Feeling Watched

Feeling Watched is a recurring motif in Bret Ellis’s account of the years surrounding 1981: the sense that someone is observing him, even when no observer can be identified. It intrudes on promised escapes and ordinary private spaces, connects the crimes of the Trawler to Bret’s intimate life, and leaves uncertainty over where external danger ends and anxious interpretation begins.

The watcher during attempted escape

The feeling persists beyond the immediate events of 1981. In late summer 1982, after graduating from Buckley School, Bret spends the final weeks of August at a house beside Lake Tahoe rented by his aunt. He walks through the forest while preparing to leave Los Angeles and start over in Bennington, then Manhattan. Although the plan offers the prospect of escape, he feels that someone is watching him as he walks with his Walkman, swims alone, or sits on the deck by the pier. The activities suggest solitude and freedom; the suspicion makes even those spaces feel occupied.

That holiday does not remain a clean break from the past. Bret recalls a blood-streaked wall and an adjoining balcony in a high-rise condo, and the memory shadows the weekend he had hoped to associate with a new life. The sense of being watched is thus bound to a wider inability to leave the violence behind: departure changes his surroundings, not the conditions under which he experiences them.

In October 1982, the same fear follows Bret to New York City. His parents meet him there after a real-estate deal and join him in an attempted family reconciliation. The weekend includes a stay at the Carlyle, a preview of Cats at the Winter Garden, meals at Le Cirque, shopping, and visits to art galleries. Yet his parents’ presence continually recalls Los Angeles, which he wants to forget. As he moves through Barneys, the edges of Central Park, and a crowded bar at P. J. Clarke’s, he imagines Robert Mallory somewhere nearby, locating and monitoring him with binoculars or a telescope. The imagined watcher gives a name and means to a fear that remains unconfirmed.

The Trawler and the atmosphere of surveillance

In September 1981, public reports about the Trawler’s crimes make the possibility of surveillance feel less abstract. The murders are connected to a series of home invasions through details the victims shared: silent phone calls, bedroom furniture rearranged, gifts left behind, and missing neighborhood pets later sacrificed. The victims had not themselves been attacked during the earlier invasions. For Bret, these patterns make the announcement of the Trawler feel like confirmation that evil is real, while also feeding a heightened atmosphere he describes as dramatic and dangerous.

Bret’s response is divided. He initially experiences the news through a movie-like story taking shape in his mind, imagining that someone is watching him at the empty House on Mulholland while he listens to Fleetwood Mac’s “I’m So Afraid.” That dramatic framing does not hold. At night, after turning off the lights, he becomes afraid that the Trawler will break in; he starts buying marijuana from Jeff Taylor to make falling asleep easier. The movement from imagined cinematic suspense to practical attempts to manage fear marks the motif’s change in register: being watched can briefly seem like a role in a story, but it becomes distressing when the house is dark and Bret cannot dismiss the possibility of intrusion.

The threat also gains force from its timing. Bret places these fears among a run of developments in which home invasions resume and the connections among the murders become public. The Trawler’s methods offer a recognizable pattern of intrusion and monitoring, while the reported absence of attacks on the eventual murder victims during those break-ins leaves an important distinction between surveillance and direct violence. The crimes give Bret concrete reasons to fear a watcher, without proving that the person he imagines is present in any particular moment.

Secrecy and the imagined audience

The motif also reaches Bret’s relationship with Ryan Vaughn. After a weekend together at Bret’s home on Mulholland, Ryan becomes more subdued and evasive at school. Their familiar exchanged looks change: what had been a knowing glance becomes a fixed smile or blankness, and Ryan appears anxious that other people could read their interactions as evidence. Bret considers that Ryan may simply be acting pragmatically to protect their secret and, by extension, Bret’s public relationship with Debbie Schaffer. In this context, the watcher is not only a suspected criminal outside the home. It is also the audience Ryan imagines around them, capable of interpreting a glance and exposing what they conceal.

Their behavior shifts between concealment at school and privacy at home. Ryan stops joining Bret at lunch and spends time with Dominic, Doug, and Kyle, while Bret sits with Thom Wright, Susan Reynolds, Debbie, and others. Yet Ryan continues to visit the House on Mulholland after school, where the two can close the bedroom door and blinds. That contrast gives the motif a specific social consequence: the possibility of being observed helps govern where the relationship can appear and how the two behave in public.

When Bret asks Ryan what he thinks about the discovery of Julie Selwyn and the Trawler’s announcement, Ryan says he does not know what Bret means. Their eyes meet, and Bret perceives desire in the moment. The exchange leaves the threat of exposure unresolved; Ryan’s evasion may protect their secret, but it also makes their public distance harder for Bret to interpret. Surveillance becomes part of a larger uncertainty in which both silence and attention can be read as clues.

Suspicion, narration, and uncertainty

Bret’s sense of being watched is not presented as proof that Robert is monitoring him. In a conversation with Susan Reynolds about whether they have secrets, Bret recalls her earlier assurance that his secret was safe with her. He then thinks of Robert and Susan’s supposed feelings for him, but recognizes that his suspicion rests on what Debbie Schaffer said and that he has no direct evidence of the relationship. He knows, too, that Robert told Susan and Thom that Bret had followed him along Ventura Boulevard. Bret tries to calm himself by considering whether he is creating a narrative from incomplete information.

The admission that a writer can hear things that are not really there connects the motif to Bret’s way of making sense of events. He repeatedly interprets gestures, absences, and unexplained possibilities as parts of a story, while also recognizing that interpretation can outrun what he knows. This self-awareness does not resolve the fear: the Trawler’s documented crimes give the possibility of surveillance a real-world basis, and Ryan’s concern about being watched makes concealment tangible. At the same time, Bret’s suspicions about Robert remain suspicions, not confirmation that Robert is observing him.

The motif’s lasting significance lies in that double pressure. The watcher can be associated with an actual campaign of intrusion, an imagined presence in a dark house, or the social gaze that makes a private relationship feel exposed. Even after Bret leaves Los Angeles, the fear returns in new places and attaches itself to new circumstances. The prospect of escape therefore cannot restore uncomplicated privacy: the watcher persists as both a threat Bret cannot dismiss and an interpretation he cannot fully verify.