The Voyeur (2017)

I watched this one with my boyfriend on Father's Day weekend 2023. The Voyeur is an interesting look at what happens when cowards are brought into the spotlight, and their secretive crimes become national news. Gerald Foos's actions are deplorable, sure, but in Gay Talese's New Yorker Piece The Voyeur’s Motel, deplorable is an understatement. The subsequent Novel by the same name came out shortly after, and the documentary looks at Gerald Foos and Gay Talese's relationship, the creation of this article and book, as well as the aftermath.

Gerald Foos, a peeping tom that owned a Colorado Motel in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, wrote a letter to world-famous and controversial journalist Gay Talese, stating that he could be a good subject for Talese's next book. Gay took the bait and began interviewing Gerald frequently over the years, looking into the claims Gerald was making. Gay even visited the hotel and watched the victims himself, taking on the experiences of Gerald as his own in order to write about them.

My first impression was that this amiable stranger resembled many of the men I had flown with from Phoenix. He seemed in no way peculiar. In his mid-forties, Foos was hazel-eyed, around six feet tall, and slightly overweight. He wore a tan jacket and an open-collared dress shirt that seemed a size small for his heavily muscled neck. He had neatly trimmed dark hair, and, behind horn-rimmed glasses, he projected a friendly expression befitting an innkeeper. ... I listened without comment, although I was surprised by Gerald Foos’s candor. I had known him for barely half an hour, and he was unburdening himself to me about his masturbatory fixations and the origins of his voyeurism. As a journalist, I do not recall meeting anyone who required less of me than he did. He did all the talking while I sat and listened. - The New Yorker

Gerald Foos proves himself as delusional right off the bat, claiming he is a "researching" just like Gay Talese, and tried to ingratiate himself with Gay, seeing him as a supporter of his private viewing platform habits. This entire time, throughout the documentary, Gerald is distancing himself from the actions he is committing by referring to himself in the third person, "The Voyeur" the whole time.

See, what takes this from "research" on human behavior to a peeping tom, very simply, is the fact that he hid from the world instead of sharing his "discoveries," and the fact that he would masturbate to these witnessed sexual events.

I asked Foos if he ever felt guilty about spying on his guests. While he admitted to constant fear of being found out, he was unwilling to concede that his activities in the attic brought harm to anyone. He said that he was indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and, because his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it. He reasoned, “There’s no invasion of privacy if no one complains.” Still, he took great pains to avoid discovery, and he worried that, were he caught, he could be charged with a crime.

...

Foos said he began watching guests during the winter of 1966. He was often excited and gratified by what he saw, but there were many times when what went on below was so boring that he nodded off, sleeping for hours on the shag carpeting, until Donna woke him up before she left for the hospital. Sometimes she brought him a snack (“I’m the only one getting room service at this motel,” he told me, with a smile); at other times, if a particularly engaging erotic interlude was occurring in the room below, Donna would lie down next to him and watch. Sometimes they would have sex up on the viewing platform.

“Donna was not a voyeur,” he told me, “but, rather, the devoted wife of a voyeur. And, unlike me, she grew up having a free and healthy attitude about sex.” He went on, “The attic was an extension of our bedroom.” When Donna was not with him on the viewing platform, he said, he would either masturbate or memorize what he saw and re-create it with his wife.

- The New Yorker

I think the matter of Foos having a self-inflated view is fairly clear, but Gerald himself is consistently delusional throughout the entire documentary, even so far as the end when he is vividly upset that Gay mentioned his baseball card collection at the end of the book, and he claims that Gay revealed his financial assets to the world. Like I said, delusional.

Now the bigger matter that is mentioned in the article, documentary, and book, is that Gerald Foos witnessed a murder and did not report it to the police. Again, this is what takes away any of his genuine credibility or status as a respectable human being. I'm usually not as strict with feelings like that, but he watched a young man kill a young woman by strangling her to death and then Gerald went to bed like it was no big deal. I mean seriously? He claims that he didn't sleep, but he still didn't report the murder. Soooo I really don't care how he slept. She died because he didn't call the police. If he had called the police, she may have lived.

After fighting and arguing for about one hour, the scene below the voyeur turned to violence. The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor. The male subject, then in a panic, picked up all his things and fled the vicinity of the motel.

The voyeur . . . without doubt . . . could see the chest of the female subject moving, which indicated to the voyeur that she was still alive and therefore O.K. So, the voyeur was convinced in his own mind that the female subject had survived the strangulation assault and would be all right, and he swiftly departed the observation platform for the evening. - The New Yorker

Nice. Y'know because that's how objectified women were to this man. Not to mention he was constantly sneaking into rooms to go thru women's things and look at their underwear, especially bras to determine sizing. Yeah, this guy's a mess.

Talese does a great job asking the questions that allow Foos to show who he really is. And his presence seems to be enough. Throughout the documentary, just putting a microphone on Gerald seemed to do the trick; he was eager to talk.

The documentary itself was pretty intriguing. Talese is such an interesting personality, that his slowly drawing out of Foos' secrets is non-stop. Though the book does not have great reviews, the documentary is worth the hour and a half of your time. With an artistic look at a voyeur and very real interview footage of Talese and Foos both together and separately, the documentary does a great job of asking Foos the hard questions and exposing him for who he truly is.

-B