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The power and allure of the human gaze, literal and metaphorical, constitute the central topic of Helen Gediman’s, Stalker, Hacker, Voyeur, Spy: A Psychoanalytic Study of Erotomania, Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Invasions of Privacy (SHVS), which seeks to explore various forms of stalking, primarily through descriptions of movies.
The topics covered are sexual stalking, including erotomania (Play Misty for Me, 1971; Fatal Attraction, 1987) and perverse voyeurism (Rear Window, 1954; Peeping Tom, 1960); surveillance stalking (The Conversation, 1974; The Lives of Others, 2006; Caché, 2005; Red Road, 2006); current individual privacy invasions such as celebrity and internet/phone stalking; and current systemic privacy invasions (Enemy of the State, 1998; Citizenfour, 2014). It presents little clinical material but touches briefly on the developmental roots of stalking and the relationship between gender and stalking. And it attempts to view all of these topics from a psychoanalytic perspective.
One strength of SHVS is its broadening of the concept of stalking, from the limited view of an analyst being followed home by a patient or of paparazzo photographer Ron Galella following Jackie O around New York City, to the much bigger and, to my thinking, more terrifying idea of being watched indiscriminately by some large agency whether via cell phone GPS, Facebook use, or even wi-fi router. According to a 2016 article in The Atlantic:
By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves through it, researchers can “see” what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a
Page 182particular person by the way that they walk, and even read a person’s lips with startling accuracy—in some cases even if a router isn’t in the same room as the person performing the actions.
… MIT researchers [have also] develop[ed technology] that can . . . remotely monitor breathing and heart rates with 99 percent accuracy. (Waddell, 2016).
Another strong point is the book’s