how to read
By Douglas Messerli
Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay and director) The Conversation / 1974
It is a
brilliant ballet (filmed by Haskell Wexler, who was fired soon after) that
seems to establish Caul in the viewer’s mind as precisely the surveillance
legend that others proclaim him throughout the rest of the film. Working with
Stan, Caul gradual teases out nearly every sentence of the couple and within a
few days is ready to turn in the results in to the executive, simply described
as the Director (Robert Duvall), who has hired him.
After
watching him in the confession box, however, we realize that his real faith
lies in his professional expertise
In the
end, it is precisely because Caul has
no way to truly comprehend how to
interconnect with his fellow human beings—his life is entirely consumed into
the secretiveness of his employment, and he has difficulty in even answering
the simplest of questions asked by his occasional lover, Amy (Terri Garr)—that
he has difficulty interpreting the words spoken by the couple on his tape.
In part,
because of the woman’s simply expressed empathy—she sympathizes with a passed-out
drunk lying on a nearby bench, she pleads for change to contribute to the impromptu
jazz concert, and sighs deeply about conditions of their affair—Caul does not
know how to read the other somewhat unrelated comments such as the male’s
originally inaudible statement (fixed by Caul’s mechanical devices) “He'd kill
us if he got the chance.”
As Roger
Ebert noted, however, we soon have even more reasons to begin to suspect the
expertise of this bugging “genius.” Although Caul has three locks and an alarm
guarding his apartment door, his landlady, is able to enter and leave behind a
gift for his birthday, and later, telephones him on an unlisted phone he claims
not to own. She has evidently had another key made and has also opened his
mail.
Caul’s
of-and-on girlfriend reports that she has observed Caul watching her from the
staircase for over an hour, and she knows when he is about to enter her
apartment, from how he inserts the key quietly and then opens the door quickly,
that he is expecting to encounter her
with another man.
At a
convention selling new surveillance devices, Caul is easily tricked by a peer,
claiming to be his competitor, Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield) to carry a
listening device with a gift of pen.
Stett,
moreover, soon after seems to be stalking him at the same convention, and after
the convention Caul allows a drunken party to be held in his Spartan offices,
where, after bedding down with a seemingly sensitive whore, he awakens to
discover that she has stolen the tape, delivering it up to Stett and,
presumably, to his boss.
When he
calls the Director from his “nonexistent” home phone, the assistant telephones
back, revealing that they too know his home number. Although Caul is paid, he
observes both Stett and the Director listening to the tape with a kind of anger
that he, once again, misreads as another piece of evidence that the young
woman, obviously the Director’s wife, and her lover may be harmed.
For the
first time in his life, Caul becomes determined, so it appears, to intervene,
to act on his knowledge and prevent the murders. As he notes in a dream to a
figure resembling the Director’s wife, “I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid
of murder.”
Taking a hotel room next to the one for
which the couple has made an appointment in the tape, Caul, uses his tools to
listen in, once more, to the conversations going on on the other side of the
wall. Shouting and threats soon ensue, while, in terror, Caul rushes to the
balcony to see if he might intervene; he faces a bloody figure and escapes back
into his own room, terrified at what he has done, but still unable to actually
involve himself.
When, after hours, the noise dies down,
he breaks into the couple’s room only to find it immaculately made up, with
nothing out of place. A visit to the bathroom shower reveals no signs of battle
or blood. Finally, breaking the seal of the toilet, he sees only pure
water—that is, until he flushes it, blood welling up along with what are
obviously the papers used to clean it up.
Returning to the Director’s offices, he
is permitted no entry and guards threaten him until he is forced to leave. In
front of the building, however, sits a limousine inside of which sits the young
woman he has supposed to have been killed. Newspapers soon report the death of
the Director in an automobile crash.
Now outwitted even in his own game, Caul
breaks apart the phone to find the bug. Nothing’s there. He searches the few
objects, the trinkets, a painting, and the record player he has in his
apartment, finally even breaking apart a figurine of the Virgin Mary. He checks
the ventilators, the curtains, the blinds. He breaks into the wallboards
tearing through the layers of wallpaper, rips away the entire floor. With
nothing left to destroy, he returns to his sax, quietly playing alone in utter
despair. Unless he carries the device within the lining of his clothing (an
idea positied at one point by his competitor, Moran), the bug can only exist
within the beloved saxophone, clearly the only outlet for expression he has
left in his life.
Caul, finally, is left with nothing more to
be listened to, even had he even been able to speak.
If we now fear, rightfully so, the NSA intrusions into our life, it all began
here perhaps, just prior to the Nixon Watergate activities and the attendant
tapes that ended his Presidency. Is it any wonder that we might all be a bit
paranoid?
Los Angeles,
August 6, 2015
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