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.
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