The Voyeur

[A partial review of a documentary under the same name]

By: Amin Zargarian

Netflix’s “Voyeur” tells the world a lot more about human desire beyond what’s on the ordinary side of things. It’s about a motel owner in Colorado in the US who had been secretly watching his guests at his motel. Not surprisingly, he manages to find a place to buy only to turn it into a motel and design its high pitched roof in a way he could undertake his experiments and fulfil his desire of watching people’s secret lives.

Voyeur | Clip: A Guest of the Voyeur | Netflix

Until the making of the movie, it had apparently been 47 years since his secret project started. The voyeur, Gerald Foos, says: “people are gonna call me a pervert. But I’m prepared for that.” And surely, he continues to talk about his childhood and the fact that he was brought up in a strict sexual family environment. He wasn’t taught or told anything about sexuality. It does, however, tell a lot to the viewer what type of person he might have been. “I don’t call it voyeurism. I was a researcher.”

There is a lot more to the uncanny similarity between what Gerald Foos had been doing in his motel and what a supreme being would have done. Call it a God. Someone who plans, who creates, who prepares and then sits and watches. It’s the completely well-understood concept of God. “I wanted to be God. I wanted to put things here and they disappear.”, he says. I won’t call it voyeurism either. It’s being the God he describes, one that we all describe. One that watches us in joy, in pain, in suffering, in depression, in delight and in whatsoever he creates for us. Gerald, at some point, decides to up the game for his own leisure. He “plants” bibles, dildos, and porno magazines in the drawers of the bedside tables to see how his guests would utilise them; would they see them? Check them? Use them?

He even performs a social experiment. Once he left a suitcase in the closets of each room and called the occupants the next day asking them if they’d found any such suitcase there. He’d then explain over the phone that it had been left there by a previous guest who also happened to leave a 1000 dollars inside; he would then go up and watch people through the vents to see their reaction. Some broke the locks to steal the money, and some even disposed of them outside their rooms and claimed they hadn’t seen it.

He even witnesses a murder; a drug dealer leaves a pack of drugs in the safe, and once Gerald witnesses it he gets angry mostly because his son was a victim of drug abuse; so when the guest leaves for a short time, he flushes them down the toilet; the man, agitated by the fact that the large amount of drugs went missing, gets into an altercation with his girl friend and chokes her to death, and Gerald in fact witnesses it.

The New Yorker reporter/journalist, who is involved with Gerald’s story to publish, even describes his presence in this as a voyeur. A voyeur watching another voyeur. 

Does all of this make us mad? Is it telling enough about the existence of the supreme being who is constantly watching us, and watching us commit atrocities, tell lies, do all the wrong? And all the good, of course. “God is dead”, once said Nietzsche. “We murdered him.”

I think we murdered him for we thought of him as unfitting with our state. It simply does not fit. Imagine Gerald as your God. As much as it is disturbing to hear this story, it’s hair raising to think of a supreme ruler/creator overseeing every single move we make. Would he come out of the closet one day and reveal himself? Would he be ashamed and regretful? Would he apologise to us? Whatever. I only assume he is and has been enjoying this for centuries, millennia or an infinite amount of time before his creation of all of his miniature people on this planet. We might even be able to invite him as a guest, and get him to tell us with joy, what he liked seeing in our lives, and what made him suffer most.