Scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 movie "Stalker" (ruscico.com)

 

Guilty of love
"Stalking", to be introduced as a new sort of crime into Austrian legislation in 2006, is a by-product of our anonymous, far-distance mass communication society. Otherwise, it is difficult to understand how a romantic behavior like worshipping a beloved one could be stigmatized with such an ugly word.
You don't know what I'm talking about? Well... In fact, "stalking" is a rarely used word, at least up to recently. I was confronted with it for the first time in the 80ties by the Russian Sci-Fi movie "The Stalker" (by Andrei Tarkovsky). The title remained untranslated in the German version, designating a man trespassing secretly into a forbidden military test area where, after a major meteorite impact, supernatural events occurred. Good stuff for a speculative movie.
In the meantime, "stalking" has materialized as a criminal act directed against a specific person, first in the USA, but increasingly in Europe too. You can describe it as an exaggerated way of worshipping, persecuting the beloved one with telefon calls, e-mails, presents, showing up in front of the house, even at the work place. Unfortunately, things like that never happen to me. Nobody sends me flowers, calls me on the phone in the middle of the night, shows up in front of my door, surprisingly so, just to tell me that (she?) loves me and can't live without me. I would guess, in 9 of 10 cases, stories like that have a happy ending, and I regret, from the bottom of my old heart, that in my past life I didn't have the courage to act like this more often than I actually did.
But, wait a minute: We are talking about a crime, aren't we? What the hell could be criminal with being in love with someone? Normally, there shouldn't be any problem with that. On the contrary: Events like these belong to the most happy ones in our lives. However, the unnatural is brought in by unnatural means of communication, and by unnatural structures in our society. If the entertainment industry sells their products by merchandising attractive personalities like Richard Gere and Anna Kournikova (as cited in a recent article on stalking in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard), it is no surprise that millions of people will fall in love with them.
And among these millions, you will always find one or two who are crazy enough and will try to find out the physical reality behind that merchandising brand. To my impression, these so-called "stalkers" are no more criminal than other lovers too, but are themselves victims of the mass media and of an entertainment industry causing havoc. In our days, things have developed so far that we need protection from "stalkers" by new laws, but we'd better ask for protection against mass media and advertisements, usurpating every inch of our attention. We seriously should contemplate, how we could introduce again a more natural atmosphere into our societies.
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