films

As a teacher to high school children, whenever we discussed social justice in the worlds of books we read, one question that would repeatedly come up was, “How do we understand privilege, if you say it is all around us—how can we work with the 'lowest' common denominator if there will always be more walls and more marginalization?”; and I remember not being to answer that question most of the time. By the end of the year, as a class, what we could loftily conclude was where our own privileges and marginalizations lay; given that we did all that we could to “not speak for others.” Of course, we should have realized that growing up in Bombay meant we were speaking for others; coming of age in the decades of neoliberal economic policies in the cultural capital of the country does that to a generation of people—by being the very people who later India Shining addresses, we yield that kind of power. The privilege to voice someone else’s story, and to use our particular frame to view their lives.

"Crazy" people aren't the only ones who are a bundle of stereotypes in popular media. We also see examples of therapists (including psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors) being presented in a very negative light. In the following examples, I highlight pop culture therapists who are incompetent in a variety of ways.

Some of these movies and television shows are, of course, comedies. Not only are therapists being mocked, but so are a variety of other people. What's interesting here is how similar a lot of the mocking of therapy is across various genres.

Throughout this list I've used the catch-all term "therapist" for consistency's sake. I've also used "incompetent therapist," although "incompetent" is often in the eye of the viewer.

This week a query in the Bitch office got me thinking about John Hughes films. And that got me thinking in soundtrack mode. And that lead to the realization that many of my favorite (or at least memorable on some level) 80s films have title tracks or songs that always accompany any thought of them. Read on for the list, and listen with caution: these will get stuck on replay in your head.