One pole is that of the grandiose self, which we see in the pride Sy takes in his photo developing. Heinz Kohut‘s model of the bipolar self is useful for understanding Sy’s personality. Still, Sy must try to pull himself together, to rebuild some sense of psychological structure, since with such extreme trauma as he’s suffered, the threat of psychological fragmentation is never far away. Since one’s primary caregivers are, as internal objects, those blueprints, so to speak, for all subsequent relationships in life, this alienation from one’s parents tragically leads to social alienation in general. This trauma explains his loneliness: his parents betrayed his trust at such a tender age, and so he has distanced himself from them. The trauma he suffered as a child was to have been exploited as a participant in child pornography photography, exploited by his own parents. It seems that, with these pictures, he’s sublating the thesis of happy photos with the antithesis of traumatizing ones. He also points out that no one takes pictures of the banal, mundane, “little things” that we don’t normally pay attention to…yet at the end of the film, after he’s revealed to Detective James Van Der Zee (La Salle) the source of his trauma, we see his recently-taken pictures of such banal things as the objects and furnishings of a hotel room. By the end of the film, though, we discover that this idealizing of taking pictures is a reaction formation against the fact that, as a child, photos were taken of him in extremely unhappy, traumatizing circumstances. At the beginning of the story, he idealizes photography, insisting that one takes pictures only of the happy moments in life, never the sad ones. Photos are of extreme importance to him for reasons to be discovered in full by the end of the film. ![]() This job gives his life meaning in the absence of loving human company. He values his job above and beyond anything else in his life, believing he’s providing a “vital service” to his customers in developing quality photographs. Sy is a lonely photo technician in a one-hour photo in a big box store called Sav-Mart. In playing a mentally-ill man in One Hour Photo, Williams demonstrated the range of his acting talent if only he’d done roles like Seymour “Sy” Parrish more often. Indeed, it was gratifying to see him in a dramatic role for a change, finally going against his usual typecasting as a zany character in such superficial, feel-good films as Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man. Williams’s performance earned him a Saturn Award for Best Actor. One Hour Photo was both a commercial and a critical success. It stars Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, and Michael Vartan, with Gary Cole, Eriq La Salle, Clark Gregg, Erin Daniels, and Dylan Smith. One Hour Photo is a 2002 psychological thriller written and directed by Mark Romanek.
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