Voyeur

Voyeur (2017) is a Netflix documentary made by Miles Kane and Josh Koury and currently streamed on that service.  Ostensibly about the voyeur, Gerald Foos, a man who turned a  shabby road-side motel into a laboratory for sexual surveillance, the film warps into something unanticipated and even more disturbing than the film's peeping Tom premise.  Gay Talese, a famous investigative journalist, seems to anchor the film at first, although his suave presence is gradually swallowed by the monomaniacal Foos.  Talese wrote famous articles about Sinatra and other celebrities for magazines like Esquire and Vanity Fair and, then, published books about the mafia (Honor thy Father) and sexuality in America, the best-seller, Thy Neighbor's Wife.  In the latter book, Talese, a vain, strutting little bantam-cock, admits participating in the orgies and swinger parties that he documents -- at the time, this was scandalous and garnered him an appearance, with his obviously outraged wife, on the Merv Griffin Show.  At that time, during the late seventies, Gerard Foos owned the Manor House, a motel on the main drag in Aurora, Colorado.  A self-described "pervert", Foos rigged up the motel with louvers opening over the beds of each room, installing a catwalk to that he could creep about in the attic of his motel and watch his customers having sex, getting drunk, masturbating, fighting, and (so Foos claims)in one case committing a murder.  Foos has a big personality; he's larger than life and he accompanied his voyeurism and masturbation (when he was younger up to five times a night) by writing a sort of encyclopedia of motel sex -- he documented in a log all sexual encounters, provided details, tabulated the different types of sex that he observed, and seems to have written several thousand pages of chronicles.  Foos is bearded and, now, scarcely mobile, but he's very similar to Talese in his grandiosity, and narcissism.  Talese was the son of a tailor and, like Tom Wolfe, always appears in public impeccably dressed -- indeed, a neon blue suit that we see being bespoke-tailored for Talese plays an important role in the imagery of the last third of the film.  (We see the suit being made and, then, notice that Talese is wearing this when he goes on Late Night TV with Seth Myers.) "My father was a prideful tailor," Talese tells us, "I'm a prideful journalist."  Through repeated parallelisms and analytical editing, the film makes the point that Talese and Foos, who both think themselves fearless explorers of human sexuality, are, in fact, almost identical in their vanity and hubris -- at one point, Foos even dresses with the sort of archaic, flamboyant style that Talese affects.  (In one respect, Foos is more successful as a sexual investigator than Talese -- Talese wife disapproved of the journalist's forays into group sex and almost divorced him; Foos managed to persuade not one, but two wives, that his masturbatory research was valid and important -- Foos second wife, whom we see tending to him throughout the film, even brought her husband sandwiches and cans of pop when he was perched in the dark attic scrutinizing the sexual encounters below.)  Talese, who says he is 83, first encountered Foos 37 years ago when the voyeur wrote him a letter; fascinated, Talese traveled to Denver and, generally, verified Foos claims about what he was doing in the Manor House motel.  Since Foos' activities were undoubtedly  illegal, Talese didn't ever mention the voyeur until early 2017 when he wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine about the motel and its owner; the story was illustrated with photographs of Foos and the Manor House.  Both Foos and Talese were concerned with their mortality -- the story was too good to keep silent and so they collaborated, in essence, to issue the account before it was too late.  Almost immediately, though,  The New Yorker fact checkers encountered anomalies -- Foos' sex journals at the motel began in 1976 or 1977, but real estate records show that Fools didn't actually buy the motel until 1979.  Foos vivid account of a murder that he witnessed could not be corroborated with any police records -- although the fact checkers did discover a similar murder in the time period described by Foos, but one that occurred at a different motel.  Notwithstanding these anomalies the New Yorker essay appeared, a teaser for two books -- an extended account of Foos' adventures by Talese and publication of Foos' raw journals as to the sexual activity that he claimed to have witnessed  In the course of his investigation, Talese noted questionable aspects of Foos' behavior -- the man is an obsessive collector and his large house is filled with collections of things:  dolls and most notably baseball cards.  Foos tells Talese that his baseball cards (of which he asserts he has 2.5 million) are worth millions of dollars.  The cards occupy a huge basement room.  The filmmakers again demonstrate here the kinship between Talese and Foos -- Talese works in a basement room at his Manhattan townhouse where he has thousands of boxes of notes, photographs, and other raw materials relating to the books and articles that he has written, everything neatly catalogued, indexed, but, apparently, collaged to create detailed images representing the work contained the file.  Foos and Talese have a falling out, remarkably over Talese disclosing that Foos is a wealthy man with his house full of million-dollar baseball cards.  When Talese' book is published, other journalists immediately discover -- within a day or so -- that Foos' story doesn't check out.  Although Foos has journals through the 1990's, written almost nightly about the sexual activities at the motel, records show that he sold the motel in 1983 -- so how was he continuing to observe sexual encounters at the place?  Horrified at what seem to be errors in the book (query?  how did The New Yorker miss these factual incongruities?), Talese disavows the book.  Later, he meets with Foos and learns that the man was in cahoots with the new owner of the motel (post-1983) and that he retained access to the surveillance perches in the attic -- apparently, he and the new owner spied on the customers at the Manor House in tandem.  The documentary doesn't quite add up -- first, we can't tell the time period over which the film was made:  Foos is first seen with a dark black beard and relatively agile -- there is footage of the motel.  Later, we see Foos much older, with his beard snow-white, and the motel has been torn down -- destroyed, it seems, in 1997.  Accordingly, it appears as if the documentary was under some sort of sporadic production for many years -- but this is not explained.  A few PG-rated reconstructions of the voyeurism are provided with a tiny model of the motel standing in for the actual, demolished Manor-House -- this aspect of the film is obviously influenced by Errol Morris' various documentaries.  Various aspects of the story don't make sense.  In other words, there are mysteries that the film doesn't elucidate.  But none of this detracts with the eerie aspect of the film as a study of Doppelgaengers -- Talese and Foos are both voyeurs and there are aspects of their flamboyant personalities that are startlingly similar.  In the end, the film is less about sex than about a double -- there's a sense that the film is Borgesian:   Talese and Foos are doubles of one another.