The Conversation was made by Francis Coppola in the mid-70’s, around the time that the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King, and Nixon ordered surveillance operations on anti-war activists, civil-rights workers, and journalists on his enemies list. Secret operatives broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to retaliate against him for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the press. And there was the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel, which was the first of the “gate” scandals. Spying, invasion of privacy, and wiretapping were being ordered from the highest reaches of government. [This article is a shortened version of a paper submitted in 2006 for the University Film and Video Association's annual paper prize. The paper was awarded third place in the competition - ed.]
In The Conversation, Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman) is a man whose profession, audio surveillance or wiretapping, is marked by power without responsibility. He’s a hired gun, or rather a hired microphone, hired to keep his distance, follow orders, and not get involved. But Harry Caul is not the only secret observer in the film. The Conversation portrays a world populated by wiretappers, by people watching and spying on each other. There’s hardly a character in the film who doesn’t spy on others. The syndrome is presented as societal in nature—no one escapes with clean hands. In a few cases the watchers and watched are paired in a cycle of reciprocal mistrust, particularly Harry Caul and the Director’s Assistant (played by Harrison Ford), as well as Caul and his girlfriend Amy (played by Teri Garr), not to mention Caul’s client and the couple the client is paying Caul to spy on.
This article explores The Conversation, a film that dramatizes its opposition to government spying through the case of its lead character Harry Caul, the spy-for-hire. Caul begins as a mercenary, has a crisis of conscience, becomes engaged and finally takes responsibility for his actions, but he is ultimately destroyed. Caul’s personal traits are totally suited to his life as a professional eavesdropper, and the trajectory of his professional life is perfectly embodied in this private journey. He moves from alienation to engagement, from a willing to an unwilling outsider, from an observer to a participant. The paper examines scenes, dramatic moments, and film techniques that deliver the film's anti-surveillance message through the professional and private life of Harry Caul.
HARRY CAUL: OUTSIDER
The first few scenes of the film establish Harry Caul’s character. His portrait is developed bit by bit – building the primary qualities of alienation and secretiveness and separateness, creating the flawed human being who wills himself to feel nothing in his professional and personal lives.
His excessive secrecy is manifested when he repels his girlfriend Amy’s attempts to find out the most basic facts of his life. He says he has no secrets, but Amy knows better. With wily innocence she contradicts him, saying, “I’m your secret.” Even though they’ve obviously been together for a while, she asks first-date questions. She explains that since it’s his birthday, which he let slip in a moment of indiscretion, he should tell her something, anything, about himself. He relents, and tells his age, and we know he’s chipped off a couple of years. Throughout the scene, he tells her small lies to conceal the most basic attributes: his profession, whether or not he lives alone. His lies seem gratuitous, and his will to privacy is quite pitiful because he’s so guarded about revealing personal facts, no matter how slight.
In a later scene, Caul explains his professional philosophy to his assistant, Stan (played by John Cazale). As a professional eavesdropper, he claims to lack thoughts or feelings about his subjects. “If there is one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business,” he says, “it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature; I don’t know anything about curiosity.” Then he gets so emotionally worked up he stutters into silence.
UNION SQUARE: RECORDING THE CONVERSATION
The opening scene of the film establishes the tension between an authorial presence and the circumscribed perspective of the main character. This scene puts us into the middle of Caul’s current job – to eavesdrop on the conversation between a couple, Anne and Mark, walking around in Union Square, San Francisco.
A long zoom down into Union Square takes several minutes (fig. 1-4 show different stages of the zoom). Its movement recalls the opening shots of Psycho, in which the camera zooms from a wide view of a cityscape incrementally closer until we enter a hotel bedroom. In The Conversation, the trajectory seems intentional, but for a considerable time we cannot figure it out – our eye canvases the screen for a significant event or character. The camera picks up a mime who is, in a way, a personification of the camera, picking up one person and then another. It’s a universe where people watch and follow each other, and the most omniscient and powerful observer is the eye of the camera itself.
But the film does not persist with its authorial position. More like Rear Window than Psycho, the omniscient view is established at the beginning only to withdraw. Instead, we become locked to Harry Caul’s perspective. He is present in all of the scenes, and we follow him from place to place as he makes his way to some sort of self-discovery. Although we have no privileged information, the details of the drama give us clues about how to interpret Caul’s situation. He turns out to be an unreliable guide to this world.
So in the early scenes Harry Caul is presented, professionally, in a position of power, at the top of his game. But personally, and even professionally, he’s very isolated.
CAUL’S CRISIS
Suddenly… Harry Caul becomes a man of action! It doesn’t look like much – one could be forgiven for not noticing – but it’s the turning point of the film. Caul goes to drop off the finished tape at his client’s office, but he’s intercepted by the Director’s Assistant, Martin Stett, who insists that Caul leave the tape with him. He refuses, and after a brief struggle snatches the package from Stett (fig. 5). It’s hardly a heroic struggle, but in this world of alienation, it’s a start. Stett cautions him not to get involved. Harry takes the challenge and with it the consequences of abandoning his life of alienation.
In the next scene, Harry Caul is in his lab, back on the case, and this time he’s emotionally connected. He finds a region of the tape that had been previously indecipherable, and he jumps down the rabbit hole. This is the audio equivalent of a scene, like one in Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up (fig. 6), and another in Rear Window, where technical apparatus is used to take us from perceptual reality to a kind of super-reality or heightened, charged reality, where projection, or the mind’s eye or ear, trumps objective fact.
Caul grabs an audio filtering device, and uncovers the line, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” His fears are confirmed; the couple thinks that the jilted husband, his client, intends to kill them. During this scene, the fragment is played eight times! We get the point that this is both a personal and professional moment of crisis for Caul (fig. 7-10) .
The scene of the conversation in Union Square serves as the spine of the film. The film obsessively returns to fragments of the conversation in different contexts and treatments. These iterations function to trace the development of Caul’s interpretation of what he hears. For example, Harry Caul mishears a crucial line of his recording, hearing “He’d kill us if he had to chance,” and correcting it at the end of the film to: “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” The first reading is the one he wants to hear; it’s unreliable but authentically captures Caul’s desire to correct something from his own past and also expresses his pathological fear of intimacy.
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IN A WORLD WITHOUT ABSOLUTES
The Conversation makes a strong case for the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions, personal or professional. The film is concerned with Harry Caul’s growing realization of his own role in the probable murder of Ann. As his sense of responsibility grows, the film gradually moves deeper and deeper into Harry’s inner life.
At first Harry denies any responsibility for his actions, refusing to see any connection between his work and what may happen to the people he spies on. But during the development section, his denial becomes less sure and expresses defensive rage against others’ probes.
There’s the critical scene of the small party in Caul’s warehouse following a convention of surveillance experts. Taunted by a competitor, Bernie Moran, Caul again denies responsibility, this time for a previous job in which his work resulted in the grizzly death of three men. He says, “It had nothing to do with me; I just turned in the tapes.” And then, “What [the clients] do with the tapes is their own business.”
As he makes his denials, Caul moves like a caged animal. A circular move begins as Harry walks away from Moran, his “tormenter,” moves along a chain-link fence, and ends with Moran back in the frame. He can’t escape Moran or his own past (fig. 11-15 show different stages of the camera movement).
Later that evening, Caul is alone in his lab with Meredith, a woman he’s just met that night. He plays the entire conversation, interacting very directly with it. He says simply, “Frightened….This is no ordinary conversation. It makes me feel…something.” When Ann says, “Oh, God,” he repeats her words, matching her tone. He is learning, through imitation, how to express his own fears. Thus he comes to grips, more strongly than ever, with his responsibility for the couple’s fate. Finally Harry says, “Oh, God, what I have done. I have to destroy the tapes. I can’t let it happen again.”
Harry Caul too thinks he has a second chance. But as he starts to come to life, become a man of action, right the wrongs of his past and present jobs, he makes mistake after mistake – both professionally and emotionally. There are two problems that ultimately cause his downfall. One is that he has no privileged knowledge of others, and makes some bad judgments. And the other is related to the first: he lives in a world where no one trusts anyone, and where everyone, even the most innocent, is guilty of deceit.
HARRY’S WORLD: ONE OF MISTAKES AND MISTRUST
The pervasive mistrust and spying themes are established early in this film by the mime who tracks Caul in the opening shot; by Caul’s assistant who photographs girls through a one-way mirror; by Caul himself as he watches the entrance to his girlfriend Amy’s apartment before entering. And Amy in turn has spied on Harry spying on her!
His mistrust leads to bad judgments. For example, Harry succumbs to Meredith, the trade-show model who goes to the party in his warehouse. As Harry confides in her about his treatment of Amy, Meredith says to Harry, “Sophisticated Lady” playing in the background, “Something is on your mind; I wish you’d tell me.” And unlike his refusal open up in early scenes, he does confide in her.
While he does so, an elegant trio of identical camera moves hints at intimacy, obsession, and imprisonment, the circular musical motif heightening the drama. Three times the camera moves in a half circle from Meredith to Harry (fig 16-17 show the start and end point of the movement). This movement is reminiscent of the wonderful 360-degree camera moves done by Hitchcock to show two characters in an embrace, where intimacy and control are intertwined, as in the embrace in Notorious of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman soon after their arrival in Rio. But in The Conversation, the half circle diminishes the romanticism of its predecessor, while still invoking the sense of entrapment. Harry confides in and sleeps with Meredith, letting down his guard when he should be at his most watchful.
In another tip of the hat to Film Noir, the beautiful, seductive Meredith betrays Harry. While he sleeps, she steals the tapes and later we might figure out that while Harry slept she also planted a bug on him (fig. 18).
CLIMAX
The film’s climax occurs when Harry Caul goes to the hotel to witness Ann and Mark’s murder. There are two climactic scenes. In the first he hears – and feels – the murder taking place in the next room. In the second, he finds the evidence of the murder (fig. 19-20).
The extended scene of the murder and Caul’s response is a masterpiece of discordance. It contains juxtapositions and connections of conflicting elements – visually, aurally, and dramatically.
The multiple conflicting elements in these scenes make it the most intense moment in the film. This is where it all comes together: Harry’s greatest fear – of being involved in murder – is realized, and he’s powerless to prevent it. He totally loses all traces of detachment.
DENOUEMENT
Near the end of the film, Caul watches Ann, Mark, and the Director’s Assistant leave the corporate headquarters. He quickly realizes that his client, the Director, has been murdered, not Ann and Mark. His assumptions have been turned upside down, and now he has to mentally rework the puzzle of what happened. It’s a terrific, fast-paced scene, relying on point-of-view editing and over-the-shoulder shots to situate us in Harry’s perspective as he pieces together what happened. The characters in the present are interwoven with the originally recorded event and scenes of the murder. What’s great about this scene is that it depicts Harry Caul’s process of thought visually and aurally, avoiding the static explanatory conversation so typical of a detective film’s ending.
Caul returns to his apartment, starts to play the sax, and finds out from a phone call from the Director’s Assistant that his apartment is being bugged. Bit by bit he dismantles his apartment in pursuit of the bug. The final pans around the room show Harry Caul playing his sax, once again utterly alone (fig. 21). But the scene is different from the one of him playing alone early in the film.
His apartment is now far from sterile – it’s a desolate wreck. Early in the film the apartment was a clean slate of a life unlived, it’s now a different kind of “clean slate,” one where all superficialities have been stripped away. His sax playing is more downbeat and discordant than it was in the beginning of the film; it’s coming from the depths of his soul.
Most important, Caul has been beaten at his own game. The film doesn’t give away the location of the bug, but Caul has stripped the apartment of any possible hiding place. So we have… the sax and his eyeglasses. The only one that makes sense is the glasses, since Meredith, who betrayed Caul, removed his glasses when she slept with him. And the glasses make dramatic sense: the bug is so close, so invasive; it mediates everything he hears and, at least symbolically, sees. For someone who works by invading others’ privacy, it’s a terrible turnabout.
CONCLUSION
By the end of the film, Harry Caul has gone full circle from wiretapper to wiretapped, from perpetrator to victim, and on a personal level he goes from total alienation to making some connections, encountering private demons along the way. He loses his privacy just as he invaded others’. He loses the power that technological omniscience gave him. He sacrifices the neutrality demanded by his profession to become a person with a conscience.
In the process he learns about responsibility, guilt, regret, and empathy. His perspective is limited and circumscribed by his actions and desires; his knowledge is far from god-like. He takes risks, he makes mistakes, he suffers. What can we say about Harry Caul at the end of the film? That he is deeply wounded, but also that, paradoxically, he is deeply alive.
This paper began by talking about the limitless power of the U.S. government to investigate citizens and inhabitants without accountability and in secrecy. Harry Caul is just a bit player in this game. But writ large, we can see the consequences of his actions, both for himself in his own suffering, and for the society at large where surveillance begets mistrust, deceit, isolation, and lack of community or shared responsibility.
Copyright 2006. Ellen Feldman. All rights reserved.
Images from The Conversation courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Images from Blow-Up courtesy of Warner Home Video.