stalker

"Fame is the perversion of the natural instinct for validation and attention."

Heathcote Williams

Any idea who this is? Yes, he is as crazy as he looks, although the US legal system didn't seem to think so. He was tried and convicted as what you might call 'sane enough'. His name is John Hinckley. He's the guy who shot (but failed to kill) Ronald Reagan back in 1981.

And this man? Yeah, the mug shot kind of tells the story, doesn't it? Also a bad guy. His name is Mark Chapman. Just four months before Hinckley rocketed to infamy, he shot and killed John Lennon.

With the help of the US tabloid media, these two men catapulted the notion of stalking into the full glare of public consciousness. Until this time, a 'stalker' would more likely be defined as some sort of prowler. Stalking was not even a specific crime until 1990. Ten years later, it had spread to all US criminal jurisdictions and was being adopted elsewhere in the world. It reached Australia when Queensland introduced anti-stalking legislation in 1993.

So. . . ?

Well, Graham is a stalker.

When Ray first spots David in the pub, he says to Graham. . . . . 'one of those people you follow.' It seems an innocuous enough statement but it reverberates through all the succeeding scenes. Graham reveals, first, an encyclopaedic knowledge of David's personal history, then increasingly intimate details of his private life, as he bludgeons him with a triumphant demonstration of his omnipresence.

As the latter half of the play unfolds, it is impossible not to reflect on the implications of David being just 'one of those people'. Possibly, this is not the first of these attacks. Graham hints as much during the beating. But there is some suggestion that he has a tendency to elaborate on the truth. Whether this is the first time or the tenth, you have to wonder if they are escalating towards actual homicide. Suddenly, the psychology of men like Hinckley and Chapman become very interesting.

Chapman was a born-again Christian. (Remember Graham's reference to Jesus dying for our sins? I really can't decide just yet whether he means that, or is just being sneeringly ironic. But the play does use the the word 'stigmatic' in the title. Someone here is suffering the sins of the world.) Chapman is also intelligent, charming, obsessive - all adjectives that fit Graham. He carries around Catcher In The Rye and invests it with deep, personal meaning in a way that is more than echoed by Graham's constant soliloquising from the Greyhounds form guide. Like Chapman, Graham seems to construct from his gospel text - in his case the lists of dog placings and assessments and prognostications - some sort of grand justification of self.

Interestingly, like Graham, Chapman had more than one celebrity target; Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, George C. Scott, and Jacqueline Onassis were all on his radar. Chapman said of his reasons for killing Lennon (from Wikipedia):

"The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive... I was in a very confused, dark place. I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self esteem."

John Hinckley too was driven, in part, by a desire to eliminate the dismissive hierarchy of fame.

He became obsessed with the 1976 film Taxi Driver (the 1980 film Ordinary People also featured strongly in Chapman's pathology), and developed an infatuation with actress Jodie Foster. When Foster entered Yale University, Hinckley moved to Connecticut, enrolled in a Yale writing class, began slipping poems and messages under her door and repeatedly phoning her.

Failing to develop any meaningful contact, Hinckley considered hijacking an airplane or committing suicide in front of her to get her attention. Eventually he settled on a scheme to impress her by assassinating the president, reasoning that by doing so he would achieve some sort of social parity.

He wrote to her, (according to Wikipedia):

“Over the past seven months I've left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. [. . .] the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you."

Yikes. Lucky Jodie. Hinckley is the kind of stalker that psychologists call an erotomaniac. He has an obsessive love attachment to a famous person. He targets Reagan, like Chapman with Lennon, in order to elevate himself to a status whereby his mania will be fulfilled.

What exactly Graham seeks to achieve is somewhat more murky but the equalisation of status seems a clue to an overt, political intent.

I do occasionally find information somwhere other than Wikipedia but this too comes from there:

"The 2002 National Victim Association Academy defines an additional form of stalking: The vengeance/terrorist stalker. Both the vengeance stalker and terrorist stalker (the latter sometimes called the political stalker) do not....seek a personal relationship with their victims but rather force them to emit a certain response favourable to the stalker...the political stalker intends to accomplish a political agenda, also using threats and intimidation to force his/her target to refrain and/or become involved in some particular activity, regardless of the victim’s consent."

Graham is simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by celebrity. He tells David, "You’re a dirty leper, you’re a hideous cripple..." He undoubtedly has an agenda and is outraged when, at the end of the play, his 'lesson' seems to have been wasted: "Made the game very simple for him so he could understand it, and he blatantly chooses to ignore the rules."

That is Graham's endgame. . . but what drives him to it? Chapman said that as a boy, he lived in fear of his father, who he said was physically abusive towards his mother and unloving towards him. He began to fantasise about having king-like power over a group of imaginary 'little people' who lived in the walls.

This comes from Katherine Ramsland:

"Stalkers who are also psychopaths, Meloy says, experience only low levels of empathy or an absence of it altogether. Their relationships tend to be sadistic, based in power over others. He said he believes that this is associated with a lack of early attachment to others in the family. Meloy claims that psychopaths are biologically predisposed to antisocial activity because they have a hyper-reactive autonomic nervous system. Crime or exploiting others excites them. That means they're motivated to do things that heighten their nervous system and have no real conscience about hurting others.

Stalkers tend to be unemployed or underemployed, but are smarter than other criminals. They often have a history of failed intimate relationships. They tend to devalue their victims and to sexualize them. They also idealize certain people, minimize what they are doing to resist, project onto people motives and actions that have no basis in truth, and rationalize that the target person deserves to be harassed and violated."

Finally, just returning to the connection with cinema. . . At the beginning of the second scene, Graham and Ray are on the street, talking about 'the pictures' in a way that suggests they have just emerged from seeing a movie. In the Al Pacino film, they are actually standing on the steps of the cinema. The scene is notable for Ray's attempt to expose the (un)truthfulness of one of Graham's stories, suggesting that, like the fantasist Hinckley, Graham may be prone to inventing such anecdotes. It occurs to me that, as part of our 70s milieu, it would be entirely appropriate for Graham and Ray to be emerging from a screening of Taxi Driver.