DVD: I Think We’re Alone Now

In a celebrity’s world, there are fans, serious fans, and then there are fans like Jeff Turner and Kelly McCormick who are usually referred to as “stalkers.”  These super-fans and their obsession with 80’s pop singer Tiffany is the subject of the new film I Think We’re Alone Now, which documents what life is like in their worlds of delusion. 

Back in 1987, Tiffany was a teenage sensation with two major hit songs on the radio. Twenty two years later, though her life is slightly less glamorous as she attends conventions and plays to smaller crowds, that doesn’t seem to matter to Jeff, a 53 year-old with Asperger’s syndrome, and Kelly, a 35-year-old hermaphroditic woman, from expressing their undying love for the pop singer.

This film is as fascinating and funny as it is frightening and sad, as we are led deeper into Jeff and Kelly’s everyday lives where both are living on Disability and are mostly detached from the real world.  As the film progresses, we come to see how crazed the two fans are as Kelly explains how she believes she’s destined to marry Tiffany, while Jeff works his Radionics machine that he believes can let him communicate spiritually with Tiffany.  

The filmmaker’s only misstep is that the film is missing any sense of sanity, there is no balanced person in the film to offer a counterweight to the deep psychological issues of the subjects.  However, the film does raise a number of interesting questions about fame, fandom, and false realities and is well worth seeing.