On September 12, 1996, Ricardo López sent a letter bomb in the mail to the famous Icelandic singer Björk, before going home, turning on his video camera, and shooting himself in the head. When police discovered López in his Hollywood, Florida, apartment, they also found approximately 800 pages of written journal entries and dozens of hours of home video diaries in which López extensively documented his fixation on Björk and the development of his assassination/suicide plot over the course of nine months. As footage of his suicide hit the Internet, López’s image became a dark online curiosity, with grainy images of his last moments used for shock-trolling and taking on a life of their own sans context. Flattened in pop cultural memory as “the Björk stalker,” López and his actions have been reduced to a meme, if remembered at all.
With her archival documentary The Best of Me (2024), Heather Landsman lets López speak for himself, editing down more than 20 hours of footage into a more digestible highlight reel of his musings and preoccupations. The result is an uncomfortably hypnotizing portrait of a deeply disturbed individual in his final days, with no editorializing telling the viewer what to make of the film’s subject. Candid mentions of López’s struggles with body dysmorphia and his insecurity over his virginity sit alongside his open misogyny and racism (his plot to murder Björk stemmed from his refusal to accept that the singer was dating the Black musician/producer Goldie), challenging those who dare watch to feel sympathy for someone in pain while simultaneously accepting that their violent acts were heavily informed by bigotry and not just mental illness.
López was not the first (and certainly not the most notable) unwell person to latch onto a celebrity and then escalate to violence, but he remains a unique figure because of how his videos anticipated more contemporary modes of online behavior. In a present defined by endless self-recording and unfiltered sharing—and the darker elements of extreme alienation and parasocial obsession that are often fostered within it—it’s easy to forget that these tapes are from a pre-vlogging era. Watching López for 90 minutes straight strangely doesn’t feel that out of the ordinary, especially now that most people have become almost desensitized to stumbling upon content by angry, lonely young men—some of whom have eclipsed López in notoriety. Numerous times in his monologues, López makes comments that reveal awareness of a potential audience existing for his video diaries, even though he had no way of distributing them himself. Performing for onlookers he cannot see, while retreating further away from the world outside his de facto studio, López reads as an eerie harbinger of the online culture to come in ensuing decades.
The Best of Me screens this evening, January 26, at Spectacle as part of the series “Best of Spectacle 2025.” Director Heather Landsman will be in attendance for a Q&A.
