Annie: Why do they call him a widower? Why don't they say he was widowered?
M: We're supposed to believe this woman is a writer?
Annie: Is this crazy?
M: ... Yeah. 'Cause you're a crazy stalker lady.
M: I wonder if Rosie O'Donnel and Meg Ryan boned off stage.
Annie: I don't deserve you.
T: You're right.
Annie suddenly and flippantly hands Walter back his Grandmother's wedding ring.
M: ... so, enjoy your four-hundred dollar bottle of Dom Perion you just ordered for me, which I accepted knowing full well I'd break your heart a minute later. Oh, and your incredibly expensive reserved and pre-paid romantic weekend you planned for me... that you now have to sit through alone. I guess you're just too lame for me.
M: Dear Walter: You suck. Maybe if you were a person anyone might have cared about you.
You know what I want to see?
For every bleeding heart pathetic romance movie I have to endure, I want to see an inverse version directly after wherein every event and line of dialogue takes place exactly as it did in the original, but with the genders of each character reversed. That, to me, would be enthralling. The gender roles and steriotypes emphasized in this movie were sickening beyond explanation. I want a reversal.
I want to see the bizarro Sleepless in Seattle where a woman professes her trouble in coping with the loss of her husband on a radio talk show, and a male reporter is so taken with her monologue that he destroys his life in pursuit of her. He weeps openly while ritualistically re-watching a fifties movie to hone his Ultimate Fantasy while drafting desperate, painfully self-exposing love letters to the fantasy of a woman he mostly invented in his head. I want to see him calling all over a state on the opposite side of the country under professional pretense to determine her name, address and living conditions, commissioning a "AAA" Private Detective agency to anonymously investigate this woman he heard on the radio once for four minutes.
Calling her house and hanging up without leaving a message... Allowing the pursuit of her to overwhelm his thoughts to the almost complete exclusion of every other person and aspect of his life... I want to see the blockbuster romantic instant classic where this man uses work resources to peruse his would-be widowed love's husband's obituary and death certificate. Can you see this playing out? Him lurking at her home, watching them from bridges, lingering to view her playing with her child from afar without ever attempting contact... Could we love a man who stands in the street interrupting traffic with a silent, dumbfounded open-mouthed gawk after tracking her across her city only to leave without comment upon being spotted?
I want to see the male lead who, upon finding a child's backpack he's never seen before picks it up and rifles through the contents on reflex.
Everything I mentioned above actually happened in the movie, but it's all okay, because she stalked him for love. This lady was creepy and pathetic.
Several of her actions throughout the course of the movie raised red flags for me. In my youth I seriously considered a career in law enforcement, and explored the possibility through post-secondary education as well as the perusal of a few textbooks outside the curriculum. Richard N. Kocsis, PhD authored a text often used in criminology classes called Criminal Profiling: Principles and Practice, and the chapters on dissociative disorders and tendency of the modern serial sexual offender to obsess over the recreation of deep-seated fantasies were (in particular) quite reminiscent of our female antagonist. Annie emulated several of these tendencies, enough that I move to suggest her as a high-risk threat as an inverted and brutally aggressive repeat sexual predator.
The good doctor writes: "Fantasy proneness is a personality characteristic entailing a persistent pattern of deep involvement in fantasy and imagination. The fantasyprone individual spends much of his or her waking life in fantasy, and the imaginative involvement is so intense that the experience of fantasy is extremely vivid and realistic."
She and her friend rewatched the same movie enough that she lost touch with the reality of her impending marriage, to her own dismay. She thought she had this fairytale with her current fiance, but over time he cannot live up to her expectations. Upon hearing Tom Hanks over the radio, she sees her chance to re-enact her favorite scene in An Affair to Remember - something she cannot do with her soon-to-be husband, as they are on good terms and no barriers currently exist between them. The fantasy she thought she was living out is overshadowed by a newer potential one.
"Certainly the modus operandi of serial offenses may adapt and change as the offender becomes more experienced, but according to Douglas and Munn, the fantasy scenario that drives these behaviors is static and remains constant in each offense. In effect, the underlying fantasy represents the serial offender’s signature. Stoller and Drukteinis have both speculated that the psychological function of this fantasy is to convert memories of childhood trauma into a sense of control and mastery over life."
Take this near-frantic conversation:
Jessica: Then what?
Annie: I left, obviously.
Jessica: You were in the street?
Annie: It was like walking around naked.
Jessica: I love that dream.
Annie: This was more humiliating.
Jessica: But he saw you. You were face to face. He said hello.
Annie: And all I could say was hello.
Jessica: It's a sign.
Annie: It's a sign that I've watched this movie too many times. From the minute I heard that program I've been a complete jerk.
Jessica: You don't know who she was.
Annie: I have a picture of her. The detective sent it to me. See. that's what she looks like.
Jessica: It's her back.
Annie: It's her and he's crazy about her.
The relationship between Annie and Jessica is worrisome to say the least. This kind of enabling virtually breeds psychosis and repeat offense. It reeks of psycho-dependency and predatorial tendency. Doctor Kocsis has quite a bit to say about offenders in positions similar to Annie...
"Offender characteristics for the predator pattern accord well with the existing literature. Offenders are typically older, mobile, living with a partner... offenders in the predator pattern exhibit a high tendency to operate with an accomplice. Here a significant quandary arises as to how this result may relate to Hickey’s distinction between team offenders, who are described as being driven by different psychological imperatives, influences, and considerations, [than] the subcategory of male solo killers (also known as lust killers)."
Take, for example, this chilling exchange of dialogue:
Annie: I watched them [Sam and his child] play at the beach.
Jessica: Did you talk to him?
Annie: Couldn't do it.
Annie: ... How did I get here?
Jessica: You lied and got on a plane.
Annie: I'm going to talk to him tomorrow.
Jessica: Okay. Good. Goodbye.
Annie: Is this crazy?
Jessica: No, that's the weirdest part
Annie: Thank you. I love you.
Jessica: I love you, too.
It is worth noting that Annie barely exchanges three sentences with Sam throughout the entire movie. She is hesitant to shatter her existing image of him with a potentially mundane real-life encounter.
"The posited role of fantasy in serial crime also helps explain one of the distinctive features of such crime: the choice of strangers as victims. In most conventional murders, rapes, or arsons some form of prior relationship will exist between the victim and offender, and this relationship provides a key motive for the offense. In serial sexual crimes, however, the motive is the underlying fantasy with which the offender is preoccupied. A prior relationship between the victim and the offender therefore need not, and typically does not, exist. What is important is the role that the victim represents in the offender’s fantasy."
Annie cruises along the highway singing along to the radio and jabbering angrily to herself in bouts of agitation and intense, longing interest while Sam's pseudo-interview takes place. She completely disassociates from what she's doing while he speaks, and cries to herself in an entranced, glassy-eyed state of regression.
"The serial offender’s deep absorption in fantasy signals the significance of a personality dimension closely related to fantasy proneness: dissociative tendencies. Dissociation entails a separation between cognitive processes that ordinarily would be linked. In the dissociative state of highway hypnosis, for example, a driver may be deeply engrossed in thought and seemingly oblivious to road conditions, yet the car remains on the road; here, the cognitive processes involved in navigating the road are temporarily separated or dissociated from the conscious involvement in thought. The driver still knows what he or she is doing with the car and still owns the responsibility for the driving behavior."
Filth like Sleepless in Seattle should not be advocated or even produced in the horrifyingly invasive and violent climate of today's society. Encouraging desperate women to engage in this kind of all-encompassing obsession can only lead to the victimization of men everywhere and destabilization of humanity's ultimate goal of equality. It does not do to send the message that fixation on movie-borne impracticalities unnecessarily hurt real-life interactions within a movie that promotes fixation on movie-borne impracticalities unnecessarily. Treating men as objects or vehicles for the fulfillment of women's wholly artificial, unrealistic and engineered fantasies does violence to the notion of human connection overall.
Don't watch Sleepless in Seattle.
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