The Journalist and the Masturbator: Nonfiction, Film, and the Unreliable Narrator

Autumn stalled, the heat lingered, and an 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, indignation, 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, masturbation emerged as a prominent 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 degradation 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.

In the midst of all this comes Voyeur, a documentary 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 completely reliable: This is a man who spent most of his life devoted to a predatory form of masturbation. In his thirties, Foos purchased a motel in Aurora, Colorado, with the intention of turning it into a personal masturbatorium. He fashioned 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 emphasizes his role as a sort of documentarian, a sex researcher more interested in observing and recording what he sees than exercising his perversions. An obese man who enters his eighties 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 interlocutor, as creatures engaged in the dance of journalist and subject, which is to say an enterprise of mutual violation. On learning about the pending publication of Thy Neighbor's Wife, Talese's 1981 treatise on shifting American sexual 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 himself, 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...