Buy this book

Alistair John
posted 23 March 2007

There are certain activities in which we all engage and about which we will deny all knowledge. For instance, taking a 'minor' detour on our route home, so our journey corresponds precisely to that taken by an attractive stranger, even though their destination is several miles away from ours, and in the opposite direction.

Or enthusiastically frequenting an atrocious café, enduring food as inordinately overpriced as it is profoundly inedible, merely to enjoy prolonged illicit gazes at the person who works the coffee machine. Or spending entire nights frantically searching Google, searching Yahoo, even - when truly desperate - searching Wikipedia, for a scrap of information - any scrap of information - on a particularly longed for acquaintance, and then following this up with hours of gazing (again illicitly) at those pictures of them we have secretly stored on our computer.

With this in mind, reading Bran Nicol's description of 'desired intimate stalking' (that is, stalking someone desired as an intimate) is a rather uncomfortable experience. One begins to feel like one of the Soviet Union officials whose task it was to read 1984. And stalking is so ingrained into our cultural consciousness that it seems as though if we ourselves are not off stalking (or contemplating whether we are, indeed, a stalker), then we are watching a film in which someone else is stalking, or we are reading an account of someone who has been stalked, or hearing a friend tell us how they think they are being stalked, or thinking that we ourselves are being stalked, or worrying that we will be stalked at a later date. When members of Hear'Say - a pop band formed through a public vote on a reality television show - revealed that they had been the victims of stalkers, tabloids adjudged them to have truly achieved fame. Yes: it is a now truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of celebrity must be in want of a stalker.

So it comes as quite a shock to discover just what a recent phenomenon stalking is. In the first chapter of Stalking, we are offered a trifecta of gasp-precipitating facts. First, that 'stalking', as used to describe people hunting people, rather than people hunting animals, was absent from the lexicon until 1961, when Time magazine ran a feature on (who else) the paparazzi. Second, that in 1981 the mainstream media coverage of John Lennon's death was bereft of mention of 'stalk', 'stalker' or 'stalking'. Let us not forget that his death was the premeditated, non-politically motivated killing of a rock star by a fan. Can you imagine this being discussed without reference to 'stalking' today? No. Finally, we learn that until 1990, and California Penal Code Section 649.9, on no Western statute book was there placed any anti-stalking law. In Britain, stalking was not legislated against until 1997. It was not until this century that such provisions were put in place in Australia, Japan and Canada.

So how can a phenomenon so ingrained in our consciousness be so recent an occurrence? This is the question driving Bran Nicol's survey of the subject. Throughout the book, Nicol asserts that stalking is both an old and new phenomenon. In the words of J Reid Meloy, 'an old behaviour; a new crime.' What becomes clear is that - old or new, legal or not - stalking is an utterly horrific behaviour to be subjected to. The section of the book in which Nicol details the effects of stalking on the victims is harrowing. He cites the quite compelling argument that, as a label, 'stalking' does justice only to the ultimately harmless activities such as those listed above. Otherwise, no term is more apt than 'Interpersonal Terrorism'. For that is what stalking is: an activity designed to coerce another person into subjugating his or her own preferences to one's own. It is a relentless and insidious assault on every last modicum of autonomy an individual may have. And in a culture where the individual is supreme, how can anything be worse than having an unwanted other attached to us, perpetually, like a limpet. What often drives a stalker is the desire to assert a relationship with the victim. As Nicol's forcefully states, the perverse irony is that the stalker does end up with a relationship, just nothing like the one that was hoped for. Stalking is thus totalising. The victim too is permanently trapped in the relationship, for even to ignore the stalker is a way of relating to him or her.

Such is the nature of stalking - born of obsession - that it is quite understandable that film and fiction is full of stalkers. Nicol is a lecturer in English, and the majority of his analysis focuses upon the representation of stalking within these mediums. The variety of sources he draws upon is wide ranging and includes Edgar Allen Poe, Iain Sinclair, Our Mutual Friend, Taxi Driver and even Spiderman. Regardless of what one thinks of the offensively dire Bo' Selecta! there is something undeniably satisfying in reading it analysed alongside Foucault.

Of course, a large proportion of the analysis is focused upon the classic stalker tales: Hallowe'en, Fatal Attraction, Enduring Love. But the really fascinating analysis comes with the discussion of the film and fiction not usually thought of as being in the stalker canon. Poe's 'Man of the Crowd' acts as a springboard for discussion on fiction that has as its protagonist detectives, superheroes and crusading journalists. What becomes clear is that these figures are stalkers by any other name.

The same is true with discussion of love. In a particularly wonderful segment, we are provided with a dispassionate list of the activities partaken by Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, in one of cinema's great romances, The Graduate:

After Elaine Robinson initially rejects him [he] takes to driving past her house, watching her from behind bushes and writing her name endlessly on a piece of paper. When she leaves for university, he follows her and continues to watch her from behind trees and café windows, running across campus when he is about to lose sight of her. He takes a room nearby so he can devote himself to pursuing her full-time. He sits in on lectures she attends. He engineers a meeting with her on the bus, and insists on accompanying her as she goes to meet her boyfriend, Carl, whom he is rude to. The famous ending to the film sees him frantically tracking her down at her wedding to Carl, interrupting the ceremony, and the two eloping together.

Romance? Immediately, the less restrained of us ask whether, were the desired stranger to discover us to have been following them, or the coffee-brewer to discover us to have been gazing at them, or the particularly longed-for acquaintance to discover us to have been searching for them, we can really be blamed for thinking that their response would be a welcoming embrace? Alas, as a headline from the Onion put it: 'Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real Life Man Arrested.'

That so much of our romantic film and fiction is built on this foundation is - at the very least - unsettling. And for Nicol, our culture's dominant narrative of romance has played a large role in the emergence of stalking. As he says of Mark Chapman, John Lennon's killer: '[He was] diagnosed as having a severe psychological disorder. But his actions were motivated by fantasies shaped by cultural narratives.' The problem is that while cultural narratives may well shape the behaviour, the root is surely the psychological disorder. The unspoken laws that govern social interaction and the social and biological functioning behind love and obsession existed long before the 1960s. The book would certainly have benefited from a greater focus on how such desires expressed themselves before the 19th century. Indeed, it is difficult to finish Nicol's analysis without wishing there to have been much more emphasis on the pre-history of stalking.

Ultimately, however, Nicol offers a fascinating analysis of one our epoch's most ubiquitous and fascinating facets. What is clear is that regardless of how much we may speak of the phenomenon, and how ubiquitous a phenomenon we may think it, stalking is more ingrained in our culture than we think it, or wish it, to be. In life, we fear stalkers; in books and films we embrace those whose behaviour shares much in common with a stalker's. The message one gets from Stalking is that, while we should perhaps be much more restrained when it comes to committing those little acts of stalking common to us all, the mere temptation to do so is not something of which we should feel shamed. For stalking is, it seems, the spirit of the age.