Sometimes the cliché is true, and a public figure characterized by his good humor is a mask that hides past wounds. As the filmmaker himself has just revealed, kevin smith is proof of this: the director of Clerks and Mallrats He has confessed that he had to go to therapy to overcome sexual abuse suffered during his childhood.
In an interview with People (via IndieWire), Smith pointed out that this decision was due to a nervous breakdown suffered in 2020, two years after the heart attack that almost cost him his life. “At that time, I wouldn’t have minded disappearing”, accurate. “I called a friend and said, ‘I’m in a strange, dark place. I need to go somewhere and get help.’
Smith’s trauma occurred when he was six years old and was forced to grope a little girl by an older youth. As he explains, the filmmaker tried to justify the incident by telling himself that he had only been “play doctor in an alley” until he received treatment at an Arizona medical center. “When a third party orders you to do something like that, which goes against your principles, he is abuse,” said his therapist.
As a result of that unpleasant experience, as well as the teasing he suffered by a teacher about his weight, Smith began to develop that alter ego that would end up making it to the movies as Silent Bob. “I decided to be funny and make people like me before they realized I was fat,” he recalls.
Many of Smith’s therapy partners were war veterans, which led him to reflect on the common identity of human suffering. “At first it was hard to open up when someone just talked about watching his friends die,” he says. “But I learned that the human nervous system does not make distinctions: Inside you, trauma is trauma.”
In addition, Kevin Smith took other measures such as stop smoking marijuana and use social networks less often. “It terrifies me to see people’s reaction,” she concludes. “But I know that if there’s someone out there who doesn’t know about these things, like I did, they might be able to figure something out of it.”
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