Everyone knows that Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation is a top-notch historically-timely suspense film about surveillance and paranoia. Most of what gets written about the film concerns some aspect of either of these axes. Consider this, this, this, and this. The balance of writers tend to consider sound design, reflexivity, or spectatorship in some way. I propose that there are plenty of other productive ways to think about The Conversation, despite the fact that it hardly seems to be about anything else.
10 More Things to See in The Conversation
1. The Painting. Let’s begin near the end. As Harry Caul waits in the room adjacent to 773, listening to voices through the wall, he sits as if attempting to stare into that room, through the motel art depicting a seaside scene. The painting, tepid and innocuous, in this moment begins to function as an obdurately ironic object, since it hangs impassively in place of what’s just behind it, as though it were blocking and mocking us. Though the painting does not move like the often-seen reel-to-reel sound recorders in the rest of the film, it reminds us of all the time we and Harry have spent thus far staring at objects which transmit sound but not sight. The Conversation is a film which principally concerns partial sensory experience, and here as the camera and Harry’s gaze force us to imagine a space in lieu of presence within that space—while all the time staring at a representation of a different, irrelevant space—we are reminded of how little we know, how much we imagine, and how mistaken we can be when we attempt to interpolate or elide the gaps in our sense data. To say that Harry’s epistemological struggle and the audience’s epistemological struggle overlap in this film is to put it far too mildly. And as the borders of that damn painting just barely spill past the borders of the film frame, Coppola quietly once more reminds us that this painting, like the reel-to-reel, and like the cinema screen itself, simulates worlds while also blocking our entry into them. In this moment of Harry’s desperate listening, the painting’s incongruous simulation of a space beyond its own surface reminds us of its fundamental opacity. This film about the act of sensing, in surveillance as well as in art, always concerns and conceptualizes the limits of what we can perceive and the absolute limitations on what we can know. The Conversation, an audiovisual recording about the acts of looking, hearing, and recording, constantly reveals to us just how little we can see and hear and know.
2. The Zoom. Back to the beginning. The opening shot quietly unveils many of the film’s key themes. As a jazz ensemble echoes in the distance in Union Square, a high-angle camera slowly zooms in on the scene. As the scene magnifies, slowly selecting its subject, we notice a mime and begin to hear audio equipment picking up garbled noise. If something seems wrong about this, that’s because we do not yet realize that we are observing the square from the perspective of two surveillance microphone operators. Though the noise feels like an intrusion into the scene’s optical realism, it actually confirms a different kind of realism: a reflexivity that speaks the truth by pointing out that what you’re seeing (and hearing) is a technological representation. Just as the human eye cannot zoom in (the focal length of our eyes are fixed, but that of a camera may be varied), the human ear cannot hear at such distances, select so precisely, or create that microphone’s particular kind of distortion. A zoom, which elsewhere might be meaningless, here sets up the film’s interest in technological mediation and extension of direct human sense. While every shot in any film is seen through a mechanical eye and heard through a mechanical ear, here the zoom and the garbled sound especially underscore this fact. Single-handedly, the zoom sets up the film’s thematic interest in technology, sense, reflexivity, and surveillance; and when it spies Harry among the crowd, it even whispers to us that Harry the surveillor will soon become Harry the surveilled.
3. The Cup of Coffee. We watch Harry Caul move through the crowd, taking in the event of that moment—the polyphony of urban sounds, the particular mix of sheen and shadow cast by the low-hanging sun, the heat of the coffee in his hands counterpointing the December air around him, the taste and caffeine of the beverage answering inner cries of fatigue and hunger, the light tug on his back as the breeze pulls on his jacket, and thousands of other sensations of balance and movement through the space, intermingled with a vast inner life of paranoia, pain, and perfunctory duty. It’s all there, in that moment, and as the camera zooms in the film asks us to enter his consciousness and experience. But then, as is necessary in Harry’s profession, he oversees a surveillance crew which precisely attenuates all of this sensory input down to just one sense, limitedly captured. Humans already receive only a tiny fraction of the energetic patterns bouncing around the universe, and now a tinier fraction of that fraction will have to make do as a surrogate for reality. The rest of the film concerns Harry’s empirical crisis surrounding this loss. Surveillance by its nature must be distant or hidden, and because of this it is very limited in the senses that it can record. As such, surveillance can stand in symbolically for the limitations of human senses. Even when human senses are amplified or focused by technology, they still face absolute limits. Thus, Harry’s epistemological crisis—“I was wrong about what Mark and Ann were talking about!”—becomes an empirical crisis—“My senses and my access to reality are so limited, how can I be sure about anything?” More about the kind of doubt this kindles later.
4. The Mime. Most people who interpret the opening scene point out the mime, arguing that the mime’s presence is chiefly ironic because Harry is obsessed with sound while the mime performs soundlessly. What Caul culls the mime suppresses. While I don’t deny this interpretation, I insist that it misses crucial commonalities shared by the activity of pantomime and the activity of surveillance. When the mime stands next to Harry and sips on an imaginary cup of coffee, he also draws our attention to what an audiovisual medium like film cannot capture: the multitude of senses I spoke about in the previous paragraph. In fact, this is the essence of the mime’s performance: he approaches someone in the crowd and parodically parrots that person’s pattern of behavior, decontextualizing their actions by mimicking them in a different body. Without the context of the body which originally produced them, all of the mime’s copied actions lose their meaning, mocking the copyist. Harry, in his profession, also decontextualizes, because he displaces sound from the events which produced it, confining a copy of it to a tape, and presuming that this decontextualized lossy copy will suffice to stand in for the event that produced it. The mime would understand that such a confidence in estranged sensation is absurd, but Harry will have to discover his foolishness and his frailty the hard way. In this sense, the mime is a perfect foil for Harry; their ironic differences underscore crucial similarities. Observe the mime directly mimicking Mark in a later flashback.
5. Raincoats, Mirrors, and Microphones. The Conversation features a number of semipermeable membranes, so many that beyond a visual device they must certainly carry thematic significance. In addition to Harry’s signature translucent raincoat, the film features a range of such translucent materials: the blue window coverings outside The Director’s office, that odd sheet which hangs in front of the table which Harry turns into a bar during the party in his warehouse, the fog in his dream, and, of course, the fogged glass through which Harry witnesses the climactic murder. In the case of these translucent materials, the semipermeability is symmetrical, which is to say that the membranes obscure what’s happening behind them equally for people on either side of the membrane. These symmetrically semipermeable membranes, which by themselves already connote the obscurity of the truth, serve to direct our attention to the unequal power dynamics embedded in the film’s many asymmetrically semipermeable membranes. For instance, the one-way mirror on the “Pioneer Glass” recording truck, which allows Stan to see out, gaining power over the women outside the truck who believe that the mirror is just a mirror. Consider also the telescope outside The Director’s office, which gives a similar power advantage to the beholder by overcoming distance. Both the one-way mirror and the telescope conceptualize the kind of asymmetrical power which a surveillor gains over the person he surveils. Perhaps Coppola even jokingly refers to this thematic relationship when Harry uses a demonstration surveillance camera first as a mirror to check his appearance, then to spy on Martin Stett as he moves through the convention hall. More on semipermeable membranes in a moment.
6. A Nice Fat Recording. At the beginning, Harry Caul is the theorist/scientist par excellence in the sense that he maintains a strict critical distance between himself and the content of what he studies. He is the structuralist or semiotician who studies language while refusing to consider the content of the utterance. In fact, he actively rejects knowledge of the utterance, declaring, “All I want’s a nice fat recording” to Stan in the recording truck. Harry regards Stan’s interest in “what they’re saying” as a character flaw. Stan wishes to analyze the content of the couple’s particular speech-act, whereas Harry only cares about (or else psychologically defends himself by refusing to care about anything but) the technological apparatus of recording—the capacity of the device to capture and register sonic patterns, to indexically transcribe the sound of the world. As viewers aligned with Harry, we respect his drive to sweeten the recording, and we unknowingly internalize the belief that if Harry can process the recording enough, he will arrive at the truth. Isn’t this the premise, after all, of all suspense films? In the face of partial sensory data, the protagonist must reconstruct the world from fragments. We not only want him to succeed in order to satisfy our desire to know the solution of the mystery, we also believe implicitly that he always can succeed—that there is nothing lost which cannot be recovered. But The Conversation points out the tragic irony that sometimes we destroy the truth we wish to recover in the mere act of trying to recover it. If the connotative qualities of spoken language terminally unlink signs from stable referents, allowing words to mean things which listeners (like Harry) never considered, then language ought to trigger, as it did for Derrida, Baudrillard, and plenty of other postmodernists and poststructuralists, an epistemological crisis. Caul hides behind the indexical, registrative properties of the recording device as a way of avoiding the trap of analyzing something fraught with connotation. After all, a microphone ought to be ontologically denotative, right? How could there be any slippage of signification when all the device has to do is capture, not interpret? Sadly for Harry, capture is a form of interpretation.
7. A Model of the Square. A tape recording of an audible moment makes a partial sonic copy of that moment which can serve as an evidentiary stand-in. Our confidence in recorded sound’s ability to represent live sound gives the surveillance recording its supposed “truth-value.” Because the microphone captures an immediate imprint of an otherwise undisturbed section of reality, we presume that what we hear is truth. But because recordings cannot help but omit data, a recording of a moment is not actually coextensive with that moment; it only simulates it. The copy is not the same as the original, the map does not cover the extent of the territory, and the simulation is not the reality. Despite this, our confidence in indexical copies often distracts us from their very real deficiencies. The film reminds us of sound recordings’ nature as simulation in several ways: a. As he’s leaving the wiretapping convention, Harry runs into Martin Stett near a scale model of Union Square. Coppola directs our attention to this model, not just as a memory-trigger, but also to indicate that the sound recording and the model are both kinds of simulations. It bears mentioning that the nearby mirror generates simulations, and, perhaps for no other reason than to be devastatingly clever, a man with a saxophone walks by, reminding us of Harry’s musical hobby—which is to play saxophone with recordings in his apartment—simulated sound. (Let’s not forget that Harry also picks up the music of a street saxophonist in his recording of Union Square—#mindblown.) b. More substantially, as Harry listens to the recordings, sweetening their sound, Coppola cuts in images of Mark and Ann talking in Union Square. These images might just be there to assist the audience in remembering the moment, but often they consist of footage which we didn’t see the first time around. So if the film is meant to serve as surrogate for the audience’s memory, it crucially adds and subtracts. If these images are supposed to be Harry’s memory, then Harry’s memory has reconstructed false flashbacks of Union Square from a perspective that he didn’t occupy. If these are his memories, he has imagined—which is to say, simulated—views which he never saw. In all this, we should remember that the sound recording equipment did nothing wrong; its denotative fidelity is precisely what blinded Harry to the fact that the technological capacity to record sound begs the question of truth — that is, what does it matter how good the equipment is if you record the wrong moment? By this, I mean to state the obvious: Harry heard everything Mark and Ann said, but without the context, all this information was useless. Let me underscore an important consequence of this: the audience didn’t mishear. Harry misheard, and we heard the sound as he misheard it.
“A technical invention can never resolve a problem in art; it can only state it, so that it can be resolved by a second, properly aesthetic, invention.” - Christian Metz paraphrasing Etienne Souriau in Film Language, p. 55
8. The Confessional. We know that we’re inside Harry’s head not just because of the inscrutable events in the hotel room, and not just because we get to peek inside Harry’s anxious dreams, but because we hear his thoughts in the confessional. When he sits down to disclose his sins to the priest, he begins by listing mundane sins with feigned contrition. But as the camera moves in and slowly racks focus, the timbre of Harry’s voice changes abruptly and the words we hear stop synchronizing with the movements of his lips. And just like that, we’re in his head, hearing him formulate thoughts of guilt (his role in the death of three innocent people) which he can never bear to speak aloud, not even to God. But that’s not all that happens in this scene. All the while, the priest sits behind a semipermeable membrane, and for this moment the film’s usual power relationship inverts: Harry speaks and a veiled man positioned as a representative for God listens silently. Yet it’s not surveillance, because Harry does it willingly, as if he needs to know that someone is listening.
9. The Madonna. The hope that one day the veil will be lifted is central to Christian doctrine. In a famous passage in I Corinthians chapter 13, Paul writes, “Where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” That’s the NIV; in the King James Version, “a poor reflection as in a mirror” was rendered, “through a glass darkly.” In the 1962 film by that name, Bergman’s anxiety was that seeing God face to face would reveal him to be a monster. Philip K. Dick’s anxiety in A Scanner Darkly wasn’t that technology took the place of God, but rather that technology might not see into the head or into the heart clearly enough—that the loss of the self under the regime of the scanners might be total, since the scanners mightn’t be able to see past the murk any better than we could. Humans want to know fully, but more than this we want to be fully known. Christianity eases the pain of our lack of self-knowledge by promising that God knows us better than we do, and that one day we will know ourselves and him just as fully. But what if this is an empty promise?
By the end, Harry’s sanity has unraveled, he has witnessed a murder for which he blames himself for not preventing, and he fears for his safety and his privacy. But these are not his true crisis. The crisis is not that someone might be listening (though that worries him at least for the moment). The crisis is that perhaps, ultimately, no one is listening. Harry spent his professional life on the darker side of that glass, observing the ignorant weak from a technological pedestal. But now his senses and his technology have failed him. If he could not discern the truth when the asymmetrical semipermeable membrane favored him, how can he now possibly be confident that God sits behind the one-way mirror of reality? If Harry now knows that he can never be certain that he knows what he thinks he knows, where does this put his faith in God?
Harry went to confession because even if he couldn’t see God, at least he could see a church which attested to God’s existence and a membrane in the confessional which promised that God was listening. So when Martin Stett claims that they’re watching him, Harry, seeks the solace of finding the microphone. At least then he would know. In a way, the whole possibility of faith comes down to finding it. So after much hesitation, he tears open the Madonna, desecrating what he had considered a holy object. He finds no microphone inside. Maybe there’s no god inside either.
10. The Sounds of Demolition. When Harry arrives back in his apartment after making the Union Square recording, the camera’s static perspective stares upon the emptiness of the place. To our left, we faintly hear the sounds of heavy equipment. After a long moment, the camera pans to reveal a building being demolished across the street. When Harry gets home again at the end of the film, the building across the street is gone. And as if to actualize the symbol of his decaying sanity, Harry tears apart his own apartment too.
"Sinemada mimari" kategorisi altında incelenmeye yaraşır The Conversation'ı yeni izledim. Çekim yapılan mekânları araştırırken denk geldiğim güzel bir blog yazısını buraya iliştiriyorum.
Diyaloğu takip etmeye neredeyse gerek yok (ki büyük kısmı kayıt altına alınan bir konuşmanın farklı bağlamlar ve detaylar eşliğinde tekrarından ibaret); film, sadece ekranda görülenle, eski moda/sıcak/klostrofobik/güvenli ve modern/brütal/geniş/boş/tekinsiz mekânlarıyla bile kendine hayran bırakıyor.
Filmin akışına dönmek gerekirse: Bir nevi detektif denebilecek, dinleme uzman Harry'nin (Gene Hackman) iş ve özel hayatını birbirinden ayırabilme kapasitesi, mesleki deformasyondan sayılabilecek aşırı dikkati ve daha önemlisi akıl sağlığı, bodrum katındaki bir göz odada yaşayan kız arkadaşı Amy (Teri Garr) ile son görüşmelerinden sonra epey azalıyor ve filmin sonunda tamamen kayboluyor.
Bu kırılmayı, avcının av olma ihtimaliyle beklenmedik bir anda yüzleşmesine ve tüm savunma sisteminin çökmesine bağlayabiliriz; zira son buluşmalarında Amy, Harry'de gözlemlediği şüphe çeken tavırlardan ve Harry'nin telefonunlarını dinleme ihtimalinden şüphelendiğinden şakacı bir tavırla bahsettikten sonra sırra kadem basıyor. Harry, kızdan şüphelenedursun, filmin sonunda masum sanıp korumaya çalıştığı çiftin katil olduğunu, kendisinin sadece kullanıldığını, dahası aynı çift tarafından yıllara dayanan deneyimine rağmen haberinin bile olmadığı bir teknoloji vasıtasıyla izlediğini görüyoruz.
Harry'ye böylece çifte tur bindirilmiştir. Egosu bunu kaldıramaz ve fakat Harry, artık mahremiyetini koruyamadığı evinin parkelerini dinleme cihazını bulma ümidiyle tek tek kaldırır.
Son sahnede Coppola'nın tıpkı bir güvenlik kamerası gibi mekanik şekilde odayı tarayan bir kamera açısını kullanmasını not ettim elbette. Harikulade.