Cinema Therapy on YouTube

I started watching Cinema Therapy on YouTube a few weeks ago, and I've seen a few episodes by now. The two guys who host the show, Jonathan Decker (licensed therapist) and Alan Seawright (professional filmmaker), have a great rapport, probably because they used to be college roommates and are still great friends. Seawright can be a bit too weepy at times, but the two of them do a good job of analyzing movies from both a therapist's and a filmmaker's perspectives. Below, I'm embedding two of their videos, one about "Good Will Hunting" and the other about "The Matrix."

Decker's take on "Good Will Hunting" validates my own impression that, for the most part, the movie is therapeutically valid (Decker notes, of course, that the moment when Robin Williams's Sean Maguire attacks Matt Damon's Will Hunting is a lawsuit waiting to happen). I tend to think that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who won an Oscar for the movie's script, must have read some psychiatrist's work, such as M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, as a way to inform their script. To me, a lot of "Good Will Hunting" felt and feels like The Road Less Traveled. The authenticity is palpable: the breakthrough moment at the end, the swearing, the therapist who loses his temper—these things can all be found in Peck's classic work.

The duo's discussion of "The Matrix" doesn't break any new ground; I've heard and pondered pretty much all of their thoughts and arguments before, and I can certainly add to the insights Decker and Seawright offer to the viewer, especially from an Eastern perspective, but also in terms of philosophies like existentialism and the pseudo-philosophy of postmodernism, not to mention Sam Harris's very uncomfortable thoughts regarding the nonexistence of free will.