The Doctor Will See You Now Eliya Smith
In my defense, I fall in love with Dr. Phillip McGraw a few weeks into the pandemic, when reality is slushy — months still from evincing any sort of pattern or logic, however cruel — and I am at my personal nadir. I waste the days submerged in a vat of self-pity: wondering how my college analog would be spending her senior Spring, watching infection rates tick higher on my laptop, and logging into zoom school from the pink-bannistered twin bed I slept in for the first eighteen years of my life. I rarely sleep at night and books are gibberish but movies have plot, so I seek out the deathless glow of short clips. YouTube, obligingly, feeds me byte after byte of Phil. We share a look, he and I, and then, just for me, he points his morally unimpeachable finger at the morally impeached, facing down rabid children, neglectful parents, other womans and klepto teens until the sun leaks through my shades. And I am a little bit numbed and a little bit fortified and, finally, a little bit sleepy. In the mornings I decide I no longer like Dr. Phil. His head is too conical to permit such baldness (or too bald to warrant such a pointy crown; I vacillate on this point). I think it is wrong to air people’s problems on national television, as he does, to take advantage of those who either covet attention or who grapple with problems so insurmountable — accompanied usually by a conspicuous lack of resources to surmount them — that their last hope is televised therapy. Not to mention the fact that on occasion, Dr. Phil interviews people who spew hatred, people he argues with but nevertheless amplifies, which makes me irate. Then two, three, four a.m. hits, and again I am trawling his page for clips I may have missed. I feel bad and I want to feel better. Outside of my bedroom there is pain and disease on a scale I cannot process. No one can fix it and no one is trying. Here, where Dr. Phil is, there is healing and salvation. I am comforted by Phil’s assuredness, by his unwavering certainty — you can see it in his body, hear it in his voice — that if wrong exists, right does, too, and that progress is possible for the people on his show, if only they follow his advice. I understand, of course, that the show is a charade. Dr. Phil manufactures intimacy, but he is aware, always, of those to whom he performs. Really those people are the ones watching him months later from their television sets, but their avatars sit in the soundstage opposite Phil in the form of a small in-person audience. For me, it is this exchange between the performers (Phil and guests) and the spectators that makes the show, despite its obvious emotional fraudulence, feel so stirring. The more I watch these people — the watchers — the more obsessed I become. Phil’s powers of restoration seem drawn directly from the crowd, from their surging warmth in response to whatever he says. The troubled guests make silly defenses of their abominable behavior; Phil comments drolly; the audience laughs. I laugh, too. He is so funny. When Phil turns somber, the audience is dutifully appalled, or moved, or aghast; whatever the situation calls for. His eyes flit to his audience. He loves them for loving him. And how content they seem, in their escalating rows of chairs. Initially, the clips YouTube feeds me are reruns, filmed in pre-pandemic times. In that vestige of a world I am already forgetting, crowded audience members share air, fight for armrest real estate, and 28 | Issue 43
