I don’t have anything really booky or travely to say today, so I will cover a content creator. This time time it is Jonathan Decker. I feel bad for not mentioning Alicia Decker (cohost of Mended Light) or Alan Seawright (cohost of Cinema Therapy) in the title, but Jonathan is the common thread between the two channels I’m going to talk about. Alicia and Alan are extremely important on each of their channels, however.
I mentioned the Mended Light channel an earlier post, and Alicia is the CEO of the company. She is also Jonathan’s cohost in a lot of their videos. They’re adorable together.
On Mended Light, they talk about all sorts of mental health topics. Mended Light also has a staff of therapists that one can hire to work with.
Along with Alan, he does the Cinema Therapy channel. Alan is, as they say in their intros, a professional filmmaker. Alan had a job in Los Angeles lined up, but then Covid interfered and he had to move back to Utah. He and Jonathan were college roommates, and together they came up with the Cinema Therapy YouTube channel.
Like Mended Light, Cinema Therapy has a theme of psychology and therapy. This time, Jonathan and Alan talk about the psychological and filmmaking points of the movies they cover.
Unfortunately I don’t watch as many movies as I kind of probably should to really devote myself to the channel. I’ve watched a lot of movies, don’t get me wrong, but not recent movies. A lot of the movies they talk about are things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) and things. I had other things going on when the MCU started. The first movie, from what I can tell, was Iron Man, which was released in May 2008. I don’t know exactly what was going on in my life that month, but my marriage started really cracking and was causing me to slide into a depression that I would stay in until late 2009. Oh! I just found that the spoon analogy applies to people in depressions. Basically, at that point in my life, I couldn’t remember the last time I smiled for no reason. I used to smile just because. That was long gone and by the time I realized that Iron Man wasn’t just a one-shot action film thing and that there’d be a whole mythology, the opportunity to get into the series was basically gone.
Spoon Theory is an analogy comparing the energy those with chronic conditions have for daily activities to spoons. Every time you do an activity you lose a spoon. Eventually you’re out of spoons and have to give up and recover.
Anyway, I’ve always been a DC Comics girl rather than a Marvel Comics girl, and action movies really aren’t my thing. I like a good romcom. Animated features, mystery/thrillers, sure. Action movies? Not so much. So there really wasn’t much to tempt me into watching an Iron Man movie. And what little I knew about Thor and the different worlds: Jotunheim, Midgard, whatever, was just confusing to me. So I wasn’t really enthusiastic about that movie, either.
So now there’s like 12 million movies and television shows in the MCU and I just can’t. I don’t have the time to get caught up. I also don’t have Disney Plus.
Sorry. Got carried away. Just. I don’t watch many current movies.
But the channel has lots of great psychology stuff. In the most recent one, they talk about the appearances of Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey movies. I know some of the comics canon for Harley, so I felt at least a little tuned in there. Jonathan talks about how Harley has histrionic personality disorder, which leads her to want to be/think she is the center of attention.
I find both channels really enlightening though Mended Light tends to be actually easier to keep up on because again I don’t necessarily know the back story stuff of the episodes of Cinema Therapy.
I feel I did most of my movie watching in the 80s and 90s when these two men were like tiny. They’re, like 15 years younger than I am. When I entered my real movie-watching phase, around 1986 or so, these men were in elementary school.
Alan and Jonathan are Mormons. Have I mentioned my interest in the Latter-Day Saints? I have a family history of alcoholism, and so I believed that all gatherings of adults included imbibing. When I discovered that there was an entire subculture in the United States in which (theoretically at least) no one drinks, I was thrilled. I learned a bit about the theology, and I was young enough that Christianity was Christianity to me, so I figured I could work with that.
Is there such a thing as a whining font? I feel like I need a whining font here. The main sponsor for Cinema Therapy is Lisa’s Popcorn (nothing like an affiliate link; I just am linking the site because of what follows). I can’t eat popcorn. It just tears up my digestion and is not worth the trouble. I can eat puffcorn products, like the Beaver Nuggets at Buc-Ees, but not whole popcorn.
Now for a real affiliate link. Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is The Throne of Fire, the second book in Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles series. It will be a while until I can plug the third book, The Serpent’s Shadow, because I’ve lost my copy.