The details of Francis
Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation may be superficially dated (even at the time, a competitor throws barbs at Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul for using outmoded
equipment), but the themes of lost control and corroded sense of self remain
enormously resonant in an age of online identity theft and accelerated AI. Caul
is a professional surveillance expert, engaged by a corporate director to record
an open-air conversation between the director’s wife and another man,
achieved by synthesizing the recordings from several different microphones;
as he works on polishing the tape, he becomes ambivalent about completing the
assignment, partly because of past occasions when his work triggered unforeseen
and violent outcomes. The film feels overly schematic in some ways, such as the
strenuous artificiality surrounding its conception of “the director” and his
sinister assistant, but this must be offset against the sensationally detailed
and layered conception of Caul, a marvelous amalgamation of paranoia, Catholic guilt,
ego, fear, and underserved desires. If the film stands as one of the key works
of the 70’s, it’s partly because it feels to be in, indeed, a conversation with
the surrounding culture: an extended scene of late night shenanigans evokes
Cassavetes, some of its more baroque moments evoke De Palma, the presence of
Harrison Ford as the assistant seems like a harbinger of new populist waves to
come, and so on. Not unusually for its period, the film’s perspective on women
is limited, viewing them primarily as appendages to a world of male intrigue,
defined largely by sexual availability; even here though, Coppola strikes some productively
mysterious notes, suggesting that Harry doesn’t entirely grasp their agenda, or
the full extent of what they know about him. Indeed, the narrative ultimately
turns on the fundamental likelihood of the self-assured biter, even the most
powerful biter (even entire societies of them) eventually becoming the
painfully bitten…
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