how to read
By Douglas Messerli
Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay and director) The Conversation / 1974
The acclaimed
surveillance expert, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), is a genius at finding ways to
overhear conversations where the speakers feel they are out-of-reach and
totally safe. And in the very first scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant
exposé of late 20th century paranoia proves that by following
apparently illicit lovers (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) as they circle
about Union Square in San Francisco at lunch, surrounded by amateur jazz
singers, bongo drummers, a mime, and
numerous talking and gossiping San Franciscans with a long range recorder
directed from a nearby high-rise like a machine-gun aimed at the couple’s lips
and through bugging devices planted on two of luncheon visitors. Overseeing
these proceedings is Caul himself, draped in a plastic rain-coat that makes him
stand out in the crowd like a dowdy bag lady. Fortunately, he soon joins his
regular partner, Stan (John Cazale) in a nearby panel truck where he is
receiving and taping information coming from the various sources.
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.
Yet—despite the obvious fact
that Caul is emotionally cut off from his fellow man and argues against trying
to comprehend the reasons why he has been hired to undertake these
sophisticated feats in tracking (he builds all of his own devices)—the clever
voyeur, in this case, has serious
doubts. First of all, Caul is a man of faith—if not a man of great principle.
And, in the past, working for the federal government he has been responsible,
indirectly, the vengeful death of a man, his wife, and his child, killed
because the man’s boss, with whom he had been involved in a fraud, in convinced
no one else could have known of their plans. In short, Caul’s clever subterfuge
has gotten the man and his family killed.
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.”
Combined by his feelings that
the woman is severely saddened, he interprets the comment to mean that her
husband would kill them if he knew about their relationship. And Caul, going
over and over the tapes, begins to read them in new ways that suggest he is
imposing more and more meaning, for better or worse, upon their sentences,
while fearing that in delivering up the tapes he, himself, may be sentencing
the young couple to violence or even death. Like the central figure of
Antonioni’s Blowup, Caul attempts
again and again to make sense of what cannot be fully perceived.
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.
And then there is, again, the
problem of his conscience. Although he arrives at the Director’s offices with
tape in hand, ready to hand it over for his payment of $15,0000, the fact that
the Director’s assistant, Martin Stett (a very young Harrison Ford), suggests
he pass it on to him, makes Caul suspicious, since he has been ordered to deliver
it up only to the Director; he escapes without his payment, despite continued
threats from Stett.
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.
Suddenly Caul and we both know that he
has utterly misread the situation, has misinterpreted the words the couple
spoke, the tone of their voices, and the meaning of their vaguely expressed
phrases. What might have been read as “He’d
kill us if he got the chance,” probably should have been read as a kind
justification for the act the couple was contemplating, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Obviously they
are not about to give him that “chance.” We now must ask if the couple were not
purposely using Caul, walking and talking in circles to allow him to tape their
elliptic remarks in order to draw the Director into their liar. In short, Caul
has simply been used by the couple, who, in turn, working with the assistant,
convinced the woman’s husband of the affair so that she might have him killed.
Caul, without a clue of how to read or
comprehend the words he captures upon his tapes, has been paid simply to lead
the Director to his death, ideas which are confirmed when, confused and utterly
exhausted by the terrible truth, the would-be genius retreats to his room to
enjoy his only creative outlet, playing his tenor sax along with a jazz
recording—once more a kind of second-hand participation. His phone rings. He
answers but no one replies. It rings again, with Stett’s voice: “We know that
you know, Mr. Caul. For your own sake, don't get involved any further. We'll be
listening to you.” A short tape of the piece his has just played on his
instrument follows.
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 posited 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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