Voyeur, Netflix: Gay Talese's creepy story of the motel owner who spied on his customers – review

The journalist Gay Talese specialised in the long read decades before it became a searchable hashtag. For his book Thy Neighbour’s Wife he spent eight immersive years researching American sexuality, prompting a Denver motelier called Gerald Foos to contact him with an account of his own investigations. That was in 1980.

Voyeur (Netflix) is the account of their long relationship, which eventually yielded a New Yorker article, published last year, a book and, while both were in gestation, this metatextual documentary too. The bare bones of the story consists of an eyewatering inventory of Foos’s obsessive-compulsive voyeurism. Every night he would spy on his motel clients through a vent in the ceiling, and document the contents of this pornographic live feed like a pernickety double-entry bookkeeper. 

He didn’t always see sex. His catalogue “isn’t boring,” says Talese. “In fact it’s worse than that: it’s real.” Foos did once catch a pair of fetishists copulating in sheep’s clothing. Another time he provoked a murder by quietly confiscating the drugs of a baffled dealer, who then blamed his girlfriend and strangled her. “That made me so sick,” recalled Foos, “that I quit observations for the night.”  

To provide something other than old men to look at, the film artificially reconstructed those scenes. Neither Talese nor, latterly, the filmmakers were to know that some of Foos’s story was artificial too. Thus part of the film’s allure is decrypting a classically unreliable narrator who even managed to hoodwink the New Yorker’s fastidious fact-checking department. 

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The film is a bit of self-referential jumble which works best as a thinkpiece about the Faustian deal between writer and subject. Both participants put on a peacock display, Talese with his dandyish wardrobe and silky yakking, Foos with his voluble desire to be taken for more than a dull nobody. 

But the kernel of the story seems curiously beyond reach. Foos is not interrogated deeply about his all-consuming perversion, nor its impact on his bizarrely tolerant wives, one of whom sticks by him. “We don’t have any friends,” he tells the film crew. “Unfortunately, you guys are all I have.” Now the lonely watcher has Netflix subscribers watching him. It’s part of Voyeur’s unsettling ethical detachment that it’s hard to tell if this counts as a comeuppance.