In Swimfan, which opened yesterday, Erika Christensen is certifiably wild about swim-team member Jesse Bradford. She stalks him, terrorizes him and wonders why he isn't turned on when she shrieks, in a psychotic voice, those little words every man wants to hear: "You love me! I know it!"
But that's stalking for you. The studios love stalkers because they make perfect villains, need little background story, and don't operate by the usual logical rules that make scripts so tricky to write. Consider:
Single White Female (1992), in which Jennifer Jason Leigh answers Bridget Fonda's advertisement for a roommate, and the audience senses something creepy about Leigh long before Fonda raises an eyebrow. Leigh tries on Fonda's clothes, adopts Fonda's look, and gets very edgy when Fonda's ex-boyfriend Steven Weber wanders back into the picture. Cue the usual line in weapons and screaming and battles to the death. Nice apartment, though.
Speaking of nice, nice is what you don't want to be to stalkers. It only encourages them. Trouble is, not being nice also encourages them, as Michael Douglas found when he rebuffed Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987). Or as Lauren Bacall found in:
The Fan (1981), in which Bacall is a singing and dancing stage actress (to songs by Marvin Hamlisch) who finds she has a psychotic young fan in Michael Biehn, who doesn't like it when she doesn't answer his letters, and shows it.
Biehn got his comeuppance three years later in The Terminator,when he travelled to the past to protect Linda Hamilton and the two of them were stalked by implacable robot Arnold Schwarzenegger, the sort of giant you'd find at the top of a beanstalk.
Now, you'd think that with all the film titles floating around in the world, the studios might have avoided using the same one for two mainstream movies only 15 years apart. But no, welcome to:
The Fan (1996), with Robert De Niro as one of his tightly coiled characters, this time a seller of hunting knives, which is not an occupation any of De Niro's characters should be allowed near. He is obsessed with the San Francisco Giants, and particularly with new hire Wesley Snipes, and isn't happy when Snipes falls into a slump and Benicio Del Toro starts getting the glory. Cue the usual line in weapons and screaming and battles to the death. Anyone notice who won the game?
De Niro could fill this column by himself, starting with:
Taxi Driver (1976), in which his sociopathic taxi driver is yet another tightly coiled bundle of nerves who talks to himself in the mirror, and doesn't seem to care whether he stalks presidential candidate Leonard Harris or pimp Harvey Keitel. He drives around to a musical score by Bernard Herrmann, who composed that memorable shrieking violin accompaniment for the shower scene in Psycho, and you just know that's got to be bad for the old equilibrium.
De Niro stalked Nick Nolte and family in Cape Fear (1991), just as Robert Mitchum stalked Gregory Peck in the original Cape Fear (1962), but he had help in:
The King of Comedy (1983), in which delusional would-be comic De Niro and starstruck fan Sandra Bernhard join forces to kidnap talk-show host Jerry Lewis so that De Niro can get his moment of glory on Lewis's show.
And finally, in:
The Collector (1965), Terence Stamp follows Samantha Eggar around after he comes into a bit of money, then kidnaps her and locks her in the basement hoping she will come to love him, which is unlikely, even though he is Terence Stamp. If only he'd joined the swim team, he and Erika Christensen might have been very happy together.