one hour photo (2002), brat summer, and susan sontag
“I was here. I existed. I was young. I was happy... and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture.”
I spent my Saturday at home, reading a bunch, and watching a movie: One Hour Photo (2002) directed by Mark Romanek. It’s been on my watchlist since I saw a TikTok recommending it (sorry!) and I saw it was leaving Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so I pressed play with gusto.
One Hour Photo is about Seymour (Sy) Parrish who works at the fictional SavMart’s (aka Walmart) photo counter. There, his job is developing film photos that customers bring in. He is passionate about his job, he spends utmost care configuring the color balances, and he develops stories in his head about his customers based on the photos he sees. One family in particular, the Yorkins, has been developing their photos with Sy for the past 11 years, and in turn, he’s developed a one-sided devotional relationship to them.
It’s not hard to see why. The Yorkins embody the perfect nuclear family, except even more chic. They live in a gorgeous modern home. The wife, Nina, is styled like a 90s it-girl. Her husband, Will, is equally clean and handsome, with a high-paying job. Their young son, Jake – who Sy has witnessed growing up through photographs – is a sweet, little boy who plays soccer and loves Six Flags.
Sy is so obsessed with the family that he even spends some of his days parked outside their home, where he imagines what life would be like for him as “Uncle Sy.” He has a wall in his house of their family photos (he makes copies at his job). He takes those photos with him out and about and eats his meals alone, staring across at this picture-perfect family to keep him company. However, the family is not as perfect as it appears in the photographs (like most normal people, they only commemorate the happy occasions).
One Hour Photo stars Robin Williams in one of his least comedic roles. I never doubted he had the range, but I had to see it to really believe it. His portrayal of Sy is not only so natural, but also humanizes a character that can easily get smeared as a “sociopathic creep” in the wrong hands. It’s an incredible feat considering the little backstory we actually get about him. But part of what makes Sy such an interesting character is that despite doing creepy things, his desires were not creepy. He didn’t lust after Nina, fantasize about taking Will’s place in the family, or try to kidnap Jake, which are usually the narratives we see in these kinds of crime movies. Sy genuinely just wants to be included: to attend Jake’s soccer games, to buy gifts for the family at Christmas, and to have someone to talk to during lunch.
His loneliness feels real and his imprinting on them based on seeing photographs is just an extreme stretch of the parasocial relationships many of us have developed with celebrities online at some time or another.
In his review, Roger Ebert compared One Hour Photo to Peeping Tom (1960), which is a movie about a serial killer who murders his victims after taking photos of them. I would say this is a bit of an uncharitable mis-read. I would actually compare the movie to Ingrid Goes West (2017) (to Roger’s credit, Ingrid hadn’t come out yet at the time of his review). Ingrid Goes West is about a social-media obsessed lonely woman Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza), who, following the release from a recovery facility, embarks on a mission to befriend her favorite social media influencer.
But while Ingrid exhibited outright delusion and meanness (it’s a comedy, so some of her dramatics were played up), Sy’s obsession felt more anchored in a child-like game of pretend. Rather than feeling jealous, which manifested for Ingrid, Sy only wished the best for everyone around him. There’s one pivotal scene when he refers to SavMart’s customers as his customers, a mistake that gets swiftly corrected by his boss. To Sy, his job in delivering quality photos is the one thing that staves off the doom of loneliness. It’s the one task that binds him to society and makes him feel important.
[Spoilers] In the third act, Sy becomes unhinged when he finds out that Will has been having an affair with another woman. When he realizes that Nina won’t do anything about it, he decides to take vigilante justice by breaking into Will and his mistress’ hotel room and forcing them to pose in sexual positions as he photographs them. There’s a twist at the very end of the movie when you find out that the posing itself was the punishment and he never actually took any incriminating photos. Instead, he took photos of random mundane objects in his hotel room. The movie ends with him laying out all his photos in a flat spread and admiring them. I’ll recall his quote from earlier in the movie: “Most people don't take snapshots of the little things... the used Band-Aid... the guy at the gas station... the wasp on the Jell-O... but these are the things that make up the true picture of our lives.”
I read his obsession with “little things” partially as a sign of his arrested development. When Jake brings in his disposable camera to get it developed earlier in the movie, Sy becomes emotional while going through the simple photos that Jake has taken. The movie hints that Sy sees himself in Jake, and his anger towards Will for ‘betraying the family’ runs parallel to his anger towards his own abusive father. I also think Sy’s obsession with these images is representative of how he longs for a sense of normalcy. He yearns for a simple life of love and belonging; these are things that many people take for granted as their everyday. I also imagine that as he has no friends or family of his own, these are the only kinds of photos he’s able to take.
One Hour Photo paints an incredibly compassionate portrait of loneliness. Even though Sy’s actions are extreme, they are not quite damning enough to write him off completely. And while the story might seem dated1, it feels ever more present as loneliness statistics have increased and living parasocially through our phones becomes ever more normalized.
All of this ended up reminding me of the Charli XCX birthday party ‘discourse’ from the beginning of this month. She threw her 32nd bday bash at Tenant of the Trees in Los Angeles, which was extensively photographed by other guests. Among the high-profile attendees included Lorde (of course), Sabrina Carpenter (who must have been purposely ditching all the cameras because the paparazzi photo of her leaving the party looks like it was shot on the iPhone 1)2, Billie Eilish, and… Glenn Powell (???). As Charli is The Girl of the moment, people obviously chimed in once the photos surfaced online. Many of the viral tweets about it skewed negative.
Tell The Bees covers thoroughly in their essay the mental health issues, isolation, aging, and other factors that have led to an anti-partying mindset or a disbelief that anyone could actually be having fun at a party.3 It’s a great read.
What I want to add to the discussion is this: I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how photography serviced the ‘indie sleaze’ era.
As a disclaimer, my version of ‘indie sleaze’ was a teenage house party where someone brought a digital camera and took messy photos that were then uploaded onto Facebook in an album dump within 3 business days. Or Tumblr, if you were cooler. This version is probably not in agreement with the people who designate the early 2000s as the indie sleaze era or the people who refer to the late 2000s. There is a whole separate issue of people conflating multiple different eras, subcultural niches, and music genres into the ‘indie sleaze’ category, as @/GABELORD on X aptly put it, “It seems to be trying to squeeze everything from the Strokes until American dubstep into the same box just as long as it had flash party photography.” @/HarperSeven added, “Yeah, I recently realized that the “vibe” from all those 2000s era digital pictures was the flash.”
The fact that there is so much misunderstanding re: when ‘indie sleaze’ actually happened is a symptom of nostalgic amnesia that renders many of the anti-Charli party takes cold. And as Susan Sontag wrote in her book On Photography (1977),
Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
For example, definition of ‘indie sleaze’ aside, I’m not even sure that in 2012 I was actually having that much fun myself, despite what the pictures say. People just tend to not take photos of their unhappy moments (with the exception of the sad girl era of the internet when hot girls took photos of them crying.) And even if they were unhappy at the time, people will throw on their smiling faces immediately once the camera comes out as a reflex. I have so many childhood family vacation memories of me, exhausted from walking all day, sporting a semi-permanent frown that could only disappear when my dad held the camera and said, “Smile!”
Sure, I’ll agree that the advent of social media and iPhones have changed the partying landscape. But ultimately, social media has only amplified an existing phenomenon. For as long as photography has existed, there has always been this desire to evoke a vibe in photographs, whether or not the vibe is actually consistent with reality. People have always been aware of the camera. Susan ends her essay with this:
Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
And maybe that feels hopeless and terrible, but I disagree. To go back to One Hour Photo, I realized that, come the end of the movie, not one person had taken a photo of Sy minus the selfie he takes to finish off his customers’ film roll. It’s a sad existence to reckon with, especially as Sy seems so aware of the power of photographs himself.
As he narrates,
If these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it's this... I was here. I existed. I was young. I was happy... and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture.
I think in recent years, there’s been a backlash against photography, as it’s become associated with social media influencerdom and an inability to “live in the moment.” I embraced this for a few years myself, convinced that I could have more fun if I was fully present. I went from taking photos every single day in 2018 to taking photos every so often just a year later. I have many friends that I don’t have a single photo with.
After watching this film, I thought about how I actually need to be taking more pictures again. I don’t really want to go back to photographing every single food I ate in a day, but I think there can be a healthy balance. And maybe the moment I capture will never be as great as the memory preserves it to be, and maybe someone on the internet will project their upset about the state of the world and narcissism and whatever onto me, but at least I can say that I cared enough. I cared enough about me. I cared enough about the people. We were here. We existed.
the majority of us are not getting film regularly developed anymore and the days when you could get them developed in under an hour seem like a pipe dream!!!
This quote hits: “I do think an over-identification with the introvert label (as both Millennials and Gen Z are wont to do) and the rise of bed rotting and the ease of opting out of society has created an illusory community around… not doing anything.”
i loved the last quote about the illusion of community while identifying as someone who does not like participating in society!! This was a really fun read
This was so well written and thought provoking! It's like, simulating fun through photographs and people saying that's not real fun but during the sad girl era, you're telling people you're so deeply sad and people don't believe you either, it's like social media as changed our perceptions of emotion?