Can Anyone Help? I Need Help Getting Help (Jonah Hill’s ‘Stutz’ [2022])

Nov 28

★★★★

Netflix and Chill (and Get Free Therapy)

For months now, I’ve been telling myself that I should probably go to therapy. The only problem is: I’m too fucking arrogant to get myself there. I’m plagued and stopped by thoughts like, “Well, what’s a therapist gonna tell me about my problems that I don’t already know?” Or, “I just need to meditate more.” Or, “I’ll get through it on my own.”

I know. It’s silly. And it’s just wrong. I realize how phony this defiance toward seeking therapy is when I’m always advocating for mental health and self-improvement. It’s also bigoted of me to believe I’m better off with my meditation and mindfulness practice and doubt therapy’s efficacy or the fact that it saves people’s lives.

Here’s what all this arrogance and hubris honestly boils down to: I just don’t want be someone who needs someone. (I understand how that statement alone is proof enough that I definitely should see someone.)

But I’m just not there yet.

That’s why I’ve so desperately clung to my meditation and mindfulness journey. Nobody needs to do anything for me. I can do it by myself.

I’ve never liked the idea of dumping my problems on someone who has their own problems. I actively try to spare people of having to deal with me and my problems because I believe that’s the compassionate thing to do. I have always firmly believed that my going to someone for anything is a nuisance and selfish on my part. And, since we’re being honest, I often have to remind and force myself to show other people I need their advice or comfort. I’ll seek advice when I already know what to do, appear frenzied as an invitation to soothe me. Things like that. And in doing this for so long, I have forgotten (or never learned, really) how to actually accept people’s compassion toward me. How to accept help.

There was really only one way I’d go to therapy and accept help as the stubborn person I am today. And Jonah Hill has found that way.

Through film.

Hill knows people like me are everywhere. The people who prefer to work through their stuff on their own. People whose therapy is just being alone with their hobbies. People who attend therapy when they write, read, or go to the gym. When they go for walks, meditate, or draw. And what Hill has brilliantly learned and leveraged, is that people like me also attend therapy when they get completely absorbed in a film or TV show.

Enter Hill’s debut Netflix documentary: Stutz.

Who (and What) is Stutz?

Stutz is a documentary and tribute to Hill’s personal therapist and now-friend, Phil Stutz. In it, we explore Hill’s own journey with therapy and Stutz’s career and life.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Stutz is a therapy session. For its 96-minute runtime, we are in a room with Hill and Stutz and are invited to learn (and even participate in) behavioral tools that helped Hill deal with the loss of his brother, strained relationship with his mother, depression, and self-image.

Stutz is not a film that “depicts” mental health. This is a powerful and subversive film literally about mental health. And it earns its subversive quality by refusing to do the thing so many Hollywood films do when they try to make a movie about mental health: be all coy and avant-garde about it.

Hill has had enough of the facade. Mental health is no charade or contrived arthouse project for him. He wants to help people, and he wants to let people actually in on the conversation instead of just saying he wants to let people “in on the conversation.” In fact, about a quarter-way through the film, Hill literally rips off the wig he’s been wearing used to disguise the passage of real time. As he does this, he tells Stutz he believes it’s wrong to be making a supposed honest and vulnerable film about mental health while simultaneously trying to pretend as if his film is being shot in a single day/therapy session.

With wig in hand, Hills admits to Stutz (and by proxy, reveals to us) his guilt over lying to the audience about how long the film is taking them to shoot—that the film is actually taking them years to shoot and polish. With Stutz’s encouragement, Hill lets us in on his creative process and admits to no longer wanting to pretend as if his creativity and film-making are perfect. That his film-making and creative process, like his mental health journey, are messy and imperfect endeavors.

We are along for this ride. And while we now know it’s an imperfect film that took years to create, it is beautiful.

It is honest. It is not bashful, or contrived. In wanting to deconstruct his artistry, Hill actually creates one of the most artistic films about mental health I’ve seen to date. This is because art—good art at its core—is honest. And that’s what this film is.

Talking the Talk

This film—yes—has a lot of talking. This is a film that literally features a recorded conversation. But it’s not a self-serving conversation that isolates us. We’re not just watching two gentlemen talk amongst themselves. This is a film in which two people talk to each other; and they actually have something to say to us.

They are talking the talk.

They talk about their problems, and it’s not indulgent or gratuitous. Its purpose is to provide real context to the actual meat of this film: the tools and concepts Stutz has developed throughout his career that have helped changed the lives of his patients. These tools and concepts have helped Hill through some of his darkest times. At some points, the film invites us to practice and use the tools at the same time Stutz walks Hill through them.

Stutz and Hill talk us through (with the help of visual aids drawn by Stutz himself) cognitive and behavioral tools and concepts such as:

Part X (the dark side of our psyche; the villain in our life; the voices in our heads that tell us we can’t)
Radical Acceptance (complete and utter acceptance of all parts of yourself; expunging judgment and fear and desire that leads to pain)
The Grateful Flow (the way to penetrate through the dark cloud hovering above you; naming specific things you’re grateful for)
The String of Pearls (the belief that every act, seemingly large or small, is valuable and that you are the only one to continue placing pearls on the string and showing up for yourself)
The Snapshot (the illusion of your perfect life or goal, and how it actually lacks any depth and stands to disappoint you)
The Maze (when you are stuck in the quest to “get even” with someone, trapped in never-ending resentment, or clinging to anger)

Stutz’s drawings of his tools and concepts

Without the tools and concepts, yes, the film would lack some substance and revert back to just being a conversation. But I’m convinced that even without them, the honest and heartfelt conversation between Hill and Stutz is still meaningful and worthwhile. The two are that compatible, inviting, warm, and vulnerable. You can’t help but to feel a part of what’s unfolding. The closed-door conversation. The hearts on their sleeves. Their friendship.

Stutz doesn’t feel voyeuristic, or pointless, or self-serving.

It feels… like I should have just taken up therapy years ago.

In the one 96-minute session/film, I felt seen.

But strangely, I didn’t identify with Hill that much.

Well, of course I did on some level, but what surprised me is that I actually identified with and felt seen by none other than Stutz himself.

The therapist.

When Therapists Need Therapy

I most resonated with Stutz largely due to the fact that I’ve intentionally refused myself the luxury of being open with my pain, and often prefer to be people’s steadfast rock instead. In other words?

I prefer to be people’s “therapist” versus the one needing the therapy. I prefer to be other people’s Stutz.

The difference between Stutz and me, though? He’s an actual doctor and certified professional of many decades, and I’m just a smug asshole who thinks she knows the answers to everything.

But I don’t know… That’s just the role I play.

That’s what I am for a lot of people. The steady, always-there-for-you rock with a deep well of wisdom and a shoulder to cry on.

Michelle always has the best advice.

Michelle’s always the voice of reason.

I’m not worried about Michelle. She’s fine.

And don’t get me wrong. I love being that for people. For my friends, my family, and even strangers. I like being the person you can rely on to give sound advice, be nonjudgmental, or non-reactive.

But these days, I’ve been… not that.

Or, I still am, but I’ve been feeling deeply resentful of my position. I feel spent to the nth degree. I feel totally depleted.

And for once, I just want to be able to let myself need someone.

I think some people who know me might be surprised to learn that I suffer from just as much heartache, failure, and anger as the next person. That I need someone or something beyond me.

I know this because of the surprise I felt when I learned Stutz himself suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and that, contrary to what it seems, he is far from being perfect. It’s not until maybe 10–20 minutes in that Stutz’s constant fidgeting in his seat and shaking hands are revealed to be symptoms of his Parkinson’s. And it’s exactly this detail that tears down Stutz’s perfect veneer and allows people like me—the people who prefer to be the therapist—to feel vulnerable, too.

It’s when Stutz reveals and shares his struggles with his disease, his own pain of having lost a brother, his loneliness, and his failure to make the love of his life work out, that I really understood what made Stutz so special.

Everyone, regardless of their position, preferences, and past, needs someone to talk to. You could be the most revered, sought-after, successful therapist in the world; that doesn’t make you immune to human suffering. That doesn’t make you impervious to pain, loss, bad luck, physical ailments, grief. The pain in Stutz’s eyes when he laments over his inability to be with the one he loves will tell you that.

This is what I mean when I say Stutz is an open and honest two-way conversation and therapy session. It’s not just Stutz asking Hill, “Well, how does that make you feel?”

We clearly are in the presence of a beautiful friendship, and we clearly see that Stutz needs Hill, too. Hill is his patient, sure, but more importantly, Hill is his friend. Hill provides him a specific reprieve, and makes him laugh. In fact, Stutz asks Hill at the beginning of the film something like, “Well, can you make me laugh every once in a while [throughout the session]?”

And then the two do exactly that. They share a laugh together.

It’s this relationship that they invite us into. That make us feel heard, seen, better.

Eating Constant Shit/The Irony of Getting “Better”

While I was feeling heard, seen, better, there was one other thing I started feeling. As Hill and Stutz are so vulnerably sharing their pain, and as I’m gleaning all the wisdom Stutz has to share, I felt a sudden hypocrisy with myself. I thought, “Wait a second. How much of this is exploitative? Aren’t I just relying on Stutz the same way people rely on me?”

There’s an irony about improving your own mental health that nobody tells you about, and that irony was what I was experiencing. When you finally get to a “good” and healthy mental state, you open yourself up to eating so much more shit. It comes with the territory. You’re the steady, happy, has-their-shit-together person? You eat the shit, constantly. Your own, your colleagues’, your family’s, your friend’s, your neighborhood grocer’s, everybody’s. Because you are this seemingly whole and positive person, many people assume you have all the mental bandwidth and patience to deal with their problems, too. You’re that person for them, so you can’t really express pain or that you get affected, too. You have to eat the shit. You just take it and continue being the strong sister, friend, daughter, cousin, coworker, spouse, therapist. And this pressure can sometimes mount to a point of stress and pain and anger.

There’s a line that Stutz says twice that remains most relevant to me. He says to Hill, with a soft and kind hand, “I wish you would stop dumping so much shit on me.”

While the two laugh it off, there’s a legitimate sincerity to this wish. It’s not that Stutz resents Hill, or wants to stop being a therapist, it’s just that he wishes people would stop dumping so much shit on him.

And it’s a valid request. It’d be naive to think, “Well, he’s a therapist! He should know what he signed up for.” He might be a renowned therapist, helped countless people change their lives, and now the subject of a very moving Netflix documentary, but Stutz is still human. And eating constant shit when he has his own shit to eat gets difficult. While the film never tells us if Stutz sees his own therapist, it leans into Stutz and Hill’s beautiful friendship. By the end of the film, it’s clear that Stutz gets as much from his relationship with Hill as Hill gets from Stutz. And the two, together, help each other get better.

For so long, I’ve preferred to keep my pain…well, mine. I’ve denied myself therapy for years. Like I said, I’ve always thought it to be an act of compassion to spare others from my problems.

But as we’ve seen, people (even people like me and Stutz) need others.

And this film has pushed me closer to truly understanding and accepting that. I’m not immune to needing people. I’m not immune to needing help.

So, I don’t know. Maybe one day soon I’ll finally get the help I’ve convinced myself I don’t need.

I’m just glad films like Stutz exist to help me along the way to help.

Michelle Han-Taylor