He's a villain whose motives make sense. He doesn't view himself as horrible. He views himself as like, I'm a guy who's doing the right thing, and I'm the only one strong enough to do it. The hardest choices require the strongest wills. Even though he has some weird twisted affection, his foundation for being a parent is self-serving.
He adopts her because he sees that he has use for her in his great mission, therefore she has worth. What did it cost? Everything.
There may be even some affection there, but he's mission focused, and he puts the mission before her. His motivations are off, and therefore everything is off. Hello and welcome to Cinema Therapy. I'm Jonathan Decker, licensed therapist who loves movies.
This is... Don't snap! It only works if I've got the gauntlet on. Now I know that.
I'm Alan Seawright, a professional filmmaker who needs therapy. Today we're going to be doing villain therapy... for Thanos, the mad titan.
Is he truly mad? Sound off in the comments below. But also, yes. He is, yeah, obviously. In fact, there's a lot of people online, therapists and otherwise, who are sounding off about the psychology of Thanos.
Does he have antisocial personality disorder? Is he a narcissist? As a family therapist, I'm more intrigued with his relationships, with his adoptive daughters and how he shows up as a dad.
I mean, it's not great. It's not great. He does love them. But I want to talk about why it's not great and tease out the family dynamics and what advice I would give there. What's wrong?
You know what's wrong. Where is my mother? What's your name?
You could come. In that line, you're quite the fighter Gamora sums up exactly why he's doing what he's doing instead of just putting her in line with the others. It is all about his needs, his goals, what serves him. Look.
Pretty, isn't it? Perfectly balanced. This whole thing should be. Too much to one side.
And a meme was born. Here. You try.
There's definitely times now where like... Film writers and directors know that they're making a meme? I don't think they knew they were making a meme.
No. An instant ring. He turns her away from it. You got it.
So he's already indoctrinating her. And he's shielding her. He is such a fascinating character. Really is.
Clearly a guy who thinks he's doing the right thing, doesn't like what the thing is that he has to do. Yeah. Yeah.
It's horrible, but he doesn't view himself as horrible. He views himself as like, I'm a guy who's doing the right thing, and I'm the only one strong enough to do it. Yeah. And that's what makes him so interesting to me, is he's not sadistic. It's never personal.
It's dispassionate. And it's quick. He doesn't derive pleasure from hurting people.
It's just, this is what has to be done. Here we go. But what's terrifying is also that dispassion.
That it's so... logical and rational, at least in his mind, that it's completely divorced from a sense of, if you can use the word humanity, because they're aliens. Yeah, it's just cold. And I mean, it's the shark from Jaws, right? Yeah.
It's eyes roll over white and it just turns into a killing machine. Yeah, I just do what I do. I will kill anyone, anywhere. Children, animals, old people, doesn't matter. He adopts her, essentially, at this moment.
And he adopts her because she's a fighter. And he adopts her because he sees that... he has used for her in his great mission, therefore she has worth. And what's interesting about Thanos is he does definitely decide certain beings have more worth than others.
But until then, everyone's just kind of equal. He's wrong about a lot of things. He's right about a few things, but wrong in his approach.
Right? Or at least... or at least his...
or at least his position is understandable. Hot takes from Jonathan Decker. Thanos was right.
No, I didn't say that. I'll rephrase. He's a villain whose motives make sense.
Yes. You know? Yeah, very much so. What are his motives here in adopting?
It's not the well-being of the child. And that's the very first issue. His foundation for being a parent is self-serving, which tracks with reality. A lot of times people become parents to keep a relationship together.
They become parents because all their... Their friends have kids. They become parents because they've always wanted to, or they want to do it better than their parents did, or because it'll bring them fulfillment. Like a million reasons other than I want to create life or adopt a life and nurture it and care for it. Give it the best life possible.
Yeah. And give it love and belonging and safety and moral instruction, and then turn the life back over to the child when they're of age and say, go be your person, right? Even though he has some weird twisted affection and even protective instinct, his motivations are off and therefore everything is off.
Thanos and Gamora and Nebula probably could have used a good family therapist. Oh heavens yes. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Over 4 million people have used BetterHelp to start living a healthier, happier life. To get started, click the link below or go to betterhelp.com forward slash cinematherapy to fill out the questionnaire to assess.
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And you can even choose how you want to do your therapy sessions, a phone call, video chat, or even through messaging. What about through empathic abilities where my therapist could just sense all my trauma by like putting her hands on my head and then saying... Mantis is not one of their therapists, so probably not.
Mantis would be a good therapist though. If you think that you might benefit from therapy, click... the link below or go to betterhelp.com forward slash cinematherapy. You'll get 10% off your first month of BetterHelp so you can connect with a therapist and see if it helps you like it did me and would have helped Thanos a lot.
Again bringing your food. I thought you might be hungry. And the thing is he means it.
It's curious to me. I always hated that chair. So I've been told. Even so, I hoped we'd sit in it one day.
I hated this room. This ship. It's fascinating because there are other things that matter to him.
But nothing more than his directive, his goal. But he does feel sad that they don't have a real relationship. Like, it's actually there. Yeah. He did think she might be hungry and...
20 years....trying to do something thoughtful for her. Yeah. I was a child when you took me.
I saved you. From you? No.
We were happy on my home planet. You're in the bed hungry, scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I'm the one who stopped that. You know what's happened since then?
The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It's a paradise. Because you murdered half the planet.
A small price to pay for salvation. You're insane. Little one, it's a simple calculus. This universe is finite, its resources finite.
If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correction. You don't know that! I'm the only one who knows that.
At least I'm the only one with the will to act on it. Okay, I'm the only one classically narcissistic personality disorder. Is that what we're seeing?
When... Maybe. Because, is he right? I mean, he is the only one with the will to act on it.
Whether or not his Malthusian ethics are correct. What do you say? Malthus was famously a philosopher who, you know, said that, like, population needed to be kept in check, right?
And it continues to sort of burn. But I've gotten to the point... You should know this too.
Well, here's what I want to pick your brain about. Performance, motion capture, visual effects. It's not a hundred percent seamless.
Thanos never takes me out of it. Completely CG character. Yeah. Never takes me out of it. Why is that?
The performance capture and the original... original performance from Josh Brolin are great. Yeah.
And Josh Brolin was on set. So the actors had something to react to. It was a guy in a gray suit with dots on his face and a little camera in front of him. But they're acting with Josh Brolin.
But they're acting with Josh Brolin. You know, and they did a lot of work. Like, they built platforms and stuff to get him up to the right height so that...
that they had the right eye lines. But the visual effects work to translate, because Thanos'face is not the same shape as Josh Brolin's face. But you want to move those expressions and the micro expressions and everything that's happening into the right places.
I was going to say, because I am watching Josh Brolin's performance when I watch this. But it doesn't look like him. I don't think Thanos looks like Josh Brolin, but the expressions are Josh Brolin's, and that's why it feels like him. The expressions track perfectly.
And the folks at Weta are the best in the world at that. You had that same will as you fought by my side, daughter. That little breeze.
Everything I heard about myself he taught me. And in doing so made you the fiercest woman in the galaxy. That's why I trusted you to find the Soul Stone. I'm sorry I disappointed you.
I am disappointed. But not because you didn't find it. But because you did.
And you lied. Oh man. So I want to talk about the line... Everything I hate about myself, I learned from you.
And then you nailed it when he says, and in doing so, I made you the fiercest warrior in the galaxy. When you said, here's what I value. He has parented her after his image.
He has not parented her to value her free will and to help her figure out who she is or what she wants out of life. He has parented her because even though she's green and small and he's big and purple, he saw a fierce warrior, which is what he is, and he wanted to nurture a little mini me. If anything should happen to you, I don't know what I would do. I'd probably move on and get another replica, but there'd be a 10-minute period there when I would just be inconsolable. I think of people I've had in therapy who told me about, you know, their dad was really harsh and really cruel and really critical, and they grew up and they accomplished a lot of great things just to spite their dad, and their dad says, well, that was the plan.
I was giving you... I don't care if you did it out of spite. You still did it. I was giving you someone to push against so you would succeed. And the now adult child is like, and in doing so, you made me hate you and for a long time hate yourself.
What's my professional opinion on that? That's terrible parenting. That's not good.
Yeah, no. I mean, like on the surface, okay, you accomplished an objective. The damage you've done psychologically and emotionally to the person who should have been able to trust you with their safety and...
with their security and their sense of belonging and knowing that they're loved is, I wouldn't say irreparable because obviously I do what I do because I believe it's irreparable. But man, you've caused some pain and it's not okay. The universe has judged you.
You asked it for a prize and it told you no. You failed. I really love that line. And do you wanna know why? Because you love nothing.
No one...... cares. They're not for him. This isn't love. Which is true.
I know what my destiny wants. I cannot do that again. The Stones think it's love because they accept the sacrifice. But this is where the Stones and I disagree.
I'm on Team Gamora on this one. What he has for her, and I'm going to talk over the scene a bit so we don't get too destroyed by it. Man, that reality stoned.
I love that it's funny. It turns it into bubbles. Yeah. It's funny but then it's, you know, but it's not. It's funny right in the midst of all of this.
So when she says this isn't love, she's right. This is attachment. Right? This is...
he's attached to her. There may be even some affection there, but what love is, is selfless. And this is not that, right?
And that's why she's right. It's not love. The real life parallel is parents who put off time with their kids. They don't give those relationships what they deserve because of their goals.
He does love Gamora, but not as much as his mission. And see, that's... where i would push back i would say that he does actually love her and like his goals his goals are part of it but you know in the scene earlier he always wanted her to sit on the throne yeah i think he knew that at the end of his mission he would have to die Yeah.
Okay. He would have to go and he wanted to create a better universe for Gamora to rule. Okay. Than the one that he had. So whether he...
I think he does love her. It's twisted and it's bad. Yeah. It's wrong. Yeah.
But I think it is real. And I walk back slightly on what I said before. It's not selfish.
Thanos actually is not selfish, but he's mission focused. Yes. And he puts the mission before her. And this is where, in my opinion, in real life, if you're going to be a parent... The moment you decide to be a parent, biologically or adopted or foster, or in any sense of the word, you are choosing to go all in.
and to give it everything. Because the fact is, if you're watching this and you are a parent, you know that is literally the only way it works. Otherwise, it's going to go sideways, and it's going to hurt a lot of people.
Is it weird that I want to do it even more now? A little bit. To your point of he loves Gamora, like, he definitely cares for Gamora. It's all semantics.
How do you define love? How I define love is not this. But he definitely cares for Gamora because when Manta says he mourns, right?
And when he sees little Gamora after he snaps his fingers, what did it cost you? Everything. He cares for her deeply, but he's fully committed to this mission.
And my pushback on that, if I'm doing therapy, is Thanos, if you're going to be a parent, that's the mission. Yep. Right?
Everything else is secondary. Ronan's located the Power Stone. I'm dispatching you to his ship. So here we are years earlier, even though we're in... Four years earlier, even though it's five years later.
Yeah. Time travel, it's fun. It will not fail you, father.
I know you won't. I swear. He's looking at Gamora when he says, I know you won't. We just wait around for this Quill guy to show up and then he leads us to the Power Stone, is that it?
Let's take cover. We're not the only ones in 2014 looking for the stones. Who was that? It's chilling to me how he pays attention to everything and everything is important.
Like there are villains who are stupid and they just let things slide because they don't understand them, but his curiosity is what keeps him alive. He's constantly learning and seeking and like, he's smart and he's dedicated and he's hardworking. Yeah. He is a great hero of his own story.
Yeah. So what I want to point out in this scene is nebulous behavior and what it says about Thanos'parenting. She's clearly a brown noser, right? I mean, that's... that scene is telling you that the way she comes, the way she kneels, the way she says, I won't let you down, and Gamora just rolls her eyes because she's seen this before.
I mean, and the fact that Gamora rolls her eyes tells you... Nebula has been doing this for a long time. Yeah.
But what does that mean? She's desperate to please her father, because he is somebody who punishes harshly failure or deviation from what he wants or how he wants them to show up. And then he gives just, especially to Nebula, the tiniest little scraps of praise or acceptance, just enough emotionally to keep her alive and to string her along. This is where anxious attachment comes from. This kind of back and forth, what type of parent am I going to get?
And if I get the behavior just right, can I please them? Can I make them proud? And Nebula is anxious around Thanos all the time, because once again, as a parent, he's a dog turd. And were I giving Thanos therapy, the hard thing about giving Thanos therapy is he's so crystal clear on his goals and so dead set on them that motivating him with the feelings of his daughters or...
his relationship to them as a parent. You have to do it in a way that supports his goal, his primary goal, or gets him to question it. His mission has such a religious importance to him. Yeah. That, like, any means are justified by those hands.
Yeah. No matter what you bring to bear, he's going to be like, yeah, but kill half of people. I'm glad you brought up religion.
In the book, because in the book, Love's Executioner by Dr. Irvin Yalom. I mean, I'm a man of faith, but he's not. Right. He's a psychotherapist who's an atheist, and he says to therapists, don't even try.
try to undo a person's religious beliefs. One, it's not your job. Yeah.
And two, it is so deep rooted in there. It's not going to work. That the best approach in therapy is to say, okay, this matters to you.
This belief system matters to you. How can we build a healthier framework that aligns with that? Because with Thanos, I would say, okay, let's start having a conversation then about using the stones in a way that isn't genocidal, but still brings out a similar...
Result, right? Why don't you double the amount of resources in the galaxy? Yeah, no, I listen there's whole reddit threads about why that would or wouldn't work and we encourage you to seek them out Do we do we encourage people to go to reddit for anything? Why is it always reddit? So so what I would say is Thanos you're kind of playing it like fix the universe Have relationship with my daughters, healthy relationship with my daughters, it's one or the other.
You can do both, buddy! Let's look for ways to find both. And in therapy, I may not have that answer, but I trust in the process that together we can find it. Reduce the atom. I use the stones to destroy the stone.
Nearly. It always will be. I am inevitable.
What did you do to them? Nothing. Yet.
They're not trying to stop something I'm going to do in our time. They're trying to undo something I've already done in theirs. The stones.
I found them all. I won. Narratively, What a cool conversation around time travel.
Yeah. It's your future. It's my destiny. My father is many things. A liar is not one of them.
Ah, thank you, daughter. Perhaps I treated you too harshly. Is destiny fulfilled?
Yeah, to your point. He knows there's not a universe for him. No.
He's a traitor. That's not me. That's not...
I could never... I would never betray you. I know. I don't think he's a narcissist.
I think he has narcissistic traits, for sure. I don't think he qualifies for all the criteria. I do think he's a zealot. Yes, that is indisputable. Yeah, I don't think he's a zealot.
It's my destiny. He is a zealot. And like you said, it takes on a religious significance for him.
Yeah. I think it's so fascinating that everyone in that room is shook when he gets beheaded but him. Yeah, he's the only one who's like, and destiny fulfilled. Yeah. He knows there's not a universe for me after I do the thing.
Yeah. And that's why he does love Gamora. Like, he's building a person to achieve some ends that he believes in. Yeah.
But he believes in her to be the one to do it. Yeah. He loves her and wants her to rule the galaxy, the universe, whatever it is.
But then again, it's also simple dispassionate math. Like, he's sad when he chooses to kill her. Right.
It's like, well, it's her or it's the universe. Yeah, universe has to come first. Yeah. She was going to be the ruler of the universe. We can always find somebody else.
What this scene reminds me of, the whole, ah, daughter, perhaps I treated you too harshly. The real world parallel that I have seen is parents who go so hard after their goals, go so hard after what they want, and their children are either there to support that or as an afterthought. They don't have the time and the energy to truly parent.
And then they achieve it. They get what they want, and it's empty. Now, I don't think Thanos sees it as empty, but I see this a lot, where parents find it empty, and they look back, and they're like, oh, I burned bridges with my kids.
I stepped over all these bodies to get to this goal. All of this time and energy that I could have spent on this relationship, and now the relationship isn't there. And now they're trying to show kindness.
And with Thanos, that's kind of... If I were in therapy with him, that's the lesson that I would hope he would get, is you can have it both ways. You have committed to parenthood, so let's commit all the way, not just partway. Let's re-explore what parenthood is, because you see it as a means to the ends you're seeking.
And if you have a relationship with these daughters, it's like a happy byproduct. And then he's also, and there's a whole other episode we could do on the fact that he pits them against each other and he plays favorites. I didn't have time to go into that now, but that's a layer of this, right?
And I would help him get to a healthier place of, okay, you committed to parenting. Let's truly love and support these daughters in who they want to be. and in having a relationship with each other.
But then I'm a family therapist, so that's my bias. If I'm a therapist of, you know, universe control, then I might have different opinions. If you're a universe control therapist, please write in the comments below.
We'd love to hear from you and see what Jono got wrong and what he got right. Oh my gosh. Yeah. A different opinion.
Yeah. Is there a license for that? I mean, it's crazy that this is a real job.
So until next time. All that for a drop. I should have gone for that.
Thank you patrons. You are inevitable. Folks like... Helen.
What the... Jvav... J-V-A-F-D.
Mark Andujar. Brooklyn Sparks. And Superfaint. Which sounds like a really great 70s band.
It does sound like a great 70s band. Alright, we love you. Thank you.