一小时快照

一、个人观影笔记（只涵盖社会学相关内容）

瑞泽尔社会学理论中的Nothing和Something在这里用作我们的理想类型，作为分析这部影片的工具。通过这一工具的使用，我们更好地思考和理解影片所刻画的社会世界。

Nothing我理解为工具性的、背景板式的、没有实质意义的场景、人、服务等等，正如影片中的Sav-Mart——整齐划一的店面及货架、标准的服务员式微笑、冷漠严酷的管理者。因此，尽管我们前往Sav-Mart是在与人和物打交道，但在另一种意义上，他们更是一种工具、一套服务，是什么也不意味的Nothing。这种非个人化的关系我们在生活中已经司空见惯。就像Si，他对于顾客来说仅仅是一个冲洗照片的家伙。

而Something，反过来说，就是有所意味。当Si作为”the photo guy”开始在原本商品化的关系当中投入情感和关注、有所付出，Nothing就开始慢慢转变为Something。他记得顾客的姓名、地址、了解他们的爱好，甚至对尤金一家有了极为特殊的情感，这种突如其来的亲密让顾客感到不适。因为他已经突破了边界，挑战了为大家公认和熟悉的一成不变的标准化关系（社会学称之为“越轨”）。Si不想成为一个工具，一种功能。通过投入自己的情感，顾客的照片对于他来说，已经不再是照片那么简单，是他的期待、梦想和生命的组成。

但是，这种越轨拥有代价。Si对于尤金一家浓烈的情感不断积聚，最终化作他粗暴鲁莽的干预，而这对社会规范构成了挑战。

*（要知道，Nothing/something并不内含于任何场所、事物、人、服务，其转变取决于人们的行为和关系。Nothing和Something是一种社会建构。）

更为详实的社会学解读参见瑞泽尔。

二、Review by Ritzer

In this movie, Robin Williams plays Si Parrish, the operator of a one-hour photo lab within the confines of a fictitious "big- box" store named Sav-Mart (a thinly disguised send-up of Wal-Mart). The Sav-Mart store is clearly depicted in the movie as nothing. It is certainly part of a great chain that has been constructed on the basis of a model that was created by a central office that also manages what goes on there on a day-to-day basis. Like the chains on which it is modeled, it is likely that one Sav-Mart looks much like every other one. There are great long aisles with endless shelves loaded with products lacking in distinctive substance. There is a pervasive coldness in the store atmosphere (and in the attitude and behavior of the store manager) that is abetted by the abundance of white and icy blue colors. In case anyone misses the point, there is a dream sequence in which Parrish envisions himself standing alone in one of the store's great aisles amidst a sea of totally empty shells. The red of the blood that begins to stream from his eyes is sharply distinguished from the whiteness that surrounds him. The pain in his face is in stark contrast to the coldness that envelops him. Sav-Mart is clearly a non-place, as is the photo lab housed within it.

Employees who operate the one-hour photo stand (and Sav-Mart more generally) are expected to be non-persons. The make-up, the nondescript clothes, the shoes that squeak when Si walks the store aisles, and his unassertive and affect-less demeanor all combine to make it seem as if Si Parrish is the ideal non-person required of his position. Si has worked at the photo stand for a long time; he is virtually a fixture there. Indeed, like store fixtures, he acts, and is to be treated, as if he is not there. He is expected to interact with his customers rapidly and impersonally. This is made abundantly clear in the uncomfortable reactions of customers when Si deviates from being the ideal non-person by attempting to interact with them in a more personal manner.

The photo lab is offering a non-thing rapidly and automatically developed photographs. Those who oversee the development of the film and then hand over the photographs are not supposed to take a personal interest in them or to take a role in the process by which they are developed. This is clear when Si calls in a technician because the Agfa photo machine is producing pictures that are slightly off and the technician becomes enraged for being called in on such a minor matter. The technician knows that few employees, let alone customers, recognize, or care about, minor variations in the quality of photos from such a non-place as the photo lab at Sav-Mart. Finally, Si is supposed to provide a non-service. That is, he is expected simply to accept, in a very routine fashion, rolls of film handed him by customers, to have them developed as quickly and efficiently as possible, and to hand them back to customers in exchange for payment. However, Si cares about the photos and their quality, at least as much as the automated technology will allow. He wants to provide the best possible service, especially to his favorite customers. Of course, he is not supposed to have favorites (that would be something) and this is where the movie grows interesting, because Si, for his own personal reasons, has sought to turn nothing into something. Indeed, the movie can be seen as a cautionary tale on what happens when efforts are made to transform the nothing that pervades our everyday lives into something.

Si is quite taken with one particular family that he regards as ideal (Si's personal life is totally empty; indeed, he buys a photo of a woman at a street market and later shows it off claiming that it is of his mother). When the mother and son of that family come in with some film to be developed, it is clear that he is fond of them and he acts like, and wants to be treated by them as, a person. He also treats them as people and, even though it is late in the day, he agrees to have the photos developed before the close of business. In other words, he offers them personalized service! Furthermore, when he learns that it is the boy's birthday, he gives him a free instant camera claiming (falsely) that it is store policy to give children such gifts on their birthdays. In acting like a person (he also demonstrates personal knowledge of the family and asks personal questions), Si is seeking to turn these non-places (one hour photo, Sav-Mart) into places. And the non- things that he works with-- -automatically developed photos- -are obviously transformed into things by Si.

It turns out that Si has an unnatural interest in this family and is routinely making an extra copy of every photo he has had developed for them. Further, he is papering his otherwise desolate apartment with these photographs. When another woman brings in a roll of film to be developed (he inappropriately—for a non-place and from a non-person—asks if he knows her from somewhere), he remembers her from one of his favorite family's photos on his wall. It turns out that she works with the husband of that family and when, late at night, he examines her developed photos, he discovers that the two are having an affair. Enraged, Si sets out to end the affair, first by “accidentally” putting a photo of the lovers in with a set of photos developed from the camera he gave the child. When, after viewing that photo, the wife does not seem to react in the desired way by confronting the husband and throwing him out (Si spies on the family that night and witnesses a normal dinner free of confrontation), Si follows the lovers to a hotel (also depicted as a non-place) where he has a confrontation with them using his camera as a weapon. While Si ends up being arrested, the affair seems at an end and it is at least possible that the ideal family will b restored to its proper state. One lesson seems to be that “somethingness” lurks beneath the nothing that pervades our lives. Another is that the norm in our society and in our lives is pervasive nothing and those who violate it are at least slightly abnormal and do so at great risk to themselves.

While there is obviously an evaluative element involved in the selection, for illustrative purposes, of the movie One Hour Photo, and the nature of that critical position will become clear in Chapter 7, the term nothing is used here and throughout the ensuing five chapters in the analytical sense of centrally conceived and controlled forms largely empty of distinctive con- tent. In this sense, nothing, as well as something, are ideal types that offer no evaluative judgment about the social world, but rather are methodological tools to be used in thinking about and studying the social world. As was pointed out earlier, a major objective here is to develop a series of analytic tools to allow us to do a better job of theorizing about and empirically studying nothing (and something).

While it sometimes will seem as if that is precisely what we are doing, we cannot really discuss these phenomena apart from their relationship to human beings. People and services obviously involve consideration of human relationships and their relative presence or absence. However, even a discussion of places and things requires that we analyze the human relationships (or their relative absence) that serve to make them something, nothing, or everything in between. Thus, settings become places or non- places (or somewhere in between) because of the thoughts and actions of the people who create, control, work in, and are served by them. Objects are turned into things or non-things by those who manufacture, market, sell, purchase, and use them. And even human beings (and their services) become people or non-people (and non-services) as a result of the demands and expectations of those with whom they come into contact. To put this more generally and theoretically, nothing and something (and everywhere in between) are social constructions.24 In other words, being something or nothing is not inherent in any place, thing, person, or service.25 The latter are transformed into something or nothing by what people do in, or in relationship to, them. And, whatever is done in, or in relationship to, them can be defined as something, nothing, and all points in between. It is for this reason, as we will see, that there will often be a discrepancy between what will be defined in these pages as nothing and the definitions of those involved in, or with, them who are likely to define them as something.

However, while there are no characteristics inherent in any phenomenon that make it necessarily something or nothing, there are clearly some phenomena that are easier to transform into something while others lend themselves more easily to being transformed into nothing. Thus, one could turn a personal line of credit into nothing, but the personal relationship involved makes that difficult. On the other side, one's relationship to one's credit card company could be transformed into something.