One Hour Photo 16Feb05 good rvw of the movie
As if invoked (I'm not sure it would have arrived here by more conscious means) by my recent post, a video comes home about violation. 2003's One Hour Photo-fox.
Robin Williams (Psi) is a SavMart photo lab technician. He has been for 20 years. He's middle aged, balding, but in case we don't immediately recognise how unattractive he is, he wears big square metal frame glasses which he's forever pushing up onto his nose with the middle finger push, and he carries a retro airline bag—which only makes the filmmakers appear anachronistic, because didn't they notice that those are cool now? Robin Williams is unattractive and so therefore (the film implies...no, nothing implied...the film states, bluntly and often) he is without family. This is the film's central point and principle thesis about photography, as stated in an early wistful voice over by Robin Williams. The first line spoken along the film's timeline (after a Sunset Blvd-esque opening sequence where we see Robin Williams post-denouement, arrested and of course, mug-shotted) is: "Family pictures depict smiling faces." But Robin Williams has no family. He does, however, work in a photo lab and there he processes the family pictures for a lot of families. This is the opportunity the film seizes on for its horror effects: his access to other people's photos.
To get this film made, the producers exploited two things: 1. the star power of Robin Williams and 2. the intimacy and vulnerability of family photographs, their genre potential for horror. But to make the exploitation work, the film has to invent a main character who works in a photo lab. ..Now, assuming that Hollywood has noticed photoblogs, flickrs and the like, they wouldn't need to make their antagonist a photo lab technician. He could be any old creep with an internet connection.
I don't think that photographs are any less vulnerable or intimate than the film posits, and I don't think that the public space of the internet, for whatever its differences, is less open to violations than any other kind of space. Maybe then (and there are other possibilities here) the internet creates conditions under which family life (or any kind of life) does not need, first and foremost, to be defended. (how can both underlined statements be the case? )