Preface: When I saw Francis Ford Coppola promote his latest film Tetro back in 2009 at an upscale Los Angeles theater, he talked about the unexpected success of Apocalypse Now (1979). According to Coppola, he felt that the accolades can perhaps be contributed to society’s readiness to screen a film about the Vietnam War—almost a decade later when the war began. He felt people were receptive to understanding the politics of war and the impact it has on man’s identity. The timely release of Coppola’s film has coincidentally coincided with another political exploration, which is also depicted in the 1974 release of The Conversation. The release came during the wake of the Watergate scandal (1972-1974). Although political statements may be a far reach for Coppola in both Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, his moral themes that thread both films adds to the film’s provocative nature. In particular, The Conversation is a compelling audio surveillance exposé even though the film was inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 mystery thriller Blow-Up. As Antonioni explores disturbing and incriminating implications from photographic images, Coppola explores moral repercussions that stem from audio surveillance. Because of this, it is imperative to dissect and analyze the language of sound as explicit and implicit meanings in The Conversation.

According to Francis Ford Coppola, sound is 50 percent of the film experience. And in The Conversation, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is an audio surveillance expert commissioned by the wife’s husband, only referred to as “the director” (Robert Duvall), to record conversations of his wife (Cindy Williams) and the man with whom she is presumably having an affair. The impact of sound creates two different types of realities—objective and subjective—and the demarcation line between the two are not as obvious. Harry Caul’s subjective reality is his interpretation of sound in the form of audio excerpts from the recorded conversation. The objective reality consists of the events that actually happen due to the conversation Harry records.

Throughout our experience in the film and our understanding of the events that unfold during Harry Caul’s audio surveillance of the wife and her lover, we (as spectators), are also given the opportunity to eavesdrop—a voyeurism that is limited to auditory senses as opposed to visual senses. Coppola’s voyeurism, therefore, is quite different than Hitchcock’s portrayal of voyeurism—as illustrated in Rear Window and Psycho. The Conversation, offers a disturbing exploration on how sound influences the way reality is interpreted. And what makes The Conversation suspenseful is the various ways Coppola contextualizes sound, which, in turn, muddles our understanding of subjective and objective realities. Furthermore, the interpretation of sound from a cinematic experience can just as equally be unreliable as Harry’s interpretation.

In a cinematic narrative, first and foremost, sound’s language relies on the technical. Coppola inserts pieces of the audio surveillance conversations throughout the narrative, astutely placing them in various scenes when Harry Caul attempts to figure out the “meanings” behind the audio recording he was able to gather as a surveillance operative. The audio recording comes from a conversation that includes a client’s wife and her lover while they walk around a public park (the Union Square in San Francisco), which is depicted in the beginning of the film. The conversation is nestled in a cacophony of outdoor noise such as street music (drum beats) and other conversations that are in close proximity with the subjects who are under surveillance. Because the sounds are overlapping and often garbling, they are incomprehensible. After listening to the conversation multiple times, Harry tells Stanley (John Cazale), his surveillance cohort, “I don’t care what they’re [i.e., the conversations] about. All I want is a nice fat recording.” Eventually, he was able to achieve this but was not aware that it places him in a precarious situation. After “clearing” up the recording and removing all the unnecessary noise, Harry was able to cull detailed information from the recording that discusses the couple’s apprehension of being watched, prompting them to arrange a meeting at a hotel room that will take place in a few days. The most alarming phrase from the conversation is “he’d kill us if he got the chance.” Thus, the content of the conversation overwhelms Harry Caul with guilt and, therefore, feels morally obligated to thwart the efforts of his client whom Harry presumably believes will retaliate against his wife and her lover once he listens to the contents of the tape. Not only does the tape ascertains his wife’s affair but it may also have dire consequences. This epitomizes how sound from the external environs can affect the internal workings of the mind. Yet the explicit and implied meanings from sound can often be at odds—as sound is not always cut-and-dried, depending on the circumstances in which it is presented.

The sound or phrase “he’d kill us if he got the chance” changes in meaning throughout the film’s narrative. It all depends on how Coppola contextualizes it in specific scenes. The first time Harry discovers the phrase “he’d kill us if he got the chance” makes it hard for us not to share the same thoughts as Harry, especially based on the explicitness and the “purity” of how the audio recording is presented in the scene. Harry is reluctant to give the recordings to both the assistant and the director, fearing it might place the wife and her lover in danger.

Harry’s reclusive and distrusting personality, perhaps spurred by his job to spy on others, have contributed to his paranoia and inability to trust people. His audio lab is a fenced cubicle situated in an abandoned building. He refuses to tell his mistress any information about himself. In spite of his doggedness in securing his own privacy, he fails in its effectiveness. For example, his landlord knows his birthday—even though Harry never divulged such information. He does not want his landlord to come into his apartment, but his landlord enters anyway in spite of his apartment being armed with multiple locks. His surveillance cohorts are able to make him part of an audio gag by unknowingly recording his conversation with people at a surveillance convention. The most damaging of his carelessness is when a prostitute is able to steal the tapes from him. She later gives it to the director’s assistant, Martin Stett (Harrison Ford) whose actions are both suspect and menacing. His eagerness in making sure that the recordings are well within his hands first—and not in the director’s—places Harry Caul under his surveillance. He follows Harry Caul’s every move—even to a point of having a woman seduce him enough to be careless about the tapes’ security.

It is also important to explore Harry’s unreliability as a surveillance expert and as a person in general. We want to believe Harry because he has a conscience—which is heavily influenced by his Catholic faith. Yet, Harry’s Catholicism also makes him nervous, overreactive, anxious, and guilty about the moral compromises his job places him in. When he realizes the gravity of the recordings, he says “Oh God, what have I done.” Harry’s subjective reality is the reality Harry creates for himself and the reality he chooses to believe in. In a dream sequence (also a symbolic representation of his unconscious), Harry confronts the wife that takes place in the foggy outdoors (also a symbolic representation of his disturbed and hazy psyche) and tells her “he’d kill you if he’d get the chance,” which reveals the gravity of his guilt. He tells her “I’m not afraid of death . . . I am afraid of murder.”

Paradoxically, the doctrines of Catholicism and their moral teachings are what makes Harry Caul so unreliable in the way he sees reality. His Catholic upbringing distorts his moral intuition causing him to ignore the objective reality rather than his subjective reality. His subjective reality is governed by his feelings of guilt, paranoia, and ambivalence towards his job as a surveillance expert. Based on the conversation he records, he immediately assumes someone’s life is at stake—in this case, it is the wife he is spying on. In the scene when he gives the surveillance photos of his wife talking to his lover at the park to the director, he asks the director “what will you do to her?” The phrase “He’d kill us if he got chance” is played again while the director continues to sit in silence listening. The recording sound is carefully cued at the right moment as if the surveillance tape answers Harry’s Caul’s question. Such masterful side-by-side orchestration of verbal sounds, that is, Harry’s question for the director “what will you do to her?” and the phrase “he’d kill us if he got the chance” cements Harry Caul’s subjective reality as opposed to negating it. When he exits the office building, the recording “He’d kill us if he got the chance” keeps playing (but in the form of an internal-diegetic sound). The repetition of the phrase represents Harry Caul’s gnawing and overactive conscience, which prompts him to spy on the hotel meeting that was mentioned in the recording.
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Coppola coordinates sound and image to contradict Harry’s subjective reality. This is illustrated when Harry checks into a hotel room in close proximity to the hotel room where the wife and husband will meet. He sets up an audio surveillance so that he can listen to the muffled sounds of the wife and husband arguing. He is able to make out bits and pieces of the dialogue he hears in the room. When he goes out to the hotel’s balcony to peek at what is going on in the next room, a loud screeching score works in unison with the sound of a woman screaming—the scene cuts to a bloody hand on a glass partition. Fearing that the wife is being murdered next door, he goes back into his hotel room, turns on the television, and cranks the television volume in order to drown out the sounds he hears next door. The collision of sounds operates as a sound montage—underscoring Harry’s traumatized conscience. Later, he goes into the actual hotel room where the meeting takes place, but nothing looks out of the ordinary. When he flushes the toilet, he imagines blood surging from the toilet bowl. Coppola adds a loud piano score that adds to the horrors of Harry’s imaginings. What is important to know at this sequence is that Harry never saw a murder taking place in the hotel room. He only hears what might have happened.

The most striking contradiction of Harry’s subjective reality comes the day after Harry spies on the wife, husband, and the lover in the hotel. The recordings take on a new meaning when Harry Caul attempts to see the director a second time but to his amazement, he discovers, en route to the director’s office, that the wife and her lover are actually alive. At the director’s office building, the wife and lover are entangled in a media frenzy as reporters attempt to ask the wife the fate of her husband’s business in the wake of her husband’s death. The shocking news was mentioned in a newspaper article. With this discovery, Harry realizes that the murderer was not the husband but rather a triad of key conspirators—the wife, the lover, and Martin Stett—in which all three give him a look of consternation when they notice Harry’s presence at the office building.

Harry fails to understand that sound itself, and the way it is “perceived” or interpreted, can run contrary with the reality that actually happens. Harry fails to see “the bigger picture”—as he relies only on what he hears and not in conjunction with what he sees. To underscore Harry’s disturbed and troubled conscience, the recording is replayed again as an internal-diegetic sound, revealing what is on Harry’s mind and what he has come to discover. The sound consists of the conversation of the wife asking her lover “Do you think we can do this?” followed by the phrase “he’d kill us if he got the chance.” This time the conversation sounds alarmingly different in the context it is placed in—as if the word “us” is emphasized. Although it is the same recording, it sounds different (in meaning) when it is replayed again in Harry’s mind, especially after acknowledging the truth and what really happened. We, too, come to the realization that Harry’s subjective reality was wrong all along. The person Harry wanted to protect becomes the real perpetrator, the wife, who ironically got the chance to conspire to murder her husband. Thus, the psychological twist in which sound is misinterpreted leaves us and Harry with a disturbing question: Did Harry’s guilt spurred by his subjective reality play a key role in actually giving them (the wife, lover, and Martin Stett) the chance to kill?

Towards the end of the film, the director’s assistant, Martin, gives Harry a final warning through a phone call while Harry plays the saxophone in his apartment. When Harry picks up the receiver, he hears the voice from Martin Stett: “We know that you know, Mr. Caul. For your own sake, don’t get involved any further. We’ll be listening to you.” Afterwards a disturbing sound is interjected at the end of the phone conversation, which consists of a playback of Harry playing the saxophone just moments ago. From this last conversation and the surveillance sound that follows, we, and most importantly, Harry know that the surveillance will continue to be on him and, therefore, compromising his reality forever.

This screening report was specifically written for the Film Criticism and Theory course to engage their study of the relationships between realism and sound.

April 5, 2020