A stalking Dutch forklift driver, who manages to get into a relationship with a world star. It sounds like an unbelievable plot of a gloomy B-movie, but it was the reality of Gerrit van der Graaf from Steenwijksmoer and ABBA star Agneta Fältskog.
Gerrit van der Graaf remembers well the first time he saw Agneta Fältskog on television. The singer sang Waterloo at the Eurovision Song Contest, with which the four-member group won the competition. 8-year-old Gerrit from Coevorden fell in love immediately.
An innocent one crush , as children can have it, it seems. But Van der Graaf’s infatuation with his idol does not disappear with age. While his puberty classmates are starting to have girlfriends, Van der Graaf listens to ABBA in his room, dreaming about Agneta.
Wedding
It doesn’t stop there, when Agnetha’s marriage to her fellow ABBA star ends, Gerrit sees his chance. He must and will come close to her.
There are many documentaries about stalkers, but rarely does the viewer get into the head of a man who is completely taken over by obsession. Speaking is Van der Graaf himself, who explains how his fascination developed. To complement his story, there are psychiatrists, experts and friends to put the events in context.
Penetrating portrait
It produces an interesting picture, in which a penetrating portrait is made of Van der Graaf and of obsession in general. Van der Graaf eventually moves to Sweden to be near his idol. At that time, Fältskog is going through a difficult period in her personal life and has retreated to the countryside. She has hung up her stage ambitions. It is at that moment that the Dutch Gerrit manages to start a short-lived relationship with her.
What happens when that relationship ends paints a good picture of how obsession leads to extremely destructive behavior. In the documentary, which is not told from the victim’s point of view but from the perpetrator’s point of view, you do not get any sympathy for Van der Graaf despite the neutral narrative, but you do feel pity somewhere.
The genre has been criticized for a long time true crime , in which nasty stories are highlighted. According to critics, this is a glorification of perpetrators. The popular Netflix series Dahmer–Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story about serial killer to Jeffrey Dahmer recently led to anger, including among relatives.
Reliving
The question is how happy the ABBA star is with this podium for her stalker. Psychiatrist Esther van Fenema understands that criticism, especially in the case of the series about Dahmer. “Such series can be very unpleasant because it can be a re-experience for victims and relatives. And that while the events themselves are already traumatic. For the viewer, they are horrific things that you look at with a bag of popcorn. From which a revenue model is made.”
Yet Van Fenema certainly understands the great fascination of viewers for series and documentaries about stalkers, murderers and other dark matters. “Of course people have a very aggressive, ugly, black side, even though we prefer not to see it. But you can’t completely push away or repel that side, it needs oxygen. The large deviations that we see in murderers and stalkers, that is not something that most people identify with, but an enlargement of it that is therefore fascinating.”
Cruel and gruesome
Our fascination for gruesome, nasty stories is timeless, says Van Fenema. “If you read old fairy tales, which have now often been sanitized, they were also very cruel and horrific. We have now all brushed that off and made it correct because we disapprove of it socially and I suspect that this kind of series will give a little more space to our dark corners.”
It doesn’t really get dark in the end Take a chance but the portrait about morbid obsession certainly lingers.
On demand, Amazon Prime