One Hour Photo Analysis

One Hour Photo
One Hour Photo is a psychological thriller about a man, Seymour 'Sy' Parrish (played by Robin Williams), who is a photo lab technician at a local department store. As a young boy, Sy was sexually abused involving pictures being taken of the incident. In the beginning however, he seems normal and content. Sy looks forward everyday to seeing his favorite and best costumers, the Yorkin family. The Yorkin family certainly seems like the perfect family. They are attractive, wealthy, and they love each other very much. Nina Yorkin, the mother of Jacob ‘Jake' and wife of Will, is usually who drops off the family's pictures to Sy. Though they interact as if Sy was an uncle to Jake, they share a semi-personal relationship at best.
He takes his job very seriously and is very good at it. Sy is very friendly and outwardly seems very content while he's at work and is respected and cared about very much by his coworker Yoshi. However, when Sy leaves work, his life becomes very despondent. He slips deeper into depression everyday that goes by. Sy's personal life is completely lacking. He goes home after work to a very drab, sterile apartment and it becomes apparent that there is no one in Sy's life at all; no family, no companion or friends whatsoever. Ironically, Sy's refrigerator is eerily blank. In fact, there are no pictures in Sy's apartment whatsoever… except for one collage that occupies an entire wall. The collage is a very disturbing anthology of pictures of the Yorkin family over a period of several years. Sy sees the Yorkin family as having it all and obsesses over them. He eventually finds out that Will has been having an affair with a coworker and becomes psychotic. His obsession elevates beyond just thoughts and rises to the point of actions. He catches Will with his mistress in a hotel room, holds them at knifepoint, then takes pictures while forcing them to do sexual acts.
Robin William's character does a very good job at accurately portraying an individual who suffers from, amongst other disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder.
At his job, Sy shows himself to be somewhat anal retentive in the way he does his work. Sy also shows some signs of depression throughout the film. He is seems to be depressed on most days for most of each day and seems to have lost nearly all pleasure nearly all the time. Those two symptoms qualify him for possibly being clinically depressed but among those two symptoms are a few others. For example, Sy moves extremely slowly in the beginning and throughout the movie showing a loss of energy. Also, the movie shows a violent dream of Sy's which shows at least some agitation and/or trouble sleeping. Another episode of agitation is when Sy calls in a technician to fix one of the developing machines and ends up creating a scene in the middle of the store after the technician leaves because there's actually nothing wrong with the machine. The following morning, Sy makes a mistake on the developing machine that he would normally never do, showing an inability to concentrate. Therefore, as the movie progresses, it becomes obvious that Sy is suffering from a major depression. In the movie, Sy is shown daydreaming about being "uncle Sy" and spending time with the Yorkin family, which clearly shows how obsessed he has become which would contribute to the OCD diagnosis. A tag line for the film is "The things that we fear the most has already happened to us…" That tagline is intended to refer to Sy's childhood and is symbolic of how Sy was not only disappointed in childhood by being abused but now in his adult life by being disappointed by who he thought was the perfect family. The mechanism Sy uses to deal with his frustration is the displacement defense mechanism. Sy displaces his anger and frustration at what was done to him as a child onto Will Yorkin for cheating and ruining his "perfect" family. He
feels that Will should be punished for what he did so he takes it upon himself to administer the punishment. After being arrested, Sy is being questioned and at one point in time, he says "All I did was take pictures…" He is clearly using denial to rationalize his actions. One Hour Photo is intensely psychological and show many examples of many disorders and how they manifest themselves in some people.