What
motivates a stalker? That question is posed in One
Hour Photo, directed and written by Mark Romanek.
When the film begins, a timid Seymore ("Sy") Parrish
(played by Robin Williams) is in a police interrogation room.
A police officer asks him, "What did you have against
the Yorkin family?" Instead of answering, Sy asks to
see photos brought into the room by the officer, but his request
is denied. The scene then shifts to Sy working at a SavMore
Store as a one-hour photo lab manager alongside his able assistant
Yoshi Araki (played by Paul H. Kim). Sy's voiceovers remark
that photos are taken to remember happy events; he also comments
on his various regular customers, including an elderly woman
who takes pictures of cats and a twentysomething porn photo
amateur. Soon, Mrs. Nina Yorkin (played by Connie Nielsen)
and her nine-year-old son Jake (played by Dylan Smith) approach
to have photos from Jake's birthday party developed. Sy rushes
to finish the job before closing time, less than an hour,
and gives a free disposable camera to Jake as a birthday present.
Meanwhile, store manager Bill Owens (played by Gary Cole)
has his eye on Sy, since there is a discrepancy between the
number of photos printed and the number sold, and he does
not want to fire Sy, a long-term employee, without additional
evidence of malfeasance. Secretly, Sy has been taking home
an extra set of prints for a montage of Yorkin family photos
on his living room wall. Sy has also been trying to become
part of the Yorkin family by befriending Nina and Jake, even
attending the latter's soccer training session one afternoon,
and stalking the family. His stalking reveals that Will Yorkin
(played by Michael Vartan), Nina's husband, is carrying on
an affair with another woman. Meanwhile, Owens watches as
Sy has a heated exchange with an Agfa repair technician, takes
irregular lunch breaks, and spots other peculiar behavior
so that he can fire Sy on multiple grounds, awaiting an appropriate
moment, which comes as Sy disposes of chemicals while wearing
a gas mask. Having been fired, Sy purloins a hunting knife
from the store, scratches out Will's picture on the Yorkin
family photos, and takes pictures of the manager's daughter.
After developing the pictures of Owens's daughter, Yoshi brings
them to his attention. Owens calls the police, who go to Sy's
apartment to find the montage, but Sy is not there. Instead,
he has checked into the hotel where Will is having sex with
his girlfriend, and he enters their room with a roomservice
tray; then, at knifepoint, he snaps his camera at the two
in compromising positions. When police find that Sy has checked
into a hotel room down the hall, he is pursued and arrested.
Back to the police interrogation scene, Sy begins to put a
question to the detective who is with him, and soon he reveals
a strange autobiography that serves to identify the psychological
reasons for Sy's obsessions. Evidently as a child Sy was severely
abused, and the family breakup due to his father's adultery
was a trauma from which he never recovered. Too shy and afraid
to start a family on his own, Sy tried to bond with members
of the Yorkin family as if he were an uncle. Will's adultery
then prompted him to take snapshots (according to Sy's voiceover
the term "snapshot" was originally a hunting term)
as a form of revenge for his childhood trauma, though in fact
there was no film in the camera. Whereas child abuse and stalking
have been themes of films before, One Hour Photo
is a fresh look into the mind of a stalker whose low self-esteem
immobilizes him from having a normal social life and yet whose
need for family causes him first to fantasize and later to
act as an avenger of a homewrecker. Sy personifies post-industrial
alienation: an isolated individual who lives alone, had an
unsuccessful family life, and derives his only joy on the
job by taking special interest in his customers and in the
quality of his work. When an alienated worker is fired, depriving
a person of an identity, the result may be to take up arms
against a boss and even coworkers; fortunately, One
Hour Photo does not go that far. MH
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