How ‘The Conversation’ Captured the Essence of Paranoia
By: Daedalus Howell
Tags: Movies, The Conversation, San Francisco, Coppola, Surveillance

I too have recorded conversations. As a reporter, recording phone calls is par for the course — it’s an understood compact between the interviewer and interviewee. This is in even higher relief with podcast interviews, wherein recording calls is the substance of the thing itself. To wit, I’ve recorded hundreds of conversations. Pre-iPhone, I did this with an array of handheld digital recorders, and microcassette recorders before those. So it’s with some sympathy that I can relate when I see the bug men in Coppola’s film, with their ungainly 1970s-era reel-to-reel machines and goofy pin mics. The difference, however, is that my “marks” were aware that I was recording them. In fact, as a cub reporter in the 1990s, I was instructed to say as much, owing to some arcane FCC statute about which my editor fretted. Eventually, I fell out of the habit, but no one came to subpoena my little tapes. Now I just assume all conversations are recorded and pored over by bots and NSA interns.

Like Caul, I’ve also perpetrated what could be construed as illegal wiretaps. This is the first: My brother is a raconteur prone to comic tall tales that, as a writer, I thought should be captured as starter dough for fiction. So, I attempted to record one of our phone conversations. (Some answering machines in the mid-’90s actually had a button that facilitated this.) My brother was on to me from the get-go. (He’s worked closely with audio engineers his whole career, so some imperceptible telltale sign gave me away.)

Wise to my scheme, he proceeded to tell me a lie of such epic criminal proportions that I outed myself when I urged him to shut up and stop incriminating himself until I could turn off the recorder. He savored the gotcha moment, and I haven’t bothered bugging him since. Though it never occurred to me until this writing that he could have just as easily been bugging me. I’m not paranoid enough to pursue the thought further — why bother with thoughts of my little brother when Big Brother is just a Wikileak away?

I accept that I’m simply not interesting enough to be a person of interest. It seems paranoia, as a cultural force, has been on the wane as surveillance revelations have become increasingly banal. Everything we suspected is true. Sure, there was a minor flare-up of X-Files-ish “the truth is out there” conspiracy theory paranoia in the ’90s, but one has to go all the way back to the ’70s to get the good shit. Paranoia back then was purer, like the era’s cinema or drugs. The government had to earn your mistrust.

As such, the paranoia in The Conversation is a particularly virulent strain that could only have been cultivated in the vibrations and waveforms that coalesced into the Watergate era. It was a paranoia spurred by President Nixon’s Oval Office recordings and an 18.5-minute gap in the tapes that Chief of Staff Alexander Haig attributed to a “sinister force.” Whatever was in those missing minutes was not the impetus for Coppola’s film, as is sometimes believed. He reportedly had drafted an outline as early as 1966, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. As editor and sound designer Walter Murch shared with Michael Ondaajte in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Coppola “had the idea to fuse the concept of Blow-Up with the world of audio surveillance.”

Everything one needs to know about The Conversation happens in the first 10 minutes. The recorded conversation is the the film’s titular MacGuffin, a term cineastes will know is said to have acquired its Scottish-sounding name from director Alfred Hitchcock. Inasmuch as Antonioni’s spirit hovers over Coppola’s film, so does Hitchcock’s. The conversation that opens The Conversation works like an overture and, like Hitch’s Vertigo, will establish all the resulting themes.

In Vertigo, ex-cop Scottie Ferguson (a haunting James Stewart) and his feverish unwinding of the conspiracy at the heart of the film is the model for Hackman’s Caul, who, like Ferguson, is fueled by massive regret. In fact, if the taped conversation is the MacGuffin, then regret is what imbues them with meaning. And much in the way regret functions, Caul plays the tapes over and over as if echoing the regret that repeats in his mind. We begin to empathize with Caul and forget that the very nature of his trade is abhorrent. In the opening shots, Caul’s endangerment of others is visceral — until we learn otherwise, the faces of the conversing couple are ominously framed in what appear to be sniper crosshairs. That the crosshairs turn out to be on the scopes of shotgun microphones is a relief that diverts us into thinking Caul et al. are innocents. And this is part of Coppola’s artful misdirection — Harry Caul is actually a bad guy, albeit one eventually trying to make good, but part of a bad system nevertheless. Caul’s outward stoicism prefigures a kind of moral neutrality, though his visits to Catholic confession belie his trouble maintaining that pose. He can no longer convince himself that he inhabits a moral gray zone when he fears it might actually be blood red.

Initially, Caul purports to not care about the content he captures. For Caul, it’s not about the substance, but the recording. Like any audiophile, he’s more into his speakers than his music. This idea is reinforced when Caul chides his sidekick (played by Godfather holdover John Cazale) that his work is “getting sloppy” and says he should pay more attention to recording and less about what’s being recorded. Later, of course, the content of the recording and its meaning will eventually consume Caul.