Passing-Thought

One Hour Photo - Underexposed

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23)

“What is wrong with these people!?” Thus says Sy “the photo guy” Parrish speeding off through a stop sign to execute the next stage of his plan to purge evil from the family he had obsessively dreamed to belong to. Sy’s sincere question is humorous because most viewers have been wondering the same thing about him. That’s the crazy and curious irony of the movie. Sy, a one-hour photo developer for the Yorkin family, had been nurturing a secret obsession for years to be included in their family pictures. To be captured as ‘Uncle Sy’ in their pictures would, in a sense, mean to belong forever to a picture perfect family. But when Sy discovers the adulterous, secret love life of Will Yorkin, the family’s husband and father, he realizes his picture perfect family is trying to survive by its own fantasy, neglecting to face the deep violence being committed to their own family. So, the movie asks the viewers, “Which is the greater evil: Sy’s clinically obsessive stalking behavior leading to violence against Will Yorkin or Will Yorkin’s neglect of his family?” The end of the movie reveals the producer’s sympathies lie with Sy Parish: the last scene fades into a family photo showing Sy with Will Yorkin’s arm around him with his wife and son. Thus, though Sy is left alone at the end in a police interrogation room, he has earned an eternal place in the family, since through Sy’s violent action, (we imagine) the wife regained her husband and her son his father. Sy’s actions, rooted in the sexual pornographic abuse he suffered as a child, showed he cared for the family more than it cared for itself, oddly enough.

We might be disturbed to think that someone might seem to know so much about our lives without our permission; someone who has been carefully piecing our lives together as through snapshots. Our families have natural boundaries, the sacred “privacy of our own home” that should not be crossed by strangers. Strangers who desire to cross those lines, may like Sy, be living in a socially unstable fantasy. But a family that thinks it can be true to itself by maintaining its family image alone is likewise imagining things, and is no less unstable. God knows and cares for our families more than we care to allow. He is no respecter of personal privacy, though he does often patiently permit us to indulge ourselves as if we could do such things in private. Like Sy, God violently broke into our hotel room, and exposed our adulterous affair against him, forcing us to face the shameful nature of our actions. What we imagined was a harmless secret fling, he exposed as a public pornographic profession. All these things God has showed us through the naked exposure of his son on the cross, in order that the creation might be cleansed from our violence and his glory to shine forth as His family reflects his image.

Sadly, Sy falls short of that image and family. We can sympathize with his past experience with child abuse; we can admire his penetrating prophetic recognition of family neglect as one of the worst forms of human violence; we should resonate with his desire to belong to a picture perfect family that is true to its own picture. Belonging to God’s “family picture” does go against the expectations of society and established authorities. Paul, for instance, preached the gospel to the whole world from prison (Acts 28:31). But as far as we can tell Sy never recognizes any wrongdoing on his part; rather, he blameshifts, lies, and denies his transgressions. Sy is portrayed above all human authorities, but not under God’s authority; a god in his own right. But justice in a world without God through His Son in the Spirit is nothing more than matter of competing fantasies; images we can never live up to; images that will never tell truth about us.