The Thinking Mind Podcast: Psychiatry & Psychotherapy
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The Thinking Mind Podcast: Psychiatry & Psychotherapy
E151 | Thinking Films: The Truman Show (1998)
Today Alex discusses the 1998 high-concept drama The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey and directed by Peter Weir, about a man unknowingly trapped in a reality tv show. Including themes such as control, trauma, truth over comfort, paranoia and the price of freedom.
Presented by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.
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Episode produced by Ellis Ballard and Alex Curmi.
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Speaker: [00:00:00] We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We're tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is in some respects, counterfeit. There's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life.
I am not gonna make it. You're gonna have to go on without me.
Speaker 2: Welcome back. What does it mean to try and find truth in a world that is trying to deceive you? We'll be discussing this and a lot more as we do a deep dive into the 1998 film, the Truman Show. As you guys know about once a month on the podcast, we release a Thinking Films episode where we do a deep analysis of a film [00:01:00] that I think is of psychological import.
Today we'll be discussing a little bit about this film, the Key Questions It's trying to ask what it gets psychologically right, what perhaps is a little psychologically inaccurate. Some practical takeaways from the film, how you can use it in your own life and much more. The Truman Show is one of the most enduring psychological allegories in modern cinema on the surface.
It's a clever, high concept drama about a man unknowingly trapped inside a reality TV show. Beneath that surface lies a profound meditation on that universal struggle to wake up to reality. Of course we will be discussing spoilers today, so if you've never been to Sea Haven, maybe go and check out The Truman Show first before you listen to this podcast.
Unless you don't really care about the plot spoilers. And to be fair, it's not a hugely plot driven film, in which case you can listen to this as a nice intro into the film itself. Why is this film psychologically relevant? In a nutshell, [00:02:00] it touches on some core psychological tasks that we all need to face, making sense of reality.
Learning to think critically. It asks what relationship we should have to fear. It's about challenging the systems which control us and what it means to step into the unknown future where there are no guarantees. This firm is beautiful because it functions as a metaphor, as a case study and as a foundation for a great philosophical discussion all at the same time.
It's quite rare that a film can do all of those things. The Truman Show was released in 1998. It was directed by Peter Weir, who also directed The Dead Poet Society and other film, which took a classically comedic actor, Robin Williams, and put him in a dramatic role. It was written by Andrew Nichol. It stars Jim Carrey as the protagonist, Laura Linney, ed Harris.
I would put this film alongside films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, of course, which was released in [00:03:00] 2004. And that's Jim Carrey's, other huge dramatic role, the Dead Poet Society, as I mentioned earlier, network, which was released in 1976. That's one of my favorite films. It was directed by Sidney Lume and Network is all about media manipulation as well.
I think this film also sits nicely alongside. I Love You, Philip Morris and other Jim Carrey film released in 2009, and the other film I thought about when it comes to the Truman Show is actually Castaway starring Tom Hanks, which came out in 2000. And on the surface, Castaway is a very different movie to the Truman Show.
I thought it was kind of similar in that in both films, the protagonists are really isolated. Of course, in Castaway, the main character played by Tom Hanks is literally very isolated. The Truman Show, he's around people. Jim Carrey is around people, but he's psychologically very isolated. And so these two films strangely do remind me of each other.
I think they'd make a good double [00:04:00] feature. This film is hugely culturally relevant 'cause it anticipated the rise of. Reality tv, which came mostly after this film was released. The Seeds of unscripted television date back to the 1950s where you have shows like Candid Camera and in the 1970s and eighties you start to get more documentary style observational shows.
But modern reality tv, like Big Brother Survivor, the Bachelor really explodes in the late nineties, early two thousands, and the Truman Show arrives just before this boom. It's quite an eerie prediction of how much of an appetite the public has for this kind of voyeuristic entertainment, this commodification of people's private lives.
I love that for the, the world that's built around Truman. In this film, they chose a 1950s aesthetic. Sea Haven really resembles a sanitized. Fifties suburb, sunny, [00:05:00] polite, eely, idyllic, and I think 1950s America is a perfect metaphor for the firm itself. In that, on the surface, everything is working really well and everything is really pleasant.
But underneath you have a lot of darkness, a lot of, uh, excess conformity, rigid gender roles, hidden trauma, a lot of unspoken dysfunction. That's really what Truman's world is like. It's perfect. On the surface, there's a lot of suffocation underneath. Although this film was considered a big risk for Jim Carrey 'cause it was his first dramatic role, it was a success.
It was critically acclaimed and performed well commercially. It made over 260 million worldwide in the box office. Jim Carrey's performance was widely praised. Famously, Roger Ebert, the film critic from the Chicago Tribune, had totally dismissed Carey before, but after this film came out, [00:06:00] totally sunk his praises and admitted publicly that he was really wrong about Jim Carrey and Jim Carrey's potential as an actor.
Carey was asked. About this film and the, and taking the risk, uh, and if he was worried about what it would do to his career, and Jim Carrey said, I've already won by being given the opportunity to make this film whether it's successful or not. He loved having that ability to stretch his wings as an actor.
The director, Peter Weir always had Jim Carrey in mind. He never really considered anyone else based on interviews with him, and he waited, I think for a few years until Jim Carrey would be available to, to work on this film. In terms of my relationship to this film, I first watched the Truman Show when I was about 10 years old, and my parents took me and around five of my 10-year-old friends to go watch at the cinema.
I think my parents probably thought, oh, this is a Jim Carrey film. This must be for kids. And they would've been right if we had [00:07:00] gone to see Ace Ventura or the Mosque. But as it happens, we were taken to see this existential drama film. And funnily enough, I remember enjoying it at the time, and I remember even my friends liking it.
You know when you go to watch a film for your birthday, you're really worried about what your friends are gonna think. You don't want your parents to have taken you and your friends to see a lousy film. But from what I remember, we all kind of liked it and we all kind of dug, even in our 10-year-old brains, that this film had something cool to say at quite a deep level.
Since then, of course, I've watched a few times and I've. Always really appreciated it. I think this film can give you really interesting insights depending on which stage of life you're at. I really like this film because it's archetypal, you know, it's universal. Everyone is, to some degree on a quest for truth and freedom in their lives.
I think they really wrote the Truman character quite cleverly in that they made him kind of a blank slate. You don't actually know that much about Truman or Truman's [00:08:00] personality, so it's easy as the viewer to project yourself into him. Jim Carrey's performance, of course, is magnificent. He's emotionally open and vulnerable, and there's something about the slight comedic exaggeration of his performance where you immediately know what he's feeling and can relate.
And there's something about watching Jim Carrey's emotional cycles through the course of the film that's deeply moving and quite sad actually. I also like this film because it knows what it's trying to do when it stays focused. It stays focused on these archetypal themes, and because it does that, it's able to accomplish quite a lot.
This is in contrast to a lot of films that I've seen more recently where a lot of modern films are trying to be five different kind of films, and as a result, they kind of accomplish none of those goals. So I see that with the Barbie film. The Barbie film tried to be like three or four different kinds of films.
Similarly, [00:09:00] Berg, which I watched in the cinema quite recently, tried to do two or three different things and accomplish none of them, you know, very satisfactorily. Whereas the Truman Show is really one thing. It's a man's search for truth and freedom, but because it does it so well, there's a lot of takeaways he can get from that.
Good Morning.
Speaker 3: Morning.
Speaker: Good
Speaker 3: morning.
Speaker: Oh, and in case I don't see you. Good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.
Speaker 2: So who are the characters we're dealing with? We've got Truman Burbank, a cheerful, happy go lucky insurance salesman whose entire life is being broadcast on television without his knowledge. We have Christophe the Godlike creator of the show who controls Truman's world with a kind of paternalistic devotion, but also a heavy dose of authoritarianism.
We have Meryl Truman's wife, who is eternally, artificially cheerful, but we can see her unhappiness barely concealed below the surface. Marlon Truman's best friend. Another [00:10:00] actor who reinforces the illusion of his life. And then crucially, we have Sylvia the outsider, who tries to awaken Truman to the fact that his life is being broadcast on tv.
The pro of this film is pretty straightforward. Truman, Burbank lives in Sea Haven, the perfect small town. But of course, we know as the audience that this is just manufactured for the entertainment of others. And slowly, Truman begins to. Discover inconsistencies in his world. A stage light randomly falls from the sky.
He observes people repeating their movements in his local neighborhood. He overhears interruptions and radio communications and most hauntingly. He continues to remember a woman who earlier in his life, had tried to reveal the truth to him. Over the course of the film, his suspicions grow. And the show's creators have to try and escalate their interventions to try and keep him where he is, to keep him trapped [00:11:00] in this artificial world, they manipulate relationships, manufacture storms, try and weaponize his deepest fear, which they conditioned into him his fear of water.
Ultimately, however, Truman manages to persist. He chooses truth over safety, and at the end of the film, he manages to deceive his captors. And he reaches the edge of his world, which is essentially a giant stage. He has a brief conversation with Christophe, the creator of the show, who tries to Leo him to stay in his world.
Speaker 3: Listen to me. There's no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. Same lies, the same deceit, but in my world. You have nothing to fear.
I know you better than you know yourself. You
Speaker: never had a camera in my head. [00:12:00]
Speaker 3: You are afraid.
Speaker 2: That's why you can't leave. But he rejects this, finds a door at the edge of the stage, says goodbye, and walks through into the unknown. What are the key questions this film is asking? I think this film is asking questions like, what, what are the consequences of dishonesty?
What if fear keeps you from truly living your life? And perhaps most crucially, what if your entire life is built on a lie? And we'll try and answer some of those questions today as we talk about what this film psychologically gets right, what it gets wrong, and some practical takeaways you can get from the film.
In terms of what this film gets right, I think it's a really nice portrayal of someone trying to wake up and think critically for themselves. What you see is here, Truman is gradually learning to observe patterns things happen, which [00:13:00] shouldn't make sense in his world. Like the stage light falling, and so he starts to question these inconsistencies.
He tries to test these hypotheses for himself. He lives in a world which is constantly trying to comfort him and give him easy explanations. He chooses to reject the comforting explanation. And again, this is a classic hallmark of someone trying to develop their own critical thinking, their own way of testing reality, their own ability to test reality for themselves.
In this respect, you could say the film is a good metaphor for adolescence. Childhood, of course, is sheltered and structured. You could say even a really good childhood has an element of artificiality to it because. Parents are trying to construct a world for their child, which is safe. And yes, offer some challenge, but just the right amount of challenge and not too much.
And yes, some novelty, but not too much. And adolescence is about breaking from that [00:14:00] script, going into a more dangerous world. Taking risks, discovering one's identity. And often we know adolescents involves a lot of conflict with parents. Adolescents often reject the, the world they came from and their parents almost by default in quite a contrarian way.
And this is kind of the process you, you see, Truman undergoing. I think this film also functions as well as a metaphor for a midlife crisis. 'cause similarly to adolescents at midlife. Life can feel really too stable. Too predictable. A bit stagnant. Yes. In midlife, people have often achieved a lot of things like Truman has.
He has a job, he has a wife, he has a home. And yet in midlife, people often feel there's something else missing. Maybe a person might feel like they're not taking enough risks, like they're not facing enough friction. And with that loss of. Friction and risk also is a loss of [00:15:00] vitality above all. Less. Here, I think what you see Truman craving is a sense of exploration and novelty.
You could see this film as a modern retelling of Plato's Cave. So in Plato's Cave you have people trapped in a cave who are mistaking the shadows, being projected onto a wall for reality itself. This is Truman's situation because he is living in a world that's been entirely designed for him. In a weird way, this is also how our mind works.
So what modern neuroscience seems to tell us is we do not really with our brain and our perceptual mechanisms. Sense the world directly. We do not apprehend the world directly, but rather our brain is creating a construction of the world around us. So in a strange way, neuroscientifically speaking, we are all living in a simulation of sorts.
We're living in a simulation that our mind is producing rather than a simulation that [00:16:00] other people are producing for us. And there's a lot of value to that simulation. It's not like our brain is totally off base with reality. It's useful to know that our brain is constructing this version of reality because it helps us understand why we can be so easily deceived.
Why, for example, using drugs can dramatically alter our perceptions. Why we do need to rely on other people to help us make sense of the world. Why even more importantly, we have to rely on the scientific method to help apprehend reality more directly because through the lens of our minds, we are not necessarily getting unadulterated reality.
We are just getting a version of reality that our brain is trying to construct pretty much from moment to moment. Similar to the Wolf of Wall Street, which we discussed last time. This film also illustrates a lot of dynamics typically present in cults. It's a hyper controlled environment. Truman is pretty restricted.
He, they tried to prevent him from leaving. They [00:17:00] use fear to try and stop him from leaving, and we have it all ruled by a charismatic authority figure. So in a weird way, you could also read this film as a metaphor for a one man cult. What you also see here is that they condition a fear of water into Truman to try and stop him from leaving Sea Haven.
And they do this by creating a fake scenario. Where Truman is made to believe his father, who is actually played by an actor drowns during a childhood boing incident. Of course this isn't real, but it is true that you can condition fear into someone through methods like that. Really, Truman portrays all of the responses typical of someone experiencing post-traumatic stress.
He's avoidant of situations involving water. He panics quickly. He's hypervigilant, he has flashbacks about it. There's also one reading of this film, which is that you could see this film as. A man having a [00:18:00] psychotic episode and seeing what that might be like from his point of view. Suffering a series of.
Hallucinations, perceptual distortions, which make him come to believe that perhaps the world around him isn't real.
Speaker: What the hell does this have to do with anything? Tell me what's happening. Well, you're having a nervous breakdown. That's what's happening. You're part of this, aren't you?
Speaker 2: I don't think that's the best reading of this film, but it is interesting to look at it from that perspective.
From that perspective, you could see what Truman would be experiencing is a lot of what we call derealization, which is for reasons we don't fully understand. People with psychosis often experience the world as being subtly unreal or alien like, or too dimensional. People who experience derealization actually often feel that they are on a sound stage because there's something about their world, which seems [00:19:00] somewhat fake.
Again, we don't necessarily understand why this is, it may come down to certain things which are happening in the brain during a psychotic episode, but that's often what people experience. We do know that from time to time people do experience The Truman Show delusion, the delusion beliefs that they are on a reality TV show that everyone is watching them.
It is common for people experiencing a paranoid psychosis to think that everyone is teamed up against them in some way. But since this film came out, you actually have the emergence of what's known as the Truman Show. Delusion where people feel they are on a reality TV show and they are being broadcast live 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And many years ago, I did encounter a patient who was experiencing this. I think a nice thing that the Truman shows, so highlights is the distinction between incongruence and authenticity. So as [00:20:00] humans, we love authenticity. We love it when we feel people are being real and incongruence, by which I mean.
Putting on a front is something that we have an inherent repulsive reaction to. We all have to be incongruent at times. We all might, for example, have to pretend we're having a good day when we're buying a coffee at the coffee shop to be polite. Incongruence is useful because it can make a lot of those more superficial interactions in life a bit easier.
But in the medium to long term, if all of your interactions have this incongruence where you're putting on a front. It's really corrosive psychologically. It's also corrosive to be living a life that's incongruent, to be living a life where you feel largely you're living for other people and for other people's values as opposed to for your own.
With Truman, at the beginning of this film, you see him and the very start coming out of his house and saying hi to his neighbors and his neighbors give this fake hi [00:21:00] and this fake wave and, and he gives this fake hi and this fake wave right back. So he's almost being forced. To participate in this world of incongruence because the whole world that has been constructed around him is fake.
Along similar lines, you see the audience being totally fascinated by Truman and watching the Truman Show because they love that they're tapping into something real. The world around him isn't real, but Truman's reactions are real, and that's what makes it so compelling. And Jim Car's performance is so good that you're right there alongside him.
You're rooting for him as well, and you feel moved much in the same way that the audience in this film is moved. The Truman Show depicts how isolating it is to live in your own version of reality, which the people around you disagree with. It's deeply distressing, and you see Truman struggling with this.
Wouldn't it make my life easier if I just agreed with all of the facts that are being presented to me or. Should I [00:22:00] persist on this quest for truth? And despite the fact that the show's runners are doing everything they can to, to pull him back into this world of safety, he knows on some deep level that he has to continue persisting.
Lastly, I think Christophe, the creator of the show, is this really wonderful illustration of the kind of demented, overprotective, edible parental figure. I'm a bit sick of using the N word on this podcast, by which I mean narcissism. You could say that Christophe is a narcissist, but I don't want to go into it too deeply here.
Certainly you could say Christophe is the ultimate helicopter parent. He is trying to create this perfect safe world, which he thinks will be good for Truman, but ultimately he's just stifling him, suffocating him, taking away his autonomy, taking away his opportunity for growth, his vitality. So it's kind of a nightmare overprotective, Freudian kind of parent.[00:23:00]
So quite a huge amount that you can learn from this movie Psychologically. What does this film get wrong psychologically? Not a whole lot. And of course I wouldn't pick this film if I thought it got a loss wrong psychologically. But one thing I would say is that. I think anyone under these kinds of circumstances would probably suffer a huge psychological breakdown.
Maybe they would even suffer something like a psychotic episode. Upon discovering the truth, the the movie ends at the most optimistic possible moment. Where he discovers that, that he's been part of a TV show and and just leaves. Realistically, I think during the course and the aftermath of this film, things would be much worse for him psychologically.
I think in all probability, most people would have a total breakdown, even though you wouldn't want to risk ruining this film with a sequel. It would be really interesting to see a sequel to this film just to see what the [00:24:00] aftermath is like. Because really what Truman has suffered is kind of the worst form of institutionalization where he's brought up in a world that's literally made for him.
And it would be fascinating to see what it would be like trying to adjust to life. On the outside, it reminds you of the character Brooks from Shohan Redemption. I think a sequel to this film might be really, really dark in exploring those kinds of themes. I think there's a lot of practical takeaways the Truman Show has to offer.
Firstly, thinking for yourself and living life on your own terms is very important. Safety and security is nice. If you don't have enough safety and security in your life, you need to get some, but that alone is not gonna be sufficient for psychological wellbeing. There is something about human beings where we need exploration, novelty, challenge, friction.
Often if people. Don't have enough O of [00:25:00] these things, they can actually become quite self-destructive and psychoanalytically. We could speculate perhaps that people, when they're, when they're given too much safety and security, they act in quite a self-destructive fashion almost to try and bring some friction possibly into their lives.
Secondly, again, there's the lesson that constant incongruence in authenticity, dishonesty. It's going to be very psychologically corrosive to yourself if you're putting on a mask to others. If you're interacting with people who are constantly putting a mask on towards you, it's very psychologically destabilizing.
Another way you could view this film. Is as a metaphor for fame. So you can imagine if you're a very famous person like Jim Carrey, walking around the world must be quite a lot like walking around Sea Haven and the Truman Show, and that everyone's trying to be nice to you. Everyone orients themselves towards you.
Everyone's trying to give you what they think that you want, but [00:26:00] often there's a lack of genuineness because. When you're famous or successful, people are often trying to be next to you for their own personal gain and not because they actually like you. And I think that that's a huge part of why being wealthy and and famous is often quite psychologically difficult for people because they have to constantly deal with people's incongruence and trying to weed out who is being genuine towards me versus who isn't.
The third lesson from this film is that we tend to default the truth. So people do tend to trust other people by default, and that makes sense because human flourishing is often built on human cooperation, and human cooperation is very difficult to achieve if you constantly mistrust. The people around you.
So we do tend to trust people by default, but we need to be aware that sometimes people don't have our best interests at heart.
Speaker 3: And the last thing I'd ever do [00:27:00] is lie to you. And the last thing that I would ever do,
Speaker 2: just lie to you. So if you're the kind of person that really, really tends to trust. I think it would be a good idea to try and develop a little bit of skepticism and a little bit of critical thinking, especially when dealing with people you don't know. I think it's also very important to train yourself, to judge other people by their actions and not by their words, because I think the cliche is true.
Actions do speak louder than words. On the other hand, if you're constantly very mistrustful and skeptical of people. These people tend to be rarer in the population, but if you are like that, I think it's a good idea to start to ve some trust, you know, safely, cautiously in small increments. And again, using that same rule of thumb, judge people by the actions, not so much by the words that they say, but you don't want to be too [00:28:00] unbalanced at either end of the spectrum.
Although conspiracy thinking is a real phenomenon, and we're seeing people who suffer way too much conspiracy thinking, actual conspiracies do happen. We're learning about them on the news at the moment, almost every day. So somewhere this balance needs to be struck between having some kind of trust in people in larger institutions and in expertise, but also having a healthy sense of skepticism.
Another beautiful takeaway from this firm. Is kind of a Jungian idea, which is that leveling up in life often requires you to face your fears very directly and to do something really scary because by definition we tend to naturally explore the territory around us, which is not threatening. And so we tend to be deterred by fear that the limits of our growth tend to be bounded by fear.
I bet any of you listening can think of one area in your life where you [00:29:00] know things would be better if you took a certain series of actions, but you're not taking those actions because you're afraid. So I think it's really true that fear is often the precise thing that limits us. And so if we want to grow, if we want to explore uncharted territory.
Usually it's gonna be fear that hems us in. And so cultivating that metalevel skill to face fear, to confront your fear voluntarily in small increments, you could call that exposure therapy, if you like, is a really, really crucial skill to develop. And along similar lines, what the Truman show shows us is that you can change your life without knowing all of the answers.
Truman has no idea what's gonna happen next when he steps through that door at the end, but he proceeds anyway. In my experience, many people hold themselves back from making a big change. Like for example, changing job, changing country, starting a new relationship because they feel they [00:30:00] need to know everything in advance.
They need to know exactly how things are gonna work out, and because they can't know that, because no one could know that, that prevents them from taking action. What this film shows us is the opposite. You have to be willing to accept some unknowns. And kind of develop a trust in your future, serve that you can handle it in order to make that next step.
And that's why it's so heartening, why it's such a great ending to the film to see Jim Carrey not even hesitate and step right through that door. And I think that the last takeaway from this film is that age old lesson. That perfection is neither attainable nor desirable. Christophe wants to create a perfect world for Truman, and you can see even though he's really disturbed and dysfunctional in his own way, Christophe does care about Truman.
But in his efforts to create a perfect world for Truman, all he succeeds in doing is creating a world which is suffocating and [00:31:00] sterile. Again. It would be wonderful to see what happens in the aftermath of this film and how Truman deals with breaking free from this world. My favorite quote from the film is Christophe, when he says,
Speaker: we accept the reality of the world with which we're presented.
It's as simple as that.
Speaker 2: We accept the reality with which we're presented, which again, I think by and large is true for most people, and I think most people could use. A healthy sense of skepticism while at the same time there are lots of people who have started to lean on skepticism, almost, almost like a drug, and those people probably need to learn to trust a little more and maybe exert a bit more control on the things directly in front of them, rather than constantly speculating about grand narratives.
I think the psychologically healthiest character in the film is Truman Bare Bank, because despite all of the challenges he faces, he remains curious, compassionate, resilient, brave. Again, I [00:32:00] think his psychological health in this film is actually unrealistic. I think most people would have a sort of breakdown in his scenario, so hats off to him for that.
As a film, I would rate this as a solid 4.5 outta five. Again, what I love about it is as a film, it doesn't try to do too much. It tells one relatively simple but very compelling story. It executes really well, and because it focuses on that one thing, there's so much you can draw from it. In terms of psychological accuracy, I probably rate this quite low.
3.5 outta five. In terms of literal accuracy, I mean this film mostly functions really well psychologically as metaphor as opposed to other films we've talked about on the podcast. You know, we talked about Wolf of Wall Street. Last time, which was a true story, and the script really seemed to stick well with that story.
We talked about her, where you have Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with a computer, and we do really have [00:33:00] people falling in love with chatbots now. So I don't think this film is very literally psychologically accurate, but I think a lot of wonderful metaphorical takeaways you can get from it.
Nonetheless, the Truman Show endures. Because it speaks that universal struggle we all have to break free from the deception around us to break free from the shackles of comfort, to choose reality. Even if reality is uncertain, reality is incredibly revitalizing. Truman's final bow at the end as he leaves his lifelong stage is not just a cinematic moment.
It's a symbolic act of breaking free courage. And on some level, this is an act we all need to take regularly in our lives. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you find the psychological analysis of films helpful. Thank you for those who have suggested some films over email that I look at. Please do keep sending those [00:34:00] suggestions.
I apologize in advance if we're not able to get to the film that you suggested. We are constrained by certain things in the way we choose films, and of course, we can only release one film per month, so that does limit us. But I do promise we do look at consider and take into account every suggestion that we are provided.
If you have any suggestions for films, do feel free to send them over to a Thinking Mind podcast. At gmail.com or you can send them over via social media channels at Thinking Mind Pods on X at Thinking Mind Podcast on Twitter. If you like the show and want to support it, the best way you can do that is by following or subscribing on whatever channel you listen on sharing with a friend, leaving a rating or a review.
These are the things that help more people to find us. We have a bunch of fun podcasts lined up for the rest of the year. As always, thank you for listening, and in case I don't see you, good [00:35:00] afternoon, good evening, and good night.