BOLANO's "LAST EVENINGS on EARTH"

Here's an interesting article that indicates we might not get any CLOSURE at the end of these SESSIONS:

“This isn’t a results-oriented practice.”

https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/hbo/in-treatment-season-4-review-hbo/

there have been a few recent studies that suggest pure psychodynamic therapy (aka “psychotherapy”), as distinguished from the cognitive-behavioral model, might not be as helpful to patients as popularly imagined.

Freudian-style techniques have fallen out of favor and the more practical cognitive-behavioral approaches show the most efficacy both in the short term and over time.

In Treatment very much relies on the trope of a probing therapist identifying hidden demons in a patient’s brain, teasing out the trauma, and sparking a slow series of epiphanies through this exploration.

Especially with what we’ve learned in the last two decades, these forced revelations can feel quite hollow.

So it is with Eladio (Anthony Ramos), one Dr. Lawrence’s three primary patients

(the show is structured so that throughout the season, we’ll see roughly six weeks of each patient, and six weeks of Dr. Lawrence meeting with her own therapist)

who works for a rich family as a home health aide but dreams of the poetry of Bolano and Marquez and Paz, and can’t sleep. In the process of seeking medication, he meets a brick wall in Dr. Lawrence, who quotes Jung before offering up this piece of speculation:

“Maybe we stay awake to avoid the moment we have to come to in our lives… where the dream world falls away, reality sets in.”

I’m no expert, but in my experience people with insomnia have wanted nothing more than to sleep, and if real life was such a burden, they’d want to escape it through sleep now and again, rather than being fully and constantly immersed in reality. Later, she tells Eladio that he’s “haunted,” and that this might explain his sleeplessness. Spoken in the patient’s second session, the words come across as presumptuous and a little condescending, as if the core belief here is that they can beat insomnia by digging into old memories. It’s a bit arrogant, and a bit old-fashioned.

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The article up above continues down below:

Watching her spar with her second patient, a white-collar criminal named Colin, who’s there at the behest of the state and must pass muster to avoid returning to prison, is a delight. She immediately recognizes Colin as a charismatic bullshit artist dead set on avoiding any kind of engagement, and psychologically, this feels truer than anything we see with Eladio. For Colin, truly confronting his past brings out the demons of bitterness and extreme anger, and he’s loath to make that journey even as those demons torpedo his life. Dr. Lawrence absorbs his deflections, his flattery, and eventually his abuse, and forces him to be accountable and honest. That’s tremendously painful for Colin, and their conflict is riveting in a way that aimless Freudian speculation can’t touch.

Laila, an 18-year-old on the verge of graduating high school and Dr. Lawrence’s third patient, is led into the home office by her grandmother, who seems to want nothing more than for Lawrence to conduction conversion therapy to “undo” Laila’s lesbianism. It has the hallmarks of stereotype, but things soon grow more complicated; Laila is a kind of rich Will Hunting, full of surface intelligence that succeeds in letting her insult those around her, but also full of insecurities that she’s hellbent on keeping submerged. Again, watching the dance between her and Lawrence makes for effective TV, and stays clear of therapy cliche.

Don’t expect a breakthrough, but sometimes, it’s enough to watch interesting people, in the thick of distress, talk it out.

As you can see this writer thinks Patient 2 is more interesting than ELADIO, but I DISAGREE, because whereas COLIN is a "BULLSHIT ARTIST" (as they put it), Eladio seems much more GROUNDED and SINCERE about what he says than the much more "SHALLOW and HOLLOW" Colin who sounds Extremely FAKE and PHONY.

And that STUCK UP LALA character also sounds just as FAKE as COLIN does when she rants on about how much better she thinks she is than GENERATION X (or whichever one it is she was talking about). In other words, imo, she also sounds like a "BS ARTIST" too.

Any one else have any other thoughts that they'd care to share???

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