An open review about "In Treatment" (Part 1)

An open review about "In Treatment" in general, "Season 1" in particular and - of course - Gabriel Byrne, ending with a very important question to HBO.

Note: There's no "Season 2" in Germany so far! "Season 1" had been broadcasted only in November/December 2008 in Germany, where most of us had missed it. We just saw it, when it was repeated in January/February this year. Loved watching this outstanding TV series, we talked about it repeatedly afterwards. After "Season 2" had started in the US, we enjoyed reading a part of what is posted in this forum and on other pages, trying to avoid all the topics that deal with the second season. A few days ago I was finally asked to write some lines here and, maybe, add some new thoughts.
English is - and always will be - a foreign language to me. To express myself in another language than my own, leaves the feeling of insecurity and limitation.
The following is meant to be an essence of our conversation
and a reflection of what we've read as well as my very own thoughts - I hope it's intelligible.
And so ...

First of all I'd like to say that "In Treatment" is a beautiful work. Starting with a very smart, thoughtful writing and ending with some of the most brilliant and memorable performances that have ever been shown on the small screen. The idea to make a show about the emotional life and reduce it to its essentials - 'cause finally there are only two people in two chairs - was remarkable. That format creates a gripping intensity and has enabled its excellent cast, to express and visualize their characters' inner workings by giving a microscopically layered magnificent piece of acting.
Actually it was a twenty-five min. act play every night that just contained well-wrought dialogue and really great silent moments. So it's a striking example for the fact that less is sometimes more. In this case - much more.

If you still have the 'old-fashioned' idea that film making should basically be about storytelling and about the elaboration of characters, reflecting and dealing with issues relevant to present times, a lot of what is done nowadays just feels - quite empty. Their most distinctive feature is their similarity. It's like fast food; you watch and an hour later have already forgotten it. It's about characters you don't understand or don't care about, acting in a somehow strange world, you don't live in and don't really be interested in. Technical possibilities play a leading role and the plots are mainly just about action and effects. Besides, the tempo is so fast, if there was a well-hidden story worth seeing, there would be no time to think about it anyway. So the door to one of the essential ingredients of storytelling, the participation in the characters' actions, is shut. That's one of the reasons, why s quality program like "In Treatment" is as well important as it is a gift these days. It concentrates just on the characters and deals with problems, most of us can identify with. In the end it doesn't really matter whether you empathize in them or judge them, the important thing is - you can participate.
Moreover it's about the complexity of human behavior, the human soul; about a society that either don't care, have no time or forgot how to listen. I think the issues of human mind and heart are in its basics as old as our civilization itself and don't necessarily reflect just our time. But what mirrors our affluent society most striking, is the lack of real human relations and entanglement; and the need to take our problems to a therefore sacrosanct place to gain a hearing - a therapist's office.
Whatever you think about Paul, he really gives his patients his undivided attention, and he really listens. I think this kind of esteem alone can already have a therapeutic effect.

Without doubt there's no equal in the history of film portrayal of the work of a therapist. No wonder that this series received great attention in the professional world of psychotherapy. Since I'm neither a therapist nor have ever been in therapy, I'm not really qualified to say whether "In Treatment" is a realistic portrait of the therapeutic process or not; and to be honest, I never saw this as a kind of sole yardstick. IT isn't a documentary about psychotherapy. It doesn't claim to show clinical correct case studies about, how a therapist has to deal with different psychological damages or diseases. In spite all authenticity, it's still a drama, a fictional
story - what we see just comes from the imagination of writers. In "Season 1" we had a developing dramatic plot that was limited by a period of nine weeks. I don't think that in real life therapy sessions are that structured, and they surely don't follow any narrative intent or limited timeframe. That's why I think to approach or judge IT just on this level, isn't really the right way to do so. On the one hand it reaches its high credibility by a realistic and very wise description of the human nature. Whatever our superlative addicted media landscape might say us - the world isn't divided in heroes and failures, in winners and losers. We all have bright and dark sides, have great and pretty poor moments. And on the other hand it captivates by the convincing acting of a great ensemble, all above of its protagonist - Gabriel Byrne. I think the most important thing was to find not just a great actor but the right actor for this role. The heart of the show requires somebody, who the audience more than anything else believes, to be a smart listener as well as a keen observer, and he doesn't need to play that - he is.

Because in the end the center of IT isn't first and foremost psychotherapy. It's the story about the life and work and dreams of one specific therapist named Paul Weston; otherwise you could not just show different patients but different therapists as well. The patients we saw, were not chosen accidentally, 'cause in every patients story, Paul could find a part of his own life reflected. That's what creates emotional connections and builds the indispensable ground for drama. I assume Paul had about forty patients a week. To have eavesdropped on the sessions of the other thirty-five patients Paul has treated, would have been probably pretty boring. So the series is about Paul, new and exceptional and really the whole point is the format, to tell his story in sessions.

As mentioned above, Gabriel Byrne lead a terrific cast in the first season. Dianne Wiest, as Paul's former supervisor Gina Toll, couldn't give a more credible performance. To watch those two experienced actors with a noticeable stage background must have been for everyone, who's interested in a good piece of acting, simply a joy. The whole week we carefully watched every emotion in Paul's face, trying to get not just into his head but into his heart and soul. When he finally put down his professional exterior, fighting his own feelings on Fridays, we could get an idea of his real emotional state. That's what made their sessions so powerful and interesting.

Embeth Davidtz and the 'dead poet' Josh Charles had probably the most extreme job to take care of. That couple, dealing with a (simply expressed) broken marriage, was very special and particularly the character of Amy, was really troublesome. The fact that Paul didn't built the same strong emotional connection to them as to his other 'three' patients we saw, also didn't make this task exactly easier. Taken that precondition into consideration, they tremendously solved those challenge by calling up the most excessive stir of emotions, fighting with violent temper not just verbal but literally.

The story about Sophie, amazingly played by Mia Wasikowska, was in many ways the light of the show. Her story was the only one that took a good end. I think her 'suicide attempt' in Paul's office was a very intensive experience for both of them and brought them really close to each other. Besides, Paul knows how it feels to be left behind with a depressed mother. This circumstances - and maybe her youth - created an exceptional relationship, which was the basis for this successful treatment and the most interesting therapeutic process. The 'therapist' Paul Weston had his brightest moments here.
Alex's story was pretty complex, not least he was involved in a love triangle. As we had to learn eventually, he was a really damaged character. Physical strength and arrogance more and more falling apart and ending in a breakdown and in tears in front of Paul's office, were remarkably shown by Blair Underwood.
Rounding off the cast was perfectly supported by Michelle Forbes and Glynn Thurman.

Unquestionably the most significant story, that carried the whole first season, was the story about Laura and Paul. She was the only reason, Paul went to visit Gina, after their difficult history. On Monday we had her in person. In his meetings with Gina on Friday, she was in the room whether they spoke about her or not. She sandwiched his week, even played an important role in nearly half of his sessions with Alex. The season started and ended with her.

I've read that many people found her character annoying. I'm sorry to disappoint all those people but that's an assessment, my friends and I don't share at all. Melissa George playing the role of Laura was - just fantastic, and like Paul we loved this woman. Actually it was a pretty clever move to create a storyline of overriding importance, because you really had to watch every Episode, if you wanted to know what's going on between the two of them and finally in Paul's private life. So to some extent it feels like a contradiction in terms, describing in glowing words how much you enjoyed watching IT but on the other hand, to can't stand this woman and find her annoying. In a way half of the first season dealt with her and, without question, she was the most important person in the life of the leading man.

I've also read that her character was just to answer whether Paul sleeps or doesn't sleep with a 'patient'. To tell the truth, that's a question I've never asked myself and a huge simplification of her characters meaning and of her relationship with Paul. In my opinion there lies a misjudgement in this statement.
But to understand that, we have to take a closer look at what we've learned about Paul's and Laura's past, their current lives as well as their personalities.

We know that Paul's father, a heart surgeon, abandoned his mother for one of his patients when he was fifteen. Paul was left behind with a depressed mother, who was in a difficult state of mind. He took care of her, wanted to get her out of this. But whatever he tried, it didn't work and he couldn't understand why. He thought it was his fault and naturally he blamed his father for this terrible situation, in which he was trapped. He said, a child taken care of a parent is a reverse of the natural order of things, it's like a kind of death. From what we've seen, we can suppose that he was very emotional and soft in his teenage days. So that must have awfully hurt him and he really must have suffered from this circumstances. He would have needed somebody but, obviously, no-one took care of him. He said as a teenager, he was always in trouble. This experiences have influenced his entire life and, of course, the personality he became.

His father was the personification of everything Paul deeply despised. He said, he wanted to be everything when he grow up, except his father. His father was a very selfish man, who didn't have regard for anybodies feelings, simply took whatever he wanted. So Paul swore to himself that he would care about the feelings of other people. That, if he would marry and have kids some day, he would never do to his kids and his wife, what his father had done to him and his mother.

The burden that he couldn't help his mother rested heavily on his shoulders. I think that created the deep wish to understand and be able to help. In these days life was out of his control, he had no influence on it. That must have been a horrible as well as frightening experience. I can imagine, that's why he became a psychologist. Maybe he thought that would protect him from getting in a similar situation in his future, that he would be able to control things and steer them to a different direction. Or he felt, he has to work off his guilt by helping other people.

Besides it taught him the lesson, that needing somebody makes you vulnerable and in the end just hurts, 'cause, as Gina said, there's always the risk of losing it. Therefore he abandoned all his desires and longings in his heart of hearts and put up a protection wall and let nobody come really close to him. So I suppose it was like a kind of (emotional) death. He married a woman, who was grounded, honest and - most important - dependable, but he never really loved her. I think he needed 'silence' at this point in his life and maybe Gina was right, and he wanted to be mothered, something he never really had experienced before. In one of their sessions Kate told Gina that she couldn't get over how seriously Paul took her, when they started seeing each other. That he was constantly analyzing her, working very hard to figure her out. She said that Paul was the first person, that tried to understand her and that she felt very grateful to him for that. Until she realized that this had nothing to do with her, it was about him. She was just the patient married to the doctor. Twenty-five years she always had the feeling that he could walk out of any minute. I think that's one of the most terrible feelings you can have in a marriage. It looked like their relationship had somehow been rested on a misunderstanding.

The moment Paul married her, his own value system conflicted with the outline of his life and he got entangled in a web of half-truths. He promised himself, he wouldn't hurt his wife, like his father had done. But he did - 'cause what is worst than this kind of insensitivity. It doesn't really matter that this was not intentional, it's still painful. When Paul was talking about Kate cheating on him, Gina mentioned that he sounded very controlled; and Kate herself said that she doesn't believe, he would need her. Here the wheel turned full circle and we were back at Paul's childhood. Over all those years he had been preparing himself for such a moment by controlling his emotions. And it worked. As Gina said: "...and sometimes it seems you're not that upset about Kate...". You can't control when you really love and there are no guarantees. There will always be a feeling of need and, of course, you're vulnerable. But in spite the atmosphere between them was quite chilly, I think he really cares about Kate and respects her, after all she is the mother of his children; and children can compensate a lot - though not undefined. Actually it was just a question of time when his married life collapses like a house of cards.

It didn't come as a surprise that a doctor isn't a kind of 'higher being'. They're just ordinary people dealing with ordinary problems, as we all do. But what's really sad is, Paul never realized, he has to deal with his unsolved issues to take this weight of his mind and finally - to live. As he said to Alex: "...I would continue to deal with the complex difficult issues that we've been talking about, not sweep them under the carpet like you've been doing in your life. I can tell you one thing - they will creep up on you again...". Even though he intellectually of course knows and understands it, he never really cared about his own life. He is very harsh with himself and therefore - unfortunately - with the people around him. For the fact that he had spent much time studying the human mind and condition, he could be very thoughtless and naive in his private life.

But at least in his professional life there was nothing to fear with. He has high moral standards and takes his craft and the code of ethics very serious. He is compassionate and he really cares about his patients. It felt like he had lived and put all his passion only in this world, 'cause, due to the given boundaries, there was never the risk that somebody could come too close. As he said himself: "The parameters and the limitations are established and ethically defined.". This rules made him feel safe, actually it reminded me of that image of Sophie on her beam. And this construct of ideas had been working perfectly - until Laura went through his door.

I think that, already from the very first moment, both of them felt a great attraction and that, as the months have gone by, this feelings just have grown more and more into a very deep and passionate love. Laura said, she felt this way from their first session, and Kate said something along the lines: "How long is this been going on? ... I tell you when this started, it started a year ago didn't it!?". From the first moment Laura was as less just a patient for Paul, as Paul was a therapist for Laura. So the patient-therapist dynamic, Gina was talking about, never was the basis of their sessions. I think their conversations took place on an equal level.
Laura was the first woman, who simply went through his protection wall and touched those emotions, he had buried deep inside such a long time ago. But in contrast to her, Paul had become very skilled over the years in deceiving himself. He loved talking to her, longed for their next session and fantasized about her, but - due to the 'less than ideal situation' - he never had thought about living this feelings in reality. And he completely had left aside her part of the equation. Then "Season 1" started.

The first we saw was Laura in tears and Paul, who watched her crying. I think that was exactly the moment when his self-deception began to waver. He was moved about seeing her break down like this. Later he told Gina, this was the moment, where he just wanted to be with her, where he could have said 'fuck it all'. As their conversation developed Paul asked Laura: "Why haven't we talked about this before?". She answered: "I think we have. It's been here all the long. You mean to say you've never noticed it?". He knew exactly what she was talking about. And he also knew that - now - he was in trouble. Not as a therapist - but as a man.

Laura's character should tell us something about Paul's personality, actually a very intimate part of him, as she is the embodiment of all his longings. She is young and really beautiful, very sexy, in a sometimes weird and dirty way, and at the same time she exudes a deep vulnerability. That madly turned him on. He once said to Gina: "But I could manipulate her to do anything I wanted. I know that.". In any other context that would have startled me, but it just expressed how much he wanted her, that his fantasies about Laura went wild. And it also showed us that Paul was struggling with his (not really existing) sexual life.
Laura is very smart and she sensed a lot in him, 'cause nearly everything, she said about him, was true. He loved talking to her, just listening to her. It felt like she was the equal, Kate never had been. Over the weeks we got the impression that she knows Paul better than he knows himself. So, if you approach their sessions on a professional level, for sure you can't get nowhere. All there could be left to say, especially after week three, was that this guy is a pretty poor therapist - and I think that would be terribly wrong. But as Laura said, he definitely could be a fucking prick.

Since the meaning of Laura's story differed completely from those of Paul's 'real' patients, we couldn't recognize a significant approach to therapy in their sessions. We know that Laura's fiancé Andrew recommended that she sees him, because he wanted to tie the knot. He knew that Laura usually baled out of her relationships and he was hoping, Paul could help her.
We also learned that Laura's mum was dying of cancer when she was fifteen. She took care of her father, who was depressed and grieving after the death of his wife. She tried to get him out of this, but it didn't work. The summer after her mother passed away, she spent with a couple, friends of her father, in San Diego. When David came to the DC area six months later, she had an affair with him. She described her home as bleak and suffocating and said, she didn't want to be there. It sounded like she was trapped in an (emotional) prison. She wanted David to help her get out of this and, like Paul said, he took advantage of her. We also know that David was about twenty-five years older than her, and that he was the first man Laura slept with. So in her first experience with a man it was all about sex, 'cause what other interest could a forty year old man have in a sixteen year old girl. She said that she seduced him and compared this with the novel 'Lolita'. This comparison could give us an idea of what this affair looked like.

Laura would've needed somebody in this phase of her life, but she was alone - nobody took care of her. She blamed herself that she couldn't help her father and also for the affair with David. So she made similar experiences as Paul at the same age, and like him, she put a heavy weight on her shoulders. Moreover she got taught the same lesson, that needing somebody makes you vulnerable and in the end just hurts.

Since they rarely talked about Laura's past in the sessions we saw, we can only speculate what effect those experiences had on her life. It felt like she baled out of emotional relationship with men, because she was afraid of getting hurt or ending up trapped again. We weren't really in a position to say whether she uses sex for this 'escape'. That restroom story, she told Paul, was just a rough night out, where she was emotionally turbulent, had too much drinks and got a bit into bad ways; and through her affair with Alex, she wanted to get back at Paul, to provoke him, so that she eventually got an reaction after all. This two situations were neither and escape from Andrew nor from Paul and shouldn't be overrated.

But through David she lost her trust in men. I think Paul was right and this guy really had destroyed her ability to communicate with men from a non-sexual place, 'cause after David she thought, she had to sleep with a man to make him interested in her. In addition he certainly had influenced her attitude towards everything what is connected with sex. Laura told Paul that she had very romantic thoughts about sex when she was young, that she imagined an angel would come and, when they're in bed, she would touch her and erase her former life. All this romanticism and innocence David had shattered irretrievable at a time, Laura was most vulnerable. She was way too young for such an affair. So he must have left a painful disillusionment behind him. Apart from the fact that she wanted to provoke Paul, that could be a possible reason for talking in such a direct way about sex. To some people that maybe sounded vulgar but to me, there lies something sobering in her straightness. Maybe that was the only way she could handle those experience by pretending, it would've been no big deal.

But in reality it had hurt her and she was looking for protection behind the same wall as Paul. She had also let nobody come emotionally close to her. I'm sure Paul was the first man, she was deeply in love with and whom she really trusted. She had feelings for him from their very first session, but it took one year until she dared to tell him, how she felt about him. Like Paul she was afraid of her own emotions and finally her weakest moment was responsible for the revelation of her love. It looked like this was courage born of desperation, 'cause that must have been a huge step for her.

Now let's go back to the misjudgement I mentioned above. Laura was never just a 'patient' for Paul and it was never the question, if Paul sleeps with a 'patient' just because of sexual attraction - he doesn't. Besides Gina, she was actually the only person, who managed that he, at least sometimes, stopped being a therapist. We really liked the way she was able to talk with him and, even when he behaved like an idiot, we liked who he was, when he was with her. So the story of Laura and Paul was an extraordinary and great, beautiful and very sexy love story. I think their feelings for each other were a new and very complex experience for both of them. Because of their similar childhood experiences they really understood each other and connected on the same deep emotional level. Like Laura said: "Something is going on between us Paul. Something more - and you know it. You're just too fucking afraid.". As i mentioned above, you just had to listen to her - most of the time, she was right.

Over the weeks we got to know that Laura wanted this love to become reality and that she finally wanted to live. We also learned that Paul's feelings were strong enough to act against his own principles. "But I want to be with her ... and I don't care what it means, ... I don't care what it costs, ... I don't care.". The question left was whether Paul has the courage to live his love as well as physically act on his sexual desire for her, not just in his fantasies but in real life.
So, if it was intended to get clear about whether Paul fucks a patient, the mark would have been overshot by far; anyway, I think IT is a much too intelligent series to serve such a flat chliché.

Part 2 will follow in a separate thread!