Director: Lana Wilson
Writer: Lana Wilson
Synopsis: A documentary through a series of intimate sessions with psychics and their clients.
Lana Wilson (Miss Americana) enters the world of New York City psychics and clairvoyants in her documentary, Look Into My Eyes. Per Erik Borja, Eugene Grygo, Nikenya Hall, Phoebe Hoffman, Michael Kim, Sherrie Lynne, and Ilka Pinheiro are mediums who hold sessions with various clients. They are, overall, an eccentric bunch. Some are put together more convincingly than others, but none are quite convincing enough to make the audience believe they’re witnessing much more than cold readings, therapy techniques, vague and interpretable language, and some (in)elegant theatrics.
The documentary makes no effort to win over skeptics and often shows the psychics getting things wrong or reaching without success. Lana Wilson doesn’t expect the audience to buy what they’re seeing is real spiritual or psychic communication. What the documentary does achieve is to make you wonder if any of the ‘reality’ matters.
Why do people go to psychics? Many of the clients in Wilson’s documentary have the pedestrian questions and concerns one would expect when consulting a clairvoyant. Someone is asking about when Mr. Right will come along, another wants some financial guidance, another needs to know if they’re making the right choice for their future. Some want to know if the environment is going to collapse. A family lives in an apartment they think is haunted. Children wonder if their deceased parents are proud of them.
Other clients have more specific concerns. A young woman needs to know if her birth mother in China who gave her up still thinks of her. A doctor wonders about the child gunshot victim who died in her arms years ago when she was first working emergency. A young man wants to know if his ancestors were slaves and how he can learn to let that legacy go. Then there are the clients of Phoebe, the animal psychic, who want someone to interpret the mysteries of an annoyed cat or a leash resistant dog.
Essentially, the answer the documentary gives is that clients seek out psychics because they are people who won’t judge their questions. Psychics are a safe space for inquiries that therapists or religion don’t want to deal with or deny the existence of. Seeking permission to grieve and to be allowed to grieve in a non-traditional manner has people coming to the psychics. Asking off the wall questions and being treated without judgement has people coming to psychics.
Each of the seven psychics is damaged in some way. Outsiders who found themselves feeling less on the outside when they hung up a sign and opened for business. Many of them were entranced by films, art, acting, musical theatre. One has a degree in theatre studies, another has an acting degree, another is a screenwriter (attempted) and a musical performer. They’re each holding onto a specific pain and their skill is to recognize pain in other people and give them the outlet to express it and provide them with some form of solace.
Phoebe, the animal psychic, is particularly good at projecting her own feelings of being a special oddball and survivor onto her clients. If she was to go to a therapist, they might use some of her own techniques on her. When one hurt young woman asks her about a faithful dog who helped her through a tough time, Phoebe’s answer about the dog in question might well be made up, but her understanding of what the woman went through is not.
NYC is the kind of place which attracts fringe people, and it sometimes rewards them for their peculiarities. Apart from Eugene, who is a borderline hoarder, carrying around his pain of being rejected because of his sexuality, most seem to be making fairly good money. Lana Wilson follows each of them home and showing them in their apartments with the small and large items they treasure gives the audience a deeper understanding of what makes them believe in their ‘gifts’ and why they feel they must share them.
The documentary doesn’t always maintain momentum, but Wilson’s window into the world of people who provide some consolation to others and who also feel more authentic when giving it, has enough impactful sections to keep the audience invested in certain clients and particular psychics.
Even though there is the element of improv sham – something one psychic embraces somewhat through a particular brand of solipsism – most people get what they came for. A moment where they are seen and made to that something or someone out there is guiding them or forgiving them.
One scene which won’t be soon forgotten is when the doctor hugs her psychic and openly grieves the young gunshot victim and the young woman she was. What she was really asking was “How do I move on from what I experienced?” No one supported her at the time of the incident decades ago and she’s probably seen too many deaths where everyone remained silent and moved on with their day. The heartbeats of the doctor and the psychic are picked up on the microphone and it is raw and intimate. In that moment, it doesn’t really matter how she got to that place of release, just that she did.
Another revealing section is when they are all brought together and one of the group is supported with the same vague language they use on their clients and that seems enough for him. Michael earlier admitted he doesn’t know if any of what he does or perceives is legitimate – and he is quite egregiously bad at his interim career while he waits for his big acting break. Yet he and the others believe in something, even if it just turns out to be having people to talk openly about vulnerability. They each have deep seated issues of loss or displacement, and their ‘life path’ has given them purpose.
The psychics might well be fleecing their clients with their claims – in fact there are times some of them most certainly are, but even if their gifts aren’t real, some people are happy to buy them. Lana Wilson leaves it up to the audience to decide if there is any significant difference between paying someone who has spirits ‘speak’ through them, or can turn a card on a tarot deck, than there is in seeing a religious figure or therapist. If the end effect is comfort or closure, does it matter?
Look Into My Eyes doesn’t represent the entire community of psychics, mediums, or clairvoyants and it also doesn’t show any of the subjects doing anything malicious or harmful (which can and does happen). It’s a small cross-section of people who are seeking something larger than themselves just as much as their clients are. Look Into My Eyes is a study of seven people who perform and their particularly willing audience. It is a minor entry in Wilson’s documentary oeuvre but a surprising one in its focus on people who need to believe they are special.
