being very all or nothing, yes, very black and white.
And also too, maybe the way her grief is presenting
as well is maybe she's having a hard time being
around the horses. Maybe they make her think of her dad.
So also the part of her that's acting kind of bratty,
I think more bratty is how she comes off. Yeah, yeah,
and like I can't hear you when her brother's trying
to get her to help with the horses. I don't know,
Maybe she is a hard time being around them, Maybe
she's a hard time being on the farm. She's choosing
to sleep in a trailer on the property, even though
they have a huge house, like there could be also
a lot going on there because I think where I
also want to give her the benefit of the doubt
is how much she grows in this movie that she
actually has a lot of intelligence, love consideration once she's
able to access that through the events of the movie.
And she's not just looking out for herself. She is
thinking about her brother, and she is thinking about the
situation at hand, and she is thoughtful and smart. She's
not just a dingling who wants the hot shot and
then she must move on with her life. So it
does make Yeah, I think we're onto something perhaps of
where maybe some of this obnoxiousness is her not dealing. Yeah,
And I think and I think mentioning all of the
different ways that she was maybe self soothing by using
the vape, by drinking alcohol, that she was doing all
of those things because she is so uncomfortable and most
of the times we see her drink she's in the house.
Oh that's true. Yeah, I think those are glaring music.
Speaker 2: She's doing a lot of things to take her back
out of the experience she's having by being concretely in
that space. Yah, which your senses can't be negotiated with.
She is in the house, she is seeing all of
the things that are in the house. So the only
option if you can't escape physically is to escape mentally,
and that's what she does. And it's not uncommon to
see people get really obnoxious and avoid when they're going
through a big loss, especially a sudden one, because they
don't want to fucking deal with it, or they can't
and they look at it and go like nope.
Speaker 1: Because watching this now with my therapist eyes, I was
seeing so many moments where you can see something flash
over Emerald's face where she wants to connect with oj,
where she's having a feeling and she's looking at the
back of his head as he's walking away from her,
and you can tell that she wants to make a
bit of connection to him, but she can't. Either she's
not aware that's really what she wants, or she doesn't
know how to do it, so she will say something Braddy,
or be like, why don't we do this together, let's
get drunk, or she'll she's trying to connect with him,
but she's going about it in a way that doesn't
actually communicate to him why that's important to her and
why she is trying to like spend time with him
and do all this goofing offfee kind of stuff with him.
And that's also where I wonder even how much maybe
their dad would overcompensate for or just accommodate for their
differences in personality and communication style, that they were able
to maybe kind of use their dad as a bridge
between Ojy's really isolated introverse introversion and her very big
extraversion because they're not they're both not great communicators. Yeah,
and when you're siblings and you have a parent between
the two of you, you don't necessarily have to work
on being better communicators while they're around, but once they're gone,
you do have to do that. And you can see
at the beginning of the movie she's trying, but she
can't connect her desire or even her insight. She has
it with her action, and so obviously he doesn't understand
why she's doing the things that she's doing other than
the fact that she's not helping him and how he
perceives it, and so it just continues, unfortunately, this moat between.
Speaker 2: Them without something like an alien presence trying to eat everyone.
I don't know that they would have recovered from without
something coming back to or requiring them to get in
the moment right now with everything that you are. I
don't know that they would have recovered. I think they
would have continued splitting down the path for quite a while,
and that moat space between them may have gotten irreparable.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And you see this in real life with clients.
You see relationships falling off and people not talking to
each other after someone's past like it's common for it's
common for some of them. Those things to happen where
either road together or we girl apart.
Speaker 2: Important to point out that if people can't actualize into
themselves and do it their own way while honoring the
traditions of the family, if somebody passes that, the rest
of the family is likely to fall off because it's
going to feel like an approximation. It's going to be
either too much for one person who will stop doing it.
Let's use holidays as an example of this. Christmas has
always done one particular way or whatever big holidays, right,
It's always done one particular way. And when the matriarch
or patriarch or whoever passes away yep or can no
longer complete that ritual. It's going to happen a new
way that people are going to drive with or they're not.
And one person may try to do it just like
Mom and may call Mom's food, and then they're going
to take all that pressure on, and everybody else is
still going to be like, yeah, I don't know, Mom's
not here, this doesn't taste like moms. Yeah, And if
that person couldn't do well, we're trying this thing, and
we're going to do this thing, or we're gonna remember
Mom this way, but we're also going to try these
new things that let all of us step forward into
the family and run things, and we're gonna do a
holiday this way this time. What's likely to happen is
everybody either puts all the pressure on the family mascot
and says, good, you do it just like Mom did.
Do everything just like you, get all Mom's stuff, get
all the dishes, make sure everything tastes exactly the same,
and take all that pressure on and we'll do nothing.
Or two people fight over it, or it becomes a
big mess and it happens once and never again. Yeah,
can be some of the ways these things go. With
practical examples, and we will see clients come in struggling
that all their traditions are gone, all their supports are gone,
anybody they're connected to is leaving them, and we see
some of that in this film.
Speaker 1: And also oj and Emerald seem so isolated, like it
seems like their family was just the two of them
and their dad. Their mom isn't around. I assume she.
I might have missed this in the movie, but I
assume she died when they were kids. There's like, no
mom doesn't like exist in this movie. There's a picture
of it, but there's no mention of her, there's no
discussion of her.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just assumed she died when they were kids. I
don't know why. And so it does seem like all
they have is each other, and so kind of what
you're saying, Ben is Ojan and Emil just feel like
two lost people who are floating in the ocean, and
they want to be able to grab each other and
depend on the other, but they can't. They can't find
each other. And then what this alien situation does is
it gives them a group project. It gives them something
that they can focus on and be able to depend
on each other about because she knows all the flashy
shit about getting the cameras and where to put it
on the internet because I don't even know, well, he
doesn't have a smartphone. They should that he is a
flip phone. In the very begining of the movie, that
probably was to establish that he is very old school, yes,
and she's very new school. Yeah. And so this is
a moment where she's able to show her strengths and
be dependable actually, and he's able to show his strengths
and be dependable actually, And they start to listen to
each other and take each other seriously, Like he goes
to the circuit city or whatever fries with her to
get the shit and she listens to him too, and
they it gives them something to focus on that's not
let's talk about dad dying and the fact that I
don't know who I am anymore right now, and you
don't know who you are right now and you're trying
to figure it out. Having something to focus on, a
project that you can lean on each other about is
really helpful, and it helps them develop individually and helps
them develop together. I mean, this movie ends the starts
with them is them connecting again with that eye thing
he does where he's like, I'm seeing you, so then
you to do as kids. And I think, I guess
what it helps about is not just like them noticing
their strength with themselves, but also I feel like this
project help them remember that they love each other if
nothing else, absolutely, because it becomes and eventually it becomes
about protecting each other. Yes, and so it changes from
let's just make a lot of money off of having
a UFO siding to I want to keep you safe
and I see you and I care about you. And
I think with Emerald, that's a lot of what she's
looking for. Like all the times that she's staring at
the back of OJ's head, what she's really wanting is
pay attention to me, be with me. I want to
spend time with you. I want to know that I'm
important to you because I don't do the business well
and I've never done the training well or at all,
And so I think that's such an important moment for her.
Speaker 2: It is, and I think visually when that becomes super
concrete to us as an audience, as he's riding the horse,
he flips his hood up and has eyes on the
back of his head.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I didn't even think about that because it's
to fuck with the alien, but it's also symbolic. I
think one of the other parts of them having this
project is also that it's something new. Right, So there's
no this is what we did last time, there's no
you should do it like this, there's no this is
a new situation, which means they're both allowed to pick
their role instead of being as signed their role, and
that feels like that's I think that's what opens them
both up to each other. They're writing new scripts scripts,
this is a new story because now this is about us. Now,
this is about us saving the farm and maybe humanity
and maybe humanity but probably not, yeah, probably not. Just
just that thing was.
Speaker 2: Huge, right, Well, it's like what I was saying with
the Christmas tradition thing. Yeah right, it's exactly that they
had to actualize into themselves as they are in this
moment without trying to repeat Dad yes, and let each
other fill the roles in a split form in whatever
ways they can, and trust like, Okay, you do all
this tech shit and I'm gonna do all of the
behavior of some stuff, and I'm gonna trust that you're
gonna do your thing. And I'm gonna do my thing,
and we're gonna meet this together, and you know, each
of us will get our help, and then it'll take
both of us to wrangle antlers. Yes, because without without
Emerald like lashing onto his tech savvy and his thing
and understanding that this is the guy, this is the
guy who's gonna want this, and we're gonna need him
to make this money and to kind of save ourselves
and this business and everything, and OJ going if you
don't get to the fuck point with this man and
let him know that he's going to capture a predator
like he's not about all this shit that you are.
He doesn't care about the attention. He wants the shot.
He wants the impossible shot, impossible shot, he wants the nature,
he wants the thing he this is his life mission
and you need to get to the point he's not
listening to you and without them having that as a
culminating moment of oh okay, so we both have points
that we need to combine and we can be our
own thing together without having to replicate Dad. Then that
team forms and a new thing grows out of the loss.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so why don't we take when more break here
and we'll come back and speak a little bit more
about I think OJ specifically and his arc in the story.
One thing that was coming to mind to me listening
to you is also how and you were saying this before,
so I'm seeing any of your points, Ben feel free
to jump in. Is that in the beginning of the movie,
OJ is so insecure in his own way because he's
trying to be the full version of his dad and
understandably maybe like feeling pretty insecure because of that, because
that's not his role that's not always comfortable with. And
it is cool to see him over the course of
the movie recognize that that his skills are really important
and he does know what he's doing. I think that
can also be so hard when you go through a
big life transition like this that throws you into a
role you weren't prepared for, is that it can make
you really doubt yourself absolutely and doubt that you ever
knew what you were doing. Like I wouldn't be surprised
if he has some imposter syndrome in a bit of
a way about the situation, like I can't get my
shit together. Nobody in Hollywood seems to like me, I
have to keep selling the horses, like, I'm sure he's
in a place where he is, like, am I even
good at this? So I think what is cool to
see with him? And kind of the way that identity
gets fucked with breathement in life transitions like this is
he comes into his own own again or maybe even
for the first time as an adult by himself without
his dad leading the way, is like, I do know
what I'm doing. Because this movie does a great job
of showing the difference between OJ and how he interacts
and figures out these aliens, this alien versus Jupe. Because
what's funny is Jupe has had six months of planning
for this live show he does, so he's been actively
trying to like figure out how to corral this alien
for six months and he fucks it up royally pretty immediately, yes,
whereas our main character OJ is only aware of it
for I don't know, a week or two, Yeah, and
he figures out exactly how to deal with it because
he knows animals. He is good at this.
Speaker 2: And sometimes my way is exactly the right way. And
once I figure it out, I'm sure and it's okay
to be sure, and I think that the part he
was missing. Yeah, like it's okay for me to be
sure and where the daddy pants and say, this isn't
a ship, it's an animal, and I know animals, and
it's not just an animal, like this idiot tried to
what do you like he made a mistake. He tried
to train a predator. And you don't train predators. You
make agreements with them.
Speaker 1: And you figure out, like he says, every animal has
rules and you don't figure out those rules so you
can break. Let me figure them out so you can
obey them and survive.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, which is a real strong moment of power
for him of finding his place in the world and
then thriving with that knowledge, which is post traumatic growth.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely what I thought about Ojay, and I really
enjoyed his shift, And I think the actor does a
really good job of showing that with his confidence, like
his body, his body changes. He does a really good
job of showing a little bit different way that this
that we can now tell that this character has confidence.
This character now feels more comfortable, they feel like they
know what they're doing. And I hope also that he
feels like he's always been able to do this, that
it's always been in him and I think even too.
What I hope he can build from it as well
is confidence that he does know how to read other beings.
He can read like the eye thing that he does,
the eye signal he does with Emerald, that he when
that geen jacket story happened, he understood that she was
upset because when she looked down at the training ring,
he did that to her like I'm I see you.
That fucked you over right now, and I get it,
and so I can see how all this Hollywood glitzy shit,
like I said, like that opening director scene has really
corroded his confidence of like do I know people? Am
I able to like figure people out? I don't seem
to know what I'm doing and how to make people
like me.
Speaker 2: Right, He settles into what has made him strong his
whole life and then actualizes when he must, which is
how we survive. When you can learn to trust that
I as I am, with all that I am, the
way that I see things enough and I don't need
permission from anybody to be myself. I just need to
do my thing and seize control of this moment in
the way that I see it and that will be enough.
That is the way we survive. I don't need to
see it the way you do. I don't need to
be like you. I need to be like me and
go freely. And he does. Both of them do?
Speaker 1: Both of them do? Yeah?
Speaker 2: But it takes them releasing themselves from oh, I have
to be doing it this X y Z or what.
I have to remember Dad's speech.
Speaker 1: All right, So we will take another break here and
be back with Jupe. So one thing we haven't really
touched on yet is that a big corner storm of
this movie is a chimpanzee. Is it chimpanzee?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yes, a chimpanzee in a classic nineties alf esque sitcom
goes feral, goes animal on the sitcom set and seems
to kill most of the It's like a full house
with a chimpanzee where he kills all the people in
full house.
Speaker 2: The dad looks exactly like the exactly.
Speaker 1: Like the dad from ALF. Yess he does. I used
to be scared of alf as a kid. Surprise, surprise,
I used to have this the planet mail mec does
not approve.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: I used to watch it as a kid when I
was very young and I used to got into my
he this idea that if I was laying in bed
at night, if I turned over, that Alf would be
standing over me while I slept. And I don't know,
maybe I had a bad dream once and I couldn't
get it out of my hand. And so now that's
what I think of when I think of that scrappy
cat eating alien dude.
Speaker 2: I had like Alf tapes that would like a little
Alf like book on tape stories, not the but Alf
was the ship for a while. Oh yeah, you're nightmares.
Unfortunately took away some serious eighties kid joy from you.
I think you're telling me.
Speaker 1: Listen, my overacting imagination stole a lot of joy from
me as a kid.
Speaker 2: We had a cooking with Alf doll at our house.
Speaker 1: Bron amazing. But yeah. So another central character of the store,
which we've been referencing here is there is Jupe shored
for Jupiter, who owns a amusement park esque western Western
disney landy kind of thing, very small.
Speaker 2: Though, side show, road show, roadside attraction. There we go,
That's what I'm looking for. Roadside attraction Western tone.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's close to O Jane Emerald's family farm and
he was the lead in that sitcom where he watched
all of his coworkers get mulled to death by a chimpanzee,
maybe even some of the audience members who are watching,
and the only other survivor was his co star. That
was his older sister. I think on the show who
gets her whole face chewed off? She's the one that
comes to the show and she has the veil on
and it blows off. Yeah, yep, I always thought that
that was the mom Oh no, first crush. Okay, that's
what makes more sense. That makes more, way more sense. Okay. Yeah,
So what's really interesting about his character from Jump is
that he had this horrific I mean, that's the part
of the movie that's really horror esque, are the scenes
of Gordy that imp attacking and dupe hiding. Yes, and
he has an interesting presentation as an adult around this trauma.
I don't know if you want to describe it, Hannah, Like,
it's really interesting how he has recreated this trauma in
his head to be something that is a spectacle. Yes,
that's a great way to put it, which is what
he wants to create, which is what he's trying to
create by capturing the alien or whatever he thinks he's
doing with the alien. But I think that he tries
it into a story. And then but then he collects
all the memorabilia from the show and from the set
and all of the horrible stuff that happened, and he
has this hidden Yeah, it's like Gripley believe it or not. Yeah,
this hidden space that he that he keeps that it
makes me wonder what he does what he does in there,
Like does he go in there and dissociate, like what
happens when he is It's such a different way for
someone to express the trauma that they've been through. Yes,
that he keeps this pristine showroom of not just like
oh cute, like you're saying, like cute memorabilia from the show,
but he is memorabilia from the day, Like he has
the bloody shoe and some other shit too. And it
also seems like he obsessively watches like the snl skit
that was paired in the event, like he is a
walking Wikipedia page about that event and like the social
cultural impact of it, and he talks about it as
if it is a cute story like a Ripley's believer
it or not esque, not cute maybe, but he tells
it very disconnected, like he's like it almost feels like
he wasn't there, that he's just someone who's special interest
is Gordy's TV show and collecting memorability the way that
people can be weird about serial killers and stuff or
like weird horrible tragedies. But he is the center person
and he talks about it as if he wasn't there,
but he was there, and as if he's fine. Yeah,
and he's renting out that space to left weird couples
and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's definitely not okay, he's not okay. I mean
we see that he dissociates. He does a little headshake thing,
and my clients get really mad at me when I
point out that they do a head little head shake
you can see sometimes when people are trying to shake
something just out of their head. I'm mad right now.
If any of you can see me, you know, love
the co host can see me doing it, You guys can't,
But people do it. There's this tiny little headshake and
he does that, and Jordan Peele is kind enough to
show us what he was seeing in his head that
he's trying to shake out of it, but people will
almost adopt a secondary persona of someone who observed it
neutrally instead of being horrified and stuck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because even though he's keeping all this shit around him,
the ironic part, in my opinion, is that he is
keeping it at arm's length. Mentally, he's trying to He
was trying to. Really, he's really trying to. He's really, uh,
white knuckling the fuck out of out of this. Like
he like he's dissociative.
Speaker 2: He is.
Speaker 1: He looks like he's not there. It's a time it's
trouble we see him. Yeah, most of the times that
the camera is focused on him, he does not seem
to be present. No, And I think that makes a
lot of sense. I think maybe he's been stuck since
that trauma happened.
Speaker 2: Of course, I think he's been stuck because it hit
him in multiple ways. Because he was a child star
on a successful show before that one, and this was
to be his next project, yes, and that got taken away,
and we know child stars struggle with that, which makes sense.
You get all this attention, fame, money, et cetera, and
you're on top of the world and all of a sudden,
it's just gone, and that doesn't go well for people,
which is understandable. But he went through all of that,
and he went through multiple losses at once, Yes lost
the show, lost his TV parents, his first crush and
work sister got maimed, his animal co worker got shot
in front of him. It did not represent good things
happening to him, and then he stayed stuck in it.
Because our brain craves the ability to make sense of
things that have happened to us. It wants to gain
mastery over it so that we can assign that to
the past and let it go. All of the feelings, imagery, etc.
That get stuck inside of our body and mind when
a traumatic event happens want to move into storage. They
want to go. Our brain wants to make them adaptive
information that we can say, Okay, if that happened again,
I would be able to deal with it because I
know what to do. That wouldn't happen to me again
because I do X, Y and Z, and that becomes
adaptive information. It's not adaptive information for him because he
hasn't processed it. It stays stuck in state dependent form
in his body and in his mind. And that's why
the part of him that seeks the control of that
is collecting all of that stuff and keeping it around
him because he is not convinced in the truest or
the part of him that knows the truth. We all
have one. It's one most of us don't like very much,
but there's one part of our brain that knows the
truth always and will always tell it to us, whether
we want it to or not. And that part of
him tells him you are not safe from this because
he has not convinced it so by processing, so he
keeps it all around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's over identifying with his showman part, the
part of him that is a entertainer, the ringleader of
his current situation. He lets that part take the show
when he can't handle it.
Speaker 2: Because that was the part that was most suddenly yanked
from him.
Speaker 1: And also that's the part that lets him lean into
that expertise as well without having to actually feel the feelings,
which is why it's off putting if you've any kind
of emotional intelligence. When he goes into that mode and
he's talking about it, and especially when he's talking about
that snl' yes, he is weird like it gives you
the weirds, and that's because you can sense that he's
not being authentic, that he is showing you a version
of himself that's not rooted in quote unquote like normal
human reactions. There's like a fake smile on his face
that's eerie almost.
Speaker 2: Because he's telling a fake He's telling a fake story.
So he looks glass and gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because Emerald asks him what happened? What really happened,
and instead he talks about the snl skit.
Speaker 2: Which is safe because that's not what happened, and he
can tell that story comfortably.
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, got to watch that snl skit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And how many people would do that when people
ask what happened on the worst day of your life?
Speaker 1: Yeah? If I had a client do that, I would clock.
I'd be I'll let him have it this time, but
we're going to talk about that later, because that definitely
reminds me of when you start working with someone. It's
like the first or second session and you can tell
that they're used to telling the story of their trauma, yes,
but they're not actually feeling it yes, And the red
flags are popping up in my brain at least like
all over the place. I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna let
the way don't. They don't know me yet, so I'm
gonna let them have it. I'm not gonna poke at it.
But hmm, I'm clocking all of this for later, because
it's not he's not pulling it off in a way
that if you, like I said, if you have any
sort of emotional intelligence, it's obvious. And I think what
is interesting is that there is that one scene before
they start the first official show that involves the alien
where he is fully the most associating, where he's like staring,
like staring off into the distance, and his wife comes
up and does something. She does come up to him,
and she does start rubbing his finger in a way
that seems very grounded, rubbing his hand in a way
that's very grounding. It's like she can tell that he's associating,
and she's doing something with him to get him back
in the moment, because unfortunately she's also asking him to
be a showman and to get out of your feelings
and we need you to get on to get an on,
which does suck.
Speaker 2: I think she's supporting him in what she thinks he
wants it seemed like he kind of holds some power
in that relationship, and yeah, that she's kind of along.
There was some energy between the two of them that
felt like there was a power dynamic. So I think
I think she's just doing what she thinks she's supposed
to and what he's probably coached her to do.
Speaker 1: Oh like, yeah, when you see me zoning out, come
over here, or it seems like a practiced behavior, it does.
Speaker 2: For it to be the hand that he fist bumped
with the chimp that kept him alive, for her to
be grounding him to.
Speaker 1: That interesting Yeah, Yeah, those two.
Speaker 2: Scenes were tied together, that creepy, you know, fist pump
thing with the chimp that just griped somebody's throat out
and then because he didn't look at in the eye
mm hmm and maintained his safety with it, when the chimp,
you know, practiced the behavior that he fist pumped with it.
It's that hand that the next scene is her rubbing,
So that's not an accident.
Speaker 1: Let me ask the lay person question, because I would
think this watching this movie. Why would someone who's also
gone through this horrific event and is very aware of
the event still because he's made a lot of his
life and personality about it, put himself in another situation
where he is inviting a potentially uncontrollable animal into his world.
Because I think what we would typically think if I
was watching this as someone who doesn't do therapy, that
he would have like a trauma reaction where you'd be
like no ooh, you know, he'd get scared, and he'd
like would want nothing to do with it. So what
do we have to say about someone who is repeating
a situation?
Speaker 2: I got it because he was eight, yeah when he
went through this trauma or ten or whatever he was.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, we don't know.
Speaker 2: And as we know from dealing with egocentric ten year
olds in past episodes, that he is stuck in the
egocentrism of thinking I can control it this time, If
I take all of this on this time, I'll be
able to save it. I'll be able to rewrite this,
I'll be able to make it better, and this time
I'll win. And the adult part of his mind that
misses the fundamental truth of this episode or this movie
that OJ knows is you can't train a predator. People
make that mistake. I mean, what antlers say.
Speaker 1: Like Roy, Yeah, yeah, think.
Speaker 2: You thought you could do that. And we've covered this
in an episode on the Mask of the Phantasm pretty thoroughly,
so I don't feel the need to go into it.
But our uh, our boy Bruce makes the same mistake
over and over and over that Juke does. Of I
can fix it if I am just good enough, if
I am on top of it enough, if I do
enough things, if I spend six months prepping this show
and learning their behaviors, I can control the factors that
I lost control of. But that is a ten year
old part that doesn't realize the truth of the world
is a predator will eat you at the first opportunity
it's convenient for it. That's it.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, he's suicidal, oh Dan, he doesn't
care about himself, oh Dan?
Speaker 2: And who else did you say that about?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: For what reason?
Speaker 1: The same ones, same ones. But I feel like what
you're saying, Ben makes a lot of sense, and it
definitely and that definitely feels right. And my first thought
was he's suicidal. I think he's doing that thing people
like to do where they want. This is kind of
what you're saying, Ben, But they where they want to
pretend that the world is safer than it's been shown
to them to be. And you know, people will get
into like relationships that replicate abuse they experience as kids,
stuff like that. People want to prove sometimes to themselves
that it can be different. Yeah, and that was just
a fluke, right, Yeah, And unfortunately there's so much hubris
in that as well. That is a scary thing to realize, right,
Like when I practice radical acceptance with clients, is like
you have to radically accept that there's some things are
never going to be within your control and that is
really scary. It's really scary to recognize that there are
certain elements in the world that can hurt you no
matter what you do, and that you can't conquer everything
and you can't control everything. And so yeah, he is,
I think, trying to create that corrective experience, Yeah, in
a not so great way, healthy way of like you're
saying that this time it'll be different, yep. And it
really makes him blind, which I think is also a
side effect of not really processing. If you don't really
process something, you don't learn from it, and you can
repeat the same mistakes. Like when we talked about what
eternal sunshine of the spotless mine, and how it doesn't
actually do you any good to not remember the things
that have happened to you that were hard because you
learn from them, and that you'll just keep repeating it.
So he's, I think, an example of someone who is
refusing to process it for whatever reason, and he is
doomed to make the same mistake, and there is probably
a story in his head, like if I saw him
for therapy, where I'd be like, why does it so
important for you to corral this thing even though it
could kill, it could harm so much if it's swallowing
horses whole babe, Yeah, your kids are smaller than horses.
Everyone you love is smaller than a horse, which makes
them easier to eat. Yeah, and so putting all these
people at risk it is nonsensical actually what he's doing,
which maybe lends more to your theory, Hannah, what he's
doing is so dangerous and reckless, and like I just
kept thinking the Huberus when we were watching it. But
I do see a lot of people, I think, especially
in like I don't know, capitalistic culture, our Western culture,
who really feel like they can conquer anything if they
just try hard enough, and they aren't able to surrender,
for example, girl, and they aren't able to surrender to
the fact that there are bigger You need to humble
yourself before the bigness that is nature, animals, alien life.
And that's what's the difference between OJ as well. Right,
A part of being an animal wrangler successful with animals
is you have to respect them. You have to respect
things bigger than you and powerful. You have to respect
the rules and always, and JUP does not respect the rules.
So we will take another break here and be back
with treatment. So who are we thinking about for treatment?
Speaker 2: I am thinking about OJ, So I guess I'll go
first here. Okay, surprise surprise you guys, huge surprise and
a Bingo square. Probably is OJ is a prime can it?
Speaker 1: For?
Speaker 2: MDR?
Speaker 1: I don't think you've actually talked about AMDR for a
while in a while, so agreed.
Speaker 2: I haven't, And I've been doing a lot of it
lately because I've been getting some really strong cases for it,
appropriate that are very appropriate for it, and it's been
very successful. So it's a kind of on my mind.
But MDR. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy is a
very powerful therapy that works really well for a lot
of things, but in cases like OJ's where he was
present for a very bizarre event, and several of them
where he saw horrible things that he couldn't have possibly
digested all of that that he saw. But we'll start
with his dad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the scene in the car, the scene where
he's waiting with his dead body, exactly, the things they
give him the nickel.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that things like that would with him. The
image of seeing his dad with his eye out would
stick with him. It would be frozen flash fro was
in his mind. And we already know he doesn't like
to talk much. EMDR doesn't necessarily require clients to do
a lot of talking. It's a lot of letting the
brain do what it's supposed to do to process and
a lot of the eye movement thing. How the therapy
works is it works on two key principles. One is
that we have an adaptive processing network in our brain that,
like I was mentioning earlier, naturally wants to process what
we go through to make it usable information. It takes
it out of being emotional information we need to react
to to survive and allows it to become usable information
that we can categorize and store like a library so
that we can pull from it as needed spontaneously to
survive anything else. Similar and with the therapy you trigger
or eye movements to enact what happens during rem sleep
and remsleep is when our brain naturally processes information anyway.
In dreams, we work on moving information from the emotional
side of our brain on the right to logical information
on the left. And you want to engage both sides,
both hemispheres of the brain to do that, which is
why our eyes flip back and forth, because we're allowing
information to be synthesized between the sides of our brain,
and that's how it goes from emotionally reactive to okay,
resourced and useful information. The other thing that having eye
movements or any other kind of alternating stimulus on either
side of the body, whether it's touch, sound, or visual
is it helps disrupt dissociation, so it keeps a person
concretely aware that they are in the present and not
in the traumatic incident. Again, and oftentimes when people are
overwhelmed with terrifying moments of their life, they dissociate back
into that moment or into another one that is just
like it, and they're powerless again, and they seek control
over past, present, and future, but only a sliver of
the present because they know they're okay in the present,
so they don't need to worry about it, so they
worry instead about the past where they got hurt and
the future where they get hurt again. What the therapy
does is it grounds them concretely to you are okay
right now, and then because the body is reminded of that,
it relaxes, and you think about the two things that
heal trauma is dispairing a distressing stimuli with a relaxed
muscle body MDR is one way to get there. There
are many but relaxed muscle body distressing stimuli. Pairing those
equals a calming response that allows that healing to take place.
So oja with all of these whole horrible, overwhelming stimuli,
Like we hear the sound as an audience, but imagine
how loud all those sounds would have been, or what
he's likely to be hearing is the sound that he
thought were bullets, and he's likely to have that initial
fear that you're just seeing dust kickup as those metal
fragments that we learned later is basically it's alien shitting
just fucked up. Agreed, But it was random metal fragments
that got stuck in the horse, stuck in the house
that all of a sudden he sees his dad struck
by one. So he's gonna hear that, he's gonna see it,
he's going to have all that sensory input connected, and
then he's going to have to recover from it. And
I think EMDR would be a great therapy for someone
like him that doesn't especially want to talk, but can
probably sit in front of a light bar and have
his eyes go back and forth and have me say
what are you noticing now? And he can repeat that
and say as much or as little as he wants,
and then okay, go with that, and he doesn't have
to explain a damn thing to me. He doesn't have
to connect to anything other than his own experience and
let his brain do that work, which would probably work
for him as behaviors because he would get it quick
once he felt it. So I think, for all of
those reasons for oj AMDR would be my therapy of choice,
and I think he'd respond tremendously well to it.
Speaker 1: I agree, yeah, because he's not a talker, and if
you just had him sit down in front of a
therapist to do like talk therapy, yeah, hell no. No.
So I'm going to take the talker, which is Emerald.
And ironically, I think what would really help Emerald, at
least the Emerald we see at the beginning of the movie,
is the interpersonal effectiveness techniques that you learn in dialectical
behavioral therapy, because she does have a hard time connecting
her desires with how to appropriately convey them. So a
lot of DBT is kind of centered on two principles,
which is distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness. And so even
with the distressed tolerance part, I think that would also
help as well, because as we've talked about, she seems
to be relying on maybe a series of we would
call maladaptive coping skills. Maybe we'd also call them self
destructive coping skills, is what they're called. A lot in DBT,
so the drinking, the casual sex, the vaping, the who
knows what she's doing, like running around she's doing.
Speaker 2: She definitely gave like the gonna go see a man
about a dog kind of line.
Speaker 1: Stealing from Jupiter's farm ranch place, stealing the horse. Yeah,
Like she does a lot of impulsive stuff, right, And
so what DBT does which I think would help her,
is it slows you down. You learn all about mindfulness,
so it has to slow you down, which would be
good for her because she does seem to be very
go go go. She relies a lot on distraction, So
it would require her to learn how to sit in
the moment, which is good reflect how she's actually feeling,
which I don't think she does enough of, yeah, which
is And so I might even have her keep like
a thought record kind of thing of like when you're
wanting to do this destructive behavior, and we'll define what
those are. I want you to take a beat and
think to yourself, why do I want to do that?
What emotion's going on right now? Was there a trigger?
Is there another skill I could try and practice instead?
And then sometimes you can also do the after evacs,
which is like I did the thing already, how do
I feel now? What maybe could have done differently? So
just really practicing building awareness into why you have these
habits and what you're trying to actually do to feel better,
and can we try something else? And then like I said,
she probably would need. Sometimes literal templates is also what's
good for DBT, like literal templates about like how do
I tell someone that I'm having a feeling in a
way that they will actually hear it? How do I
request something from someone? So she's someone i'd teach, like
dear man to which you can look up if you're
interested in that, because it's a long acronym. But I
think she would benefit a lot from having these skills
in her back pocket to pull from, because even though
she is very extroverted and seems very charming and maybe
he can get things she wants in the moment, she
actually can't communicate her literal emotional needs. And I think
that's what she really needs help with, is like slowing
down learning replacement skills, learning that what she's doing is
actually coping skills maybe aren't serving her, and then being
like really talking through like your actual support system, your
brother when you get pissed off because he won't do
this with you, Why does that feel so important? Are
you actually helping him understand what you need? And that's
where things like the dear man and stuff would come in,
of like how do you actually articulate what's going on
instead of just saying why don't you drink with me?
Or such a stick in the mud, and then he
can just be like, Oh, you're being us so annoying again.
I like tell clients if you say it like that,
they don't know what's going on in your head. They
don't know why you want them to do this thing
with them, they don't know why it's important. They just
think you're being annoying or random or whatever, and they're
not mind readers. You have to be clear with people
about the story in your head, about what's going on,
so that they can also correct it if they need to.
That's a lot of that stuff too. At DBT is
slowing down whatever narrative you're riffing off of, which I
think she also has with like the gene jacket story.
There's a lot of strong narratives in her head about
who she is that she also needs to take more
responsibility for and practice the difference between what actually is
happening and the story I'm hearing about it. So that's
what I would do with Emerald. I think she needs
a lot of like more that heavy handed skills based stuff,
and because she is maybe ADHD I think that can
help to have more concrete things, like a workbook that
you can focus on and reflect on instead of just
like trying to everything. So I decided that I would
work with OJ and Emerald and I would do family
therapy with them. Essentially sibling therapy is what I would
be doing with them. Now, something that I've heard is
that when people hear family therapy they think that if
every single person from the family can't come, that they
can't do it. And you can do family therapy in
all different kinds of ways. Family therapy can be done
where you are with siblings, you can work with a
whole family, you can work with a couple. There's so
many different combinations that you can do the same kinds
of things with different groups of people and it can
still be considered family therapy. So one of the things
that I do when I work with siblings and also
sometimes with couples, and this is kind of the same
idea that we see in the film that we already discussed,
which is that they get a new task. And so
what I would do with them in my therapy room
is I would ask them to complete this exercise that
I do with that I do with siblings that I
do with couples. And so the way it goes is
essentially one person is the speaker and one person is drawing.
The person who is speaking is describing a piece of
paper and the shapes on it that are in front
of them to the person who has to draw, and
they can't see it, right, say, they can't see it.
I usually set them back to back and so they
can't see what the person is drawing, and so they
just have to go based on how they see the picture.
The goal of this is it never looks the same.
It never looks like the picture. That's what the goal is.
It never looks like the picture. And and what the
real goal is is that then we talk about communication, Right,
why did when this person was the speaker, maybe the
picture was a little bit clearer versus the other way around.
It's usually something like a house, right, or like it's
like a house like yeah, like just like truthfully, just shapes. Yeah,
most of the time, it's just and so and a
part of the reason why I would want to do
that with them is, as we've talked about, they have
a hard time communicating, and so I would do this
activity with them to help them understand that you're looking
at this picture and you're trying to describe something, and
there's different ways that you can do that, and there's
different ways that can be effective, but that when we're
talking to somebody, we have to give them more information.
More information is always better than less information people. I know,
I have a lot of couples. When I work with
couples and they come in and one person is able
to really express themselves and one person isn't, and they're
not able to accommodate each other. For that experience, it's
a good exercise helping people realize how much they rely
on assumptions. Yes, and assuming that people think the way
they think exactly. So when I say draw a straight
line up, yes, I assume you know also know what
that means.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: It really is a good exercise for realizing how specific
you actually have to be in communication exactly.
Speaker 2: And that even then it's going to require revision.
Speaker 1: Yes, So making assumptions really fucks everything up side note
everyone assumptions, especially in couple especially in couple relationships. But
I feel like with the sibling therapy, part of the
reason why we want to do that is to help
them both understand how vague they are being in their
descriptions and how they're expressing things to each other. And
so I think that would help them. A give them
a new project they can try together, be it, lets
me see it in real time, which also is very
helpful to see how they work together. So I get
to see them do that in real time and see
then I can talk to them about communication. And is
a good way to have a physical example of we
just did some thing and you saw what the outcome was. Yeah,
And I think it would be helpful for them to
improve their communication. Do you think it would also be helpful.
I'm curious what you think, because we were talking about
how the project of this movie helps them. If they
didn't have the alien thing, do you think it would
be helpful if you gave them maybe a small project
on the farm that maybe had nothing to do with
like the business business to do together, Like there's this
day to fix it up together, figure out how to
do that. That's something you do every week together, no
matter what happens. When the two of you, you kind
of come together and you work on something that you
love that means something to both of you. Yeah, absolutely together, Yeah,
I would definitely give them something like that to help
them to have to work together in the moment, which
is which is why they're so successful in the film.
So really, I would be doing this with the OJ
and Emerald at the beginning of the movie, yeah, and
not necessarily the ones at the end, because at the
end they've had like almost post traumatic growth together. Yeah,
and they're in a much different place. Yeah. But I
just want to talk about sibling therapy because I don't
talk about it very much. So yeah, all right, Well,
one last break here and me back with final thoughts.
All right, Hannah, because this is one of your faves,
I'll have you go first. So I love this movie.
I loved it when we saw it in the I think,
did we see it together in the movie theater? I
think so. Nope, Yeah, I think we did.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: I loved seeing it in the movie theater. It was
very shocking and very exciting. It was just a beautiful
way to tell a really interesting story. And the acting
is excellent, the cinematography is amazing, and I really enjoy
the sibling relationship. You know, it's so rare that we
have in media a family of people of color who
have good relationships with each other, or who can grow
towards each other and are able to have positive relationships.
We don't see that very much, and so a part
of what I really loved about this is that we
got to see a really beautiful relationship in a different
context for once, which is really nice. And Yeah, and
I love it. I love everything about it. I watch
it every once in a while. I bought it because
that's how much I like it, So I will definitely
watch it a thousand more times. All right, I'll always
go to you, Ben, since this is your first watching
of it.
Speaker 2: It is my first watching of it, and I loved it.
I have loved each of Jordan Peele's movies that I've
seen for similar reasons. I love the way he works
everything into the story. He's going to show it to you,
and then he's going to tie it together throughout the story,
and it will all make a full complete circle at
the end, and you won't necessarily see what he's going
to show it to show you, but then he'll show
you in the end and kind of give you that
sense of accomplishment that you understood his film. And he
lays it up but also works a lot of things
in subtly, like the way these characters gain mastery of
themselves and their story and their history and their race
and the exclusions that are in there, like they're going
to be famous because of the work that they did.
She used her technological wizardry to get those pictures and
use them in the same rotary thing. I forgot what
the name of that that first motion picture clip is,
but I know they have it at the Field Museum
here in Chicago. What I didn't know that, or the
Chicago History Museum, one of them, because I think they
showed it the Columbia Exposition, Colombian Exposition.
Speaker 1: Figuring that out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they have it, or they have a thing
but where you spin a circular thing about Nickelodeon.
Speaker 1: It's not called that, but I know what you mean.
Why do you think there was a nickel because it's
a Nickelodeon.
Speaker 2: There you go behind the dad's eye.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, there you go. Symbolism, symbolism. I was just
gonna say that this movie, every time I watch it,
I noticed something new, And that's also what makes it
really fun.
Speaker 2: Those little things like that. That's that kind of thing
appeals to me as an audience member, but the easter
egg kind of thing that he puts into these like yeah,
the nickel I mean seriously, is a nickelodeon? That's why,
exactly why? And watching that I remember watching that as
a kid. I don't know if maybe it's it's one
of the museums here. Anyway, they have that horse thing
where you spin the pictures and she is taking pictures
with the well.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, which is another spin rudimentary.
Speaker 2: Yep, correct, and each rotation is a picture. But she's
taking a still shot, which is how they did that
moving picture. It wasn't a movie.
Speaker 1: They picture picture, picture, picture, picture, picture picture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's they created their own camera to do that.
Her own way of doing it took a picture I
think every ten feet or something to catch the horse moving.
And that was invented. And she's inventing a new way
to capture pictures with the well, to capture pictures vertically
of this alien to prove it, and her and her
brother both had to completely actualize themselves in their own
ways to form a complete unit and rescue their family
farm and their history and make relevance of this jockey
who was gone. And they did it in a way
that's relevant to their family by recreating that shot mechanic.
It's just brilliant writing to tell a very human story
but also make it all relevant to itself, to the characters,
to society at large, and do it in a way
that's entertaining masterpieces.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I also love this movie and I'm excited
for you to watch it another time, Ben, because, like
Hanna was saying, it's such a tightly written story that
every time I watch it, I notice new things, Like
I didn't realize because I've only seen it. Maybe this
is like my third time watching it. I never noticed
how much set up they do in the beginning of
the movie, laying the groundwork for like where he's bread
crumbing about Jube's show, where you hear Jupe in the
far distance practicing for the show, Like I never noticed
that at first, Like this movie. And I've seen this
movie like twenty times and I didn't fucking notice either.
So this movie does a great job of yeah, like
bread crumbing, all the stuff that's gonna happen later, like
everything makes sense, which I didn't appreciate the first time
I watched it. One because it was the first time
I watched it but also it felt so random with
like the chimp stuff, and then it went to this family,
and so I've appreciated it more every time I watch it.
I love all the performances in it. I love that
it felt more et esque. I love an alien movie,
and this is more like a sci fi adventure situation,
like a family sci fi drama, then a horror movie.
So when I went into it the first time, I was,
you know, expecting something like Us, which scared the Jesus
out of me.
Speaker 2: So alien robots bad.
Speaker 1: Just for the record, yes, exactly, And so I love
this movie. I'll watch it again. I love Daniel Kalua
in it. I love Kiki Palmer in it. I love
that it's such a tight little movie. I love when
the alien shits all over their house out of revenge,
which is so disgusting. But yeah, I will watch this
movie ten times over. And this is yeah three for
three with Jordan Peele Movies on the podcast. So if
you like this, we also did Us and we've done
get Out, so we've covered them all so far exactly.
All right, Well, on that note, we will close out
this episode in our second Spooky Season episode. If you
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have a good spooky season, Happy Halloween.