The Objective Compassion of Look Into My Eyes

“This film is about your experience watching it,” director Lana Wilson told us, advising that if we watch with patience and curiosity, “[we] will be rewarded.” The Doc Days audience was clearly on board: as the first voiceover began with a psychic instructing her client to take a deep breath, I heard a chorus of inhales around me. We were all in, and we were absolutely rewarded. Wilson’s newest documentary, Look Into My Eyes, is a return to the anthology format of her 2013 debut, After Tiller, and while the subjects of the two films are in very different lines of work, both are polarizing helping professions. The latter profiles the stories of late-term abortion providers scattered across the country, and this new film focuses on clairvoyants in New York City. Both films serve as collages of unbiased portraits, meant not to sway the viewer into supporting or railing against the work, but to show that these people are human in the same ways that you and I are. 

The film ends with the same session as it began, which is just one of multiple ways that mirroring appears as a motif, but the film follows seven clairvoyants through not just their work, but also their personal lives. We see their interiors: both literally, as they take the crew on tours of their homes, and also metaphorically as they lift the veil and explain not just how they got into this line of work, but all the other nuances of how they became the person they are, and all the questions they still have. Wilson’s compassionate gaze is clarified with editor Hannah Buck’s precision: by juxtaposing together moments of vulnerability and vanity, authenticity and performance, hurt and healing, the ethos of the film emerges. Or, in Wilson’s own words, it’s about “the chance for someone to witness you deeply and then hold up a mirror and say ‘this is what I see reflected here.’ I think that’s really powerful; we’re all looking for that from other people or places. That, to me, was the final layer that I wanted to get into the film.”

Throughout the screening, I found myself vacillating between levels of belief. I am definitely a woo woo girlie, but I look at a lot of mysticism the same way I do chiropractors: some of them definitely have a special skill, but a lot of them are just selling you a short-term comfort that doesn’t help – and may even harm – you in the long run. The film addresses this as well: the subjects themselves even admit to skepticism. In one uncomfortable scene, we see psychic Per flop. In another film, this scene might have catalyzed a “gotcha!” narrative, but this is a Lana Wilson documentary, so of course we instead let the moment breathe. Per experiences the same imposter syndrome that I’ve felt many times, at work or in school or even just… as a person. And that’s Look Into My Eyes’ ethos: to be human is to be messy. Messy like chasing an acting career for decades, or being raised in dysfunction, or being raised by a parent who did everything right and then died before you had the chance to say goodbye. Messy like grief and loneliness, like confusion, like finally finding your one calling in life and it’s to be a pet psychic so you can tell people whether their pet lizard is happy with his new owner. The beautiful thing is, though, that we find each other in the mess. There’s someone who really needs to hear how their lizard is doing; does it really matter to you and me whether Phoebe’s answer comes from the spirit world? 

During the post-show Q&A, Wilson revealed that she first set foot in a psychic’s shop in an act of desperation on the night that Donald Trump won the presidential election. The anecdote does well to explain how people find themselves paying for this service in the first place; that was such a moment of collective panic, of messiness. It makes me think of how my interest in astrology elevated during a particularly painful breakup; no matter what my logical brain knew, my soul needed the balm of the idea that this was all part of the universe’s greater machinations. There was a purpose to this pain, and there would be an endpoint. It wasn’t curative, but it helped fight the existential dread until I was back on my emotional feet, and it pushed me to find that within myself again. That’s what a lot of these clients are seeking, too, such as one young man who goes to see Nikenya to talk through his generational trauma. He discusses knowing the price of his enslaved ancestor, and how the number haunts him. Nikenya channels the ancestor, and the two (three) of them talk though how he can break the literal/metaphorical chains that this country has put on them. It’s a moving moment, followed by Nikenya explaining that the sessions can be just as healing for the healers. 

At the very end of the Q&A, Wilson, whose work is a reflection of her incredible warmth, said she wanted to read a poem. It’s one of my favorites, written by Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet who happens to live in San Antonio and teach at Texas State. Wilson said she wanted to read “Gate A-4” not because it was relevant to the film, but because it was relevant to the world we live in now. It was the perfect way to close the night: like the film, it was a reminder that understanding is not a prerequisite to empathy.

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Gate A-4

Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
"If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately."

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. "Help,"
said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him."

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

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