What “I Think We Are Alone Now (2008)” Reminds Us About Stalking
What comes across most when watching this always strange and sometimes disturbing documentary is the high risk strategy that stalkers fall prey to.
As more and more time and energy is gambled on a romantic pursuit in which it is not possible to objectively observe any future or indeed any reciprocity, the debt that is paid by the stalker becomes bigger and bigger until a point of “no return” has been reached at which it is impossible to ever balance out the books and emerge from the experience without having lost out. It becomes impossible for them to imagine returning to a state of “neutrality”.
However in this moment the stalker often resorts to delusion, distorted realisation and self-deception in order to justify pursuing the cause even further in the hope that this gamble will eventually pay off in such a massive way that it will outweigh all prior losses.
The very dynamic of stalking therefore blurs the line between the desperation of romantic pursuit and the desperation of mental illness because at its very core it entails a horrifyingly “bad bargain” – an impossibly high risk wager that the act of stalking will one day turn out to be profitable, despite history increasingly indicating otherwise with each passing moment, by “borrowing” from the fantasy realm of the future. “I know very well the risks I am taking – even the inevitability of the final collapse – but nonetheless I can avert catastrophe for a little while longer by taking on a little bit more risk and borrowing slightly more from fantasy….” And on the self blinding irrationality goes.
Both of Tiffany’s stalkers profess an “eternal” love for her – yet it cannot be eternal in the sense that it is an abstract and universal mutual feeling which may be applied anywhere and understood by anyone. It is “eternal” only in the sense that it has to be constantly re-imagined and re-invented by them in order to allow it to continue.
The pressure that both of the stalkers feel to “do something” in order to capture Tiffany’s attention and trigger this long awaited reward of the romantic and everlasting relationship with her is a function of the Modern Age in which we are perhaps implored to do too much without allowing ourselves to meditate and to shift our consciousness in order to understand processes over which we have little real influence from a novel and more meaningful perspective.
There is perhaps some underlying meaning to be drawn from the contours of the Western Welfare State and what economists call “moral hazard” – namely the risk that people will behave immorally because insurance, the law or some other agency will protect them against the losses that their behaviour will cause.
In many ways “I Think We Are Alone Now” is a story of the paradoxical pursuit of happiness in the affluent Western World (paradoxical because the stalking has clearly made Jeff and Kelly less happy people by virtue of the fact that they both know they have transgressed moral and social standards in a way that previously might have been unimaginable and therefore destroyed their own self-esteem in the process). What was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the well established standards of the decent behaviour of someone with pride and self-esteem both in tact becomes acceptable (at least privately and anonymously in the Internet Age).
But what if this “moral hazard” is inscribed into the very structure of Consumerism where we have wrongly learned to equate getting what we want with life’s true purpose? What if those who preach “Peace” and “Love” and real relationships that satisfy real needs miss the point of “romance” in the Consumer Age – namely that self-propelling and self-destructive never ending speculation is the true dimension of the Real in the world of today. Perhaps for a particularly demented and vulnerable type of person what they want is never really about what they want.
No wonder then that the possibility of stalking is imagined in technical terms – not as a science per se, but as something which simply works through the use of modern technology. A stalker can follow a narrative of sorts relating to their subject on the internet. This lends the stalker a false sense of intimacy or connectedness with that person – even if the reality is that they do not know and will never know them – which they then seize upon with famished relish – superimposing their own delusions and fantasies onto the chronology of a life to which the stalker will always remain fundamentally irrelevant and outside. For the stalker this does not require any ideological or logical justification because its success is defined solely in the ever changing terms mapped out by the stalker in a system which has no philosophical or intellectual aspirations. Its “success” is sufficient justification for the stalker to continue.
Does the stalker not know that this bizarre mental scheme is corrupt and bound to collapse? What psychological force denies him this self-evidently obvious insight?
To this extent the stalker pursues someone of whom they are themselves almost wholly unaware – the phantasm of limited and increasingly redundant memory, speculation, imagination and in many cases delusion. The sole objective of the pursuit is to render the fantasy of the possibility of knowing that person an immanent one even where the act of stalking is itself self-evidently completely toxic to this possibility.
Yet the stalkers who claim some natural or supernatural link to the object of their affections are knowingly and often ashamedly cheating the facts – namely that they are not involved in a meaningful relationship with the person they pursue and will never be. The pursuit is one way traffic and the reactions to it range from fear to outright disgust to sublime mockery. Perhaps someone who first rejected their stalker because they thought that they were unattractive or unintelligent will be inclined to think them yet more unattractive and unintelligent as a consequence of the stalker entering the “bad bargain”. These reactions serve only to widen the chasm between the stalker and the stalked and render the task of the stalker progressively more and more devoid of any meaningful purpose.
Ultimately the old adage “You cannot cheat yourself” proves itself applicable because the stalker pays a terrible price with their time, their self esteem, their public reputation and in many cases – their grip on reality.