The Conversation

Finally! Here is a movie that we audio-geeks can get into. The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman, is based around the character Harry Caul. Harry is in the business of surveillance and is the “best on the West Coast,” according to his associate.

The movie opens with Harry and his associates trying to capture a “big, fat recording” of two characters walking around a square in San Francisco, but because each surveillance point cannot capture the full conversation without some interference. It is not until Harry returns to his lab to compile the recordings from the different angles into one coherent recording that we get to hear the full conversation that took place. For me, as an audio person, this was fascinating to watch. Not only how Harry spliced the recordings together, but the equipment he used was really a blast from the past. Sometimes we get so spoiled with computers and modern technology, we need to be reminded how it used to be done.

When Harry returns to his apartment and we see the lengths he goes through to secure his apartment, you start to see the irony of how someone who is in the business of peering into others lives is such a private person himself.

When Harry and his associates return from the convention to Harry’s lab and he and the woman wander off by themselves, I started to notice something. The way the camera pans over them the same way over and over again reminded me of a surveillance camera. You can see this method used in other parts of the film as well, like at the end after Harry has torn apart his apartment and is sitting playing his saxophone, the camera angle moves back and forth much like a surveillance camera would. This motif of repetition is a theme that Coppola says he wanted to explore in this film. The theme of repetition is also used in the film as the recording is played over and over again throughout the film, each time a little bit of discovery is made. We start to have an idea of what the ultimate outcome of Harry’s work will be.

We see the guilt eating away at Harry for an incident in his past and that he doesn’t want this job to be the cause for someone to get hurt again. He starts to have second thoughts about turning in the recording to the director, but is deceived and the recordings stolen from him that he guarded so closely. Desperate to keep the woman from getting hurt, he checks in to the hotel where he thinks she may be murdered. But in typical 70s film fashion where things are not what they seem, he soon discovers that the victim was not going to be the woman, but the director himself.

At the end of the film, Harry is playing his saxophone, when he receives a phone call telling him that they know that he knows the truth behind the death of the husband and that they will be watching him. They then prove it by playing a recording of Harry playing the saxophone from just moments earlier. Harry rips apart his apartment trying to find out how they bugged his apartment, but after literally ripping his place apart, cannot figure out how and the “best on the West Coast” is now a victim himself. We are left with Harry playing his saxophone, but for the first time, he is playing without the stereo. His privacy and paranoia has left him truly alone.