I hate the psychobabble.
I hate it. I hate that everyone is going to therapy. I hate that everyone is so focused on their own emotions and psyche. I hate that every character in every movie nowadays has to psychoanalyze themselves and each other, out loud.
Hate it.
Their choices are supposed to cause you to psychoanalyze them. That’s why it’s a story, and not a character-description you’re reading from a Pitch deck.
I hate that Zootopia 2 did this and everybody ate it up. I hate that the two to three clips I’ve seen of Stranger Things’ last season contrived scenes over and over to have characters just explain exactly what their own deepest fears and insecurities are to one another.
Remember when you were watching Finding Nemo, or Rocky, or Big, or On the Waterfront, or even Labyrinth, and you watched the story, and it ended, and that’s when you had to engage and think about what the characters were thinking and feeling? I mean even in kid’s movies, they don’t spell it out for you. You just get it because you don’t need to obsess over what the character’s inner world is. Their decisions made their inner world clear—and their inner world was only a topic in the story because it taught you something. Not because it’s just interesting to sort your personality into little slices.
We didn’t used to be so fascinated with how our own emotions and traumas and triggers worked. We used to just live life.
And obviously, if you notice a repeated pattern of doing something wrong or getting in a bad mood, you get called out by a friend or you notice the consequences of that and you try to correct it. In extreme cases that meant seeking help in therapy. But now everybody is a sidewalk therapist or patient. And everybody is having to neatly categorize their whole inner world into easily-sharpied labels and whip those out every five seconds.
It’s the self-obsession that I can’t stand. Look up. Look out. Figure out how you can make life easier for somebody else or make things outside of you better, or easier to understand.
If one more character goes, “shared trauma,” or “oversharing” or “my insecurity” I’m going to lose it.
