Psychics Soothe NYC’s Wounds in Eccentric, Frustrating Doc Look into My Eyes
During the season one finale of Sex and the City, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” Charlotte York makes an appointment with Noanie, a psychic, to discover more about when she will get married, and to whom. The psychic tells Charlotte point blank that she does not see marriage in her future, which does not align with Charlotte’s narrative she’s written for herself in her head. “How can you say that like that? What about my feelings?” Charlotte asks. “Honey, I’m a psychic,” Noanie deadpans. “I’m not a shrink.”
To use Lana Wilson’s documentary Look into My Eyes to measure the cultural temperature around psychics, things have certainly changed since Charlotte sat in Noanie’s chair in 1998; many are moving away from psychiatry and toward psychics to answer life’s questions. Wilson could have alternatively titled this film What about My Feelings? Frankly, a lot of people in this film mistake their psychic for a licensed mental health professional, and many of the psychics erroneously see themselves that way, too. Look into My Eyes opens and closes with an ER doctor visiting a psychic for answers surrounding the violent, wrongful death of a child patient she saw decades prior. This set alarm bells off in my head: If anyone should be seeing a therapist and not a psychic, it’s this woman.
“Earth is hard,” is a refrain we hear more than once in Look into My Eyes, an intimate illustration of seven New York City psychics and the people who pay them money to get in touch with their dead loved ones (yes, including pets). “Earth is hard,” is both true and an overly simplistic way to explain away problems that feel too big to tackle. If a therapist said this to me, I would probably get a new therapist. Living on Earth these days is certainly not easy, as outlined by the anxieties of both the “healers” and their “patients.” Whether they are burdened by climate change worries, intergenerational trauma, career troubles or heartbreak, it seems like everyone could use a break. One way to soothe achy nerves is to self-narrativize, but that only addresses the symptoms, not the cause, of our problems. A therapist would challenge our self-narratives as a way to heal, not tell us what we want to hear, which is all that these psychics can do.
Look into My Eyes is not intended as an investigation setting out to either prove or disprove the credibility of Wilson’s subjects, but it does unintentionally reveal a lack of integrity in some of her subjects, which Wilson (off-puttingly) does not address. Many of the psychics barely buy into their own act. During one session, a young Black man struggles with visions of an enslaved ancestor, and looks to psychic Ilka Pinheiro for clarity on what these visions could mean. Pinheiro, in a moment that could be described only as improv, explains that his ancestor doesn’t want the young man to be chained down by grief, as he himself was chained. It’s an awkward moment, one hard to fully buy.
“Am I making this shit up?” Pinheiro asks herself, with Wilson’s camera as a witness. “If it resonates, then it doesn’t fucking matter,” she ultimately decides. The degree to which you agree with this statement likely correlates with the degree to which you will enjoy this film.
None of the seven subjects grew up with the dream of becoming a psychic; it probably won’t surprise you to learn that they’re all creative types—mostly aspiring actors, a trade which goes hand in hand with improvisational skills—and many of them are avid cinephiles. Cinephilia being the most sure way of raising the dead at our disposal, this makes perfect sense. One notable way that Look into My Eyes succeeds is that it proves that, despite evidence that the finance and tech people have taken over New York City, there are still strange, lovable dreamers living here. They’ve just gotten more creative with their survival tactics.
The star of Look into My Eyes is one of the most eccentric characters in the film, Phoebe Hoffman, the animal communicator. Hoffman suffered a troubled childhood in New York, and grew up loving John Waters movies, which led her to want to become an actress. She became a pet psychic by accident. It’s precisely because of the ridiculousness of communicating with a dead or lost pet that it’s easier to drop the pretensions surrounding Hoffman’s gig, and get to the heart of what she’s telling her patients. The stories she tells them about their pets are more clearly just that—stories—but Hoffman is so sincere that you believe them. She has a scrappy trustworthiness the other psychics lack.
In the press notes, Wilson has stated that she first saw a psychic on November 9, 2016, the night after Donald Trump was elected into office, as she was uncertain about how the world might move forward. I can only speculate as to what Wilson asked that psychic that night, but if I had to guess on the basis of this film, I would say she centered her own feelings, like Charlotte. Maybe she should have seen a shrink instead. Look into My Eyes is a unique window into the minds of those who, like Wilson, experience a lot of feelings about the state of the world, but aren’t quite sure what to say or do about them.
Director: Lana Wilson
Release Date: September 6, 2024
Brooklyn-based film writer Katarina Docalovich was raised in an independent video store and never really left. Her passions include sipping lime seltzer, trying on perfume and spending hours theorizing about Survivor. You can find her scattered thoughts as well as her writing on Twitter.