CRITICISM
The Journalist
and the Masturbator
Nonfiction, Film, and the Unreliable Narrator
Michelle Orange
utumn stalled, the heat lingered, and an
A interim season began. In lieu of leaves,
the sky rained with tales of sexual predation.
More curiously, the world took notice: On the
ground there occurred a clamor for stories of
harassment and assault, which were gathered
with an altogether new sense of industry, indig­
nation, and consequence. A bonfire subsisted
on the shredded reputations of high-profile
men; communal nests of solace and of recourse
were fashioned from the feathered remnants of
their careers.
In accounts of the predations of certain
powerful men, m asturbation emerged as a
prom inent theme. Helpful articles sought to
educate a baffled and disgusted public; experts
certified that what is defined as the practice of
sexual self-gratification can also be an act of
taking, of theft, of violence. Women who have
experienced this particular form of degrada­
tion confirmed what was evident but not well
understood—which is to say that it stems from
rage, and a hatred of their kind. In mainstream
media accounts, the act of masturbating in front
of an unwilling participant has been described
as “sexual misconduct,” existing in the gray
area between unwanted attention and outright
assault. The perpetrator’s claim of wanting to be
seen, to be made a sexual object, is a sort of feint:
Compulsive, targeted acts of masturbation and
their gratifications hinge not on being observed
but on watching. More than the penis, the gaze
seeks its victory.
164
In the midst of all this comes Voyeur, a doc­
umentary that follows Gay Talese’s attempt to
chronicle the life and exploits of a Colorado
man named Gerald Foos. Of the many things
the viewer comes to learn about Foos over the
course of the film, only one stands out as com­
pletely reliable: This is a man who spent most of
his life devoted to a predatory form of mastur­
bation. In his thirties, Foos purchased a motel
in Aurora, Colorado, with the intention of turn­
ing it into a personal masturbatorium. He fash­
ioned a catwalk in the building’s attic space and
installed ceiling vents in each room, through
which for several decades he would watch motel
guests argue, pick their noses, eat their garbage
dinners, and, ideally, have sex.
In recounting these events, Foos em pha­
sizes his role as a sort of documentarian, a sex
researcher more interested in observing and
recording what he sees than exercising his per­
versions. An obese man who enters his eight­
ies during the documentary’s filming, Foos is a
figure of pompous mirth, a self-dramatist who
details with misty nostalgia the inception of his
career as a sexual predator—masturbating at his
aunt’s window as a boy. And what’s the harm,
really? He just wanted to watch; none of Foos’s
victims discovered him. If a victim is unaware of
being violated, has a violation occurred?
Codirected by Myles Kane and Josh Koury,
Voyeur offers no explicit challenge to this idea,
and bears no interest in litigating events long
past. Instead, it focuses on the project at hand,
presenting Foos and Talese, his stalwart inter­
locutor, as creatures engaged in the dance of
journalist and subject, which is to say an enter­
prise of mutual violation. On learning about
the pending publication of Thy Neighbor’s Wife,
Talese’s 1981 treatise on shifting American sex­
ual mores, Foos wrote to the author in January
1980, describing the motel and his adventures in
satisfying what he calls “my unlimited curiosity
about people.” It is unclear whether Foos hoped
to attract Talese’s attention as a possible subject
or command his respect as a peer. Intrigued,
within a month of receiving Foos’s letter, Talese
traveled to Aurora and saw the motel for him­
self, even joining Foos on the catwalk, where
he watched from above as a man and woman
engaged in oral sex. Unwilling to cooperate with
a story, Foos strung Talese along in the years that
followed, sending excerpts from his extensive
voyeur logs to keep his suitor’s interest alive.
The film is hazy on precisely when and how
the two men reconnected, except to emphasize
that both had reached an age of peak preoccupa­
tion with legacy, each perhaps seeking one last
run at the mountain. In “The Voyeur’s Motel,”
the 2016 New Yorker article whose writing and
publication Voyeur chronicles, Talese writes that
he contacted Foos in 2012, after the mass shoot­
ing in an Aurora movie theater, and the next
year Foos agreed to make his story public. Also
omitted from the documentary are the roots
of its own existence, the fact of which adds to
the film’s substantial case against Talese’s judg­
ment. The famed journalist’s instincts appear
dulled, his sensibility trapped in a bygone era,
one in which the detailed exploits of a sexual
voyeur might pass as a great—perhaps even a
watershed—story. “A great story” is how Talese
repeatedly describes the material. “You can’t
believe this story, you can’t make it up,” he says,
Voyeur
Directed by Myles Kane
and Josh Koury
Netflix, 2017
96 minutes
repeating the second part for emphasis.
In fact, what Talese makes of Gerald Foos,
“epic voyeur,” is rather mundane. Dazzled by
the details of the situation—and his own role
as a character, chaperone, collaborator—Talese
fails to cohere much of a story. This is never
more clear than in his handling of the numer­
ous discrepancies that begin to emerge in Foos’s
account of his years at the motel, in particular
his claim of having witnessed a woman’s murder
at the hands of her boyfriend. Talese is willing
to overlook glaring and apparently willful inac­
curacies (Foos’s voyeur log begins in 1966, but
records show he did not purchase the motel
until 1969). His solution is a boilerplate dis­
claimer: My subject is fallible, not everything
he says is reliable, and I cannot vouch for the
accuracy of every detail. Talese, a self-described
“very accurate chronicler, an observer,” appears
in Voyeur as a journalist long-enamored with
himself as a subject. In allowing a documentary
crew to follow and manipulate his process, his
desire to be watched getting the story contrib­
utes to an already rampant case of what moun­
taineers call summit fever, where delirious
climbers, close to the top, press on despite obvi­
ous peril. In his determination to publish well—
to win—Talese loses sight of the story, its merits
as well as its credibility.
One imagines that Kane and Koury, whose
filming spanned several years, struggled to
maintain a sense of the story they might choose
to tell. Where they landed proposes a more skep­
tical and involving approach than Talese chose
for either his New Yorker piece or the expanded
book published some months later. Voyeur
makes apt use of a storytelling device more
commonly associated with fiction: the unreli­
able narrator. The film finds much in common
between the journalist and the masturbator,
Directed by Laura Poitras
■
86 minutes
MI CHEL L E ORANGE 165
aligning them primarily as co-narrators of equal
and abiding unreliability.
A mong nonfiction modes , documentary in
particular lends itself to a deconstruction of
narrative layering. A typical Michael Moore
documentary, for instance, merges director
(we might think of him as the implied author)
with a narrating “I” (Moore commenting in
voice over), and a narrated “I” (Moore as he
appears onscreen, moving about in the story).
In a typical Moore documentary, there is no
discrepancy between the implied author’s per­
spective and the values articulated by either the
narrating or narrated “I”; in fact, the success of
his films might be gauged in direct relation to
his success in establishing reliable narration all
down the line.
At the most basic level, as the critic Fiona
Otway notes, the unreliable narrator introduces
inconsistencies within a text. In her study of
Laura Poitras’s 2010 documentary The Oath,
Otway argues that Poitras is successful in mak­
ing an unreliable narrator of her main subject,
a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden named
Abu Jandal, because “irony is achieved through
the disconnect between the character-narra­
tor’s [Jandal’s] presentation of his story and the
implied author’s...presentation of the story.”
Discussing The Oath, which comprises inter­
view and raw footage of Jandal (Poitras does not
appear in or narrate the film), a cab driver in
Yemen who may or may not be recruiting jihad-
ists to the cause, Poitras described the decision
to create tension between what Jandal says and
her point of view as a matter of narrative expedi­
ence: Certainty is boring. Jandal is often charm­
ing, and claims reform. Rather than present him
as a monster, Poitras says, “we show that he’s a
very good liar and that he’s media savvy. And so,
there’s a bit of a push-pull between drawing you
in and giving you clues to not always trust what
you’re hearing.”
By contrast, Risk, Poitras’s 2016 documentary
portrait of Julian Assange, offers a less successful
example of an attempt to work with unreliable
narration. The original cut of the film, which
screened at Cannes in 2016, contained no voice­
over, and festival reviews indicate a portrayal
166 VQR | SPRING 2018
sympathetic to Assange, whom Poitras filmed
over several years. In the course of the 2016 US
presidential campaign, Poitras began to recon­
sider her judgment of Assange and of WikiLeaks,
and thus her film. She recut Risk, adding her
own doubt-filled voice-over narration.
The result is unpersuasive: In quoting from
her production notes and offering candid
impressions, Poitras appears more interested
in mitigating criticism than in complicating
her role in the film. Her capacities as narrator
and implied author appear unified. She pres­
ents questions directly that a more sophisti­
cated approach might have invited the viewer
to raise for herself, and she neutralizes tension
by spelling it out. Poitras lacked either the nerve
or the time to make of herself a truly unreliable
narrator, and so a film with the potential for two
unreliable narrators falters for having none.
Voyeur' s frequently berserk depiction of
journalism as a moral, personal, and profes­
sional minefield reaches a dizzying apex during
what might be described as the film’s climactic
scene. In the run-up to the book publication of
The Voyeur’s Motel, we are to understand that
Talese travels to Colorado to babysit Foos, calm
his nerves, and keep him away from the press.
During the visit, the two men sit for one of the
film’s numerous staged interviews between
them. The extent of the staging becomes clear
when Talese balks at a certain of the directors’
prompts, and begins to unravel. If the presence
of the filmmakers has been suggested and occa­
sionally made explicit (in their solo interviews,
both Talese and Foos look off camera, address­
ing themselves to interlocutors; when Talese
hears of the directors’ plan to get footage of the
destroyed motel he asks to join the trip; in one
stressed-out moment, Foos expresses apprecia­
tion for their company), in choosing to include
the moment of their exposure as the architects
of these interviews, Kane and Koury lose their
sole status as implied authors and become impli­
cated in the journalistic chaos they depict.
Up to this point, the viewer has had cause to
doubt the directors: Tabloid-TV reenactments
and ponderous resort to a dollhouse version of
the motel feel overdone; the terms of certain key
interviews and meetings are muddy; at times,
tricky editing makes it unclear whether Foos
is speaking with Talese or the filmmakers. As
Talese’s meltdown makes explicit, Foos himself
has reason to be unsure. During their seated
interview, Talese becomes irate when the direc­
tors ask Foos a question in Talese’s presence that
we learn Foos has already answered on his own.
At this point wildly compromised, Talese claims
the high ground, chastising the filmmakers. He
explains to Foos that they are attem pting to
make him look unreliable, expose him as a hyp­
ocrite. “These guys are not even credible jour­
nalists, they’re cameramen,” Talese huffs. “Did
we hit a sore spot on you?” Foos replies.
On the publication of Talese’s book, more
discrepancies in Foos’s account emerge. Talese
disowns the book, then sheepishly reclaims it.
As much as Talese’s sloppy reporting, reviews of
The Voyeur’s Motel emphasize his failure to treat
his subject’s inconstancy with more skepticism,
to make a story of it. Instead Talese deflects,
insisting on a larger scheme of reliability. As
the critic James Phelan points out, “An implied
author of a nonfiction narrative who endorses
a narrator’s erroneous report about a historical
event is constructing reliable narration just as
much as an implied author of a fictional narra­
tive who endorses a narrator’s racist views. As
members of the flesh-and-blood audience, we
should deem both kinds of narration deficient,
but, again, such fault finding is not an activity
to which the implied author guides us.”
Both Risk and Voyeur suggest the hazards
of working with unreliability in nonfiction
narrative. A keen authority and consistent
intention are central to pulling it off. Kane and
Koury make it work with only half measures
of both: That the filmmakers drift into their
film’s carefully constructed realm of unreliable
narration feels inevitable, so strong is the grav­
itational pull of its twinned subjects. If I found
some of their choices suspect or even deficient,
their transformation into Foos’s and Talese’s
fellow unreliable narrators only strengthens
Voyeur’s invitation of the viewer’s scrutiny, its
challenge to grasp the incongruities between
the story told by the film’s (four) narrators and
that ultimately encoded by its directors.
It is saying a lot that Talese appears in Voy­
eur every bit as self-deluded as Foos, a man who
believes his actions were harmless because his
victims were oblivious to the crime. In fact,
Foos believes himself a pioneer, a view Talese
endorses—one of many instances where it’s
impossible to distinguish between the jour­
nalist’s manipulations and his genuine feeling.
Talese also believes that his work does no harm,
and in Foos’s case bestows what Talese consid­
ers the ultimate reward. “Even if he hates the
article, he’s gotta love the prominence,” Talese
says, admiring his New Yorker story’s cover place­
ment. “He wanted to be discovered... Now if he
dies, this thing will put him on the map, it will
get him an obituary in the New York Times...
Why? Because he’s a voyeur who talked—talked
to me.” As Voyeur makes plain, legacy is a funny
thing, often bearing a capriciousness in direct
relation to the pride and desperation of those
who spend long lives attempting to secure it. □
MICHELLE ORANGE 167
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