By Ken Knight
ONE HOUR PHOTO ~Directed by Mark Romanek (2002) starring Robin Williams is a “stalker” themed motion picture featuring the comedian genius Robin Williams in arguably the most intense role of his career to date. The Film did relatively well at the Box Office and in DVD sales as a thriller exploring one lonely single man’s voyeuristic life as a Photo-Tech at a “SAV MART” discount department store somewhere/anywhere in suburban America. Watching this film however, whether you are married or single, you will find a little more to it than that!
Seymour “Sy” Parrish is a middle-aged white male living alone in a “downtown” apartment which is furnished for one solitary occupant who is never expecting visitors and whose job defines him identity-wise, working as a Photo-Tech at the department store’s mini-lab, a profession he’s held for 20 years. The film quickly exhibits that Sy has had a decade-long fixation on one particular family whose photos he’s been developing: The “Yorkins”, a thirty-something suburban couple with one ten year old son named Jake. It has been said that children are naturally intuitive so we see in the opening salvos of this film Young Jake sensing that Sy “The Photo Guy” Parrish (whom he visits every time his mother goes to SAV-MART) is lonely without a family of his own, no wife, no girlfriend, etc. and feels sorry for him. At this point the film shows us how really lonely/solitary the character of Sy Parrish truly is, showing the extent Sy has been keeping tabs on the Yorkin family, an entire wall filled with extra copies of the photos the Yorkins had developed over the past 10 years (stealing photo-copies gets Sy fired later on) and that he secretly views himself as their “Uncle Sy”, fantasizing that he’s a part of their family since they have been nice to him over the years.
The character Sy Parrish is painfully portrayed as the ultimate “Omega” male in American society, a man who is never popular, never athletic, no family of his own, never has a girlfriend (i.e. never gets laid!) usually dresses bland, lives alone with a pet hamster, physically soft, “quirky” and lacking in social skills…the kind of guy most other men ignore and women never give the time of day. Seen as pitiful and sympathetic to some viewers of the film and yet “creepy” and irritating by others, Sy Parrish envies the Yorkin family and the seemingly “ideal” family-life he imagines they lead, to the point that he injects himself in stalker-like times with each one of the Yorkins to fulfill his fantasy as “welcome” among them. What Sy fails to see (until it is too late) is that the Yorkin’s family-life is anything but picture-perfect!
The character of Nina Yorkin is an over-spending, “keep up with the Joneses” housewife driving her husband Will to work harder and longer in order to keep up with her expenditures. When Will confronts his wife about her bankrupting habits, she retorts that he is an “emotionally-neglectful” husband and father! (yep, all his fault for working hard to provide for a gold-digger wife). Far be it for Hollywood to portray the wife as the villain in this film, it turns out that Will Yorkin is having an affair with a female co-worker named Maia Burston, an affair Sy Parrish accidentally discovers when he develops photos the mistress turns in. Sy’s idealistic image of the Yorkin couple is completely shattered and on his last day at the photo-lab he puts one of the incriminating photos in Mina Yorkin’s packet for her and Jake to see (yes, a douche thing to do but Sy begins his “revenge” trip after being fired from his beloved Photo-lab job around the same time he finds the Yorkins are not Ozzy and Harriet). Sy then discovers Nina Yorkin doesn’t appear to give a shit about her husband’s affair as he watches them eat dinner in their home as he sits out at the street.(Why ruin a good dinner when she had her husband by the balls anyway?). With the Yorkin family he envied and idealized not being the picture-perfect family unit he so desperately wanted for himself, and no longer doing the job he felt important in doing, Sy’s own loneliness increases two-fold and in typical Hollywood “creep” fashion, he lashes out at his former boss as well as Will Yorkin who is hammering his hot mistress at a local Hotel.
This film has its complicated “villain” in Sy Parrish and the Marriage 2.0 example of The Yorkins he is systematically stalking is shown as the “victim” by the film’s ending, though the real victim in this tale is the single male “Omega” who should not have envied what other people have, for how wrong he was in his assessment of a married couple! The enigmatic “Loser” who lives alone without wives, kids, divorce-decrees, child-support / alimony payments….became ensconced with the demon of ENVY and sought a taste of someone else’s life! What is not said in this film is the social “pariah” (Sy) is considered a “loser” simply because he is a single man of middle-age. Sy saw a married couple (Marriage 2.0) and in the general social expectation of wife/house/kids-or-else wanted those things for himself, or to at least be around such things since he could not seem to acquire wife/house/kids-or-else all on his own.
How many single men have suffered from the same “expectation” and lost their damn mind chasing the lives of others who are married with kids, wives with boob-jobs, kids who may or may not be theirs, subprime-mortgages, et al? (though maybe not physical stalking as Sy Parrish carried out). How many single men have gone green with envy over the lives of couples and families, pursuing that life for themselves because that is what is “expected” of a man? “Marriage 2.0” (as clearly defined by the fictional Yorkin family) is a surrealistic nightmare for countless denizens who may have imagined the same idealistic “family life” Sy Parrish did during his lonely apartment sojourns in the film. Maybe if Sy Parrish could have been patient enough to see the end-result of the Yorkin Marriage 2.0 > divorce papers, Family Court Judge, lawyers’ fees, husband kicked out of his house while forced to still pay for it, child support and visitation hours determined by the ex-wife, alimony to the non-working-ex-wife, and the mistress bailing as soon as lover boy’s bank account is drained….Sy would have taken his boss’s advice and gone on vacation to Club Med rather than stalk a married couple.
Whoever said a fictional film can’t be a lesson? ONE HOUR PHOTO points out a great example to follow in hindsight for Single men: do not bother to envy the lives of others ~ particularly the lives of married/engaged couples because the married man has more to lose than you do, and he often does exactly that….LOSE!
Ken Knight is a Feature Contributor on MONDO-VIDEO.COM and is the Author of “THE MIDNIGHT SHOW~Late Night Cable TV Guy-Flicks of the 80s” among other book titles.
