Plasma Productions

Review of The Conversation

by Matthew Elton

copyright 2009 Matthew Elton

Rating: 5 stars

Warning: This review contains major plot spoilers!

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation focuses on the life of Harry Caul, an eccentric and highly reclusive espionage expert who works for ominous corporate clients. Already, three people are dead because the information Caul gathered through his surveillance enabled the criminals who hired him to commit murder. The Conversation begins years after this event, but the trauma of it still weighs heavy on Caul’s conscience, and he constantly questions the morality of his espionage. Hired by a powerful director of a large corporation, Caul is instructed to spy on a young and seemingly innocent couple. After tape recording their conversation in a public square, Caul listens to it repeatedly, trying to decipher what information the corporation could possibly want from it. The conversation seems so normal and the couple seems so innocent that Caul cannot imagine why the corporation wants to spy on them. Only one sentence in the conversation is alarming: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”

“I’m not afraid of death,” Caul says. “I’m afraid of murder.” The Conversation delves deep into the mind of Harry Caul as he faces an intense moral dilemma. His job requires that he hands over the tapes to the director of the corporation, but, anticipating another murder, he finds it hard to do so with a clear conscience. Against the will of his employer, he holds onto the tapes as long as he can, obsessing over the smallest details of the seemingly innocent conversation, trying to figure out what it all means, and why the corporation wants this conversation so badly. The corporation demands the tapes, but Caul refuses to deliver them until he can hand them to the director face to face. He soon finds himself unable to trust anyone, not even his girlfriend. He lives alone, isolating himself from society, paranoid that someone might be spying on him. He has no hobbies except playing the saxophone and going to a surveillance technology expo, where he meets some people who are apparently his friends, although he can’t seem to connect with them socially. When he is asked innocent questions for the sake of simple conversation making or mere curiosity, he becomes very defensive.

In a dream, he sees the woman from the conversation, and tries desperately to communicate to her. He tells her a story from his childhood, as if to say, “I’m not a murderer. I’m a good person. I’m a human being just like you. I don’t want you to die.” He tells the woman about the paralysis he experienced as a child - something that may seem strange and irrelevant, until we consider the parallel between his childhood paralysis and his present-day feeling that he is unable to prevent another murder. To Caul, the corporation seems too large and too powerful to be resisted, and he can’t hold onto the tapes forever, but at the same time, he cannot deliver the tapes to the corporation with a clear conscience. He wants desperately to warn the woman in the conversation, but in his dream she stands above Caul at the top of a small cliff - on another plain that is out of Caul’s reach. There is nothing he can do to warn her, and her silhouette is shrouded in thick fog. From a Freudian perspective, this dream reveals Caul’s subconscious fears, his inner need to convince the woman and himself that he is not a murderer, and his inability to warn the woman who is so innocent to him, but so elusive.

When the tapes are finally stolen, Caul experiences a mental breakdown. He goes to the corporation and is taken into the office where the tapes are being played. He wants to take the tapes back, but he is surrounded, outnumbered, and overpowered by the corporation’s might. He receives his payment, which he throws away like Judas throwing away the silver coins he received in return for the betrayal of Jesus. Caul doesn’t care about money. He is furious at himself for not destroying the tapes when he had the chance. Paranoid that he may have just contributed to a murder, he books a hotel room next to the room where the couple in the conversation is staying. He then witnesses what appears to be the murder of the couple. It seems he was too late to stop the murder, and too weak (physically and psychologically) to have done so even if he had tried. However, when he enters the couple’s hotel room the next morning, he finds everything neatly in order, and the audience is forced to reevaluate whether the murder he thought he witnessed the previous night was real or a figment of his increasingly intense paranoia. Nothing in the room seems out of place, until, in the most shocking scene of the film, he flushes the toilet, and it overflows with blood.

Only at the vend of the film does a sudden plot twist reveal that Caul did not contribute to a murder after all, as he realizes that it was the seemingly innocent couple in the conversation who were the murderers, not the secretive corporation he was working for - an entity that he had come to distrust. What he thought was “He’d kill us if he got the chance” in the conversation was actually “He’d kill us if he got the chance” - an attempt to rationalize the murder that the couple would soon commit. However, this sudden realization does little to ease Caul’s paranoia. He is left disillusioned with the world, having come to realize that no one can really be trusted - not even those who seem most innocent - and nothing is really as it seems. The film ends as he tears his apartment to pieces in search of a surveillance bug that doesn’t exist, convinced that even now, after the tapes have been delivered and the murder has been committed (though not the murder he anticipated) someone is still spying on him.

At a personal level, The Conversation is the story of an introverted, socially awkward recluse whose guilty conscience and premonitions of murder drive him to the brink of insanity. However, at a social level, The Conversation is about a man who is a victim of a cold and uncaring society that is controlled by powerful, secretive, and often criminal corporations capable of spying on anyone - a society in which no one can be trusted. Francis Ford Coppola began writing The Conversation in 1966, but he could not secure funding for it until the 1970s. This actually worked to his advantage. The Conversation was finally released to theaters in 1977, and the timing could not have been more perfect. The Watergate scandal was still big news in American society, and the release of Nixon’s secret audiotapes occurred less than four months after The Conversation was released. The historical context into which the film was released proves that The Conversation is not science fiction. The audio espionage seen in the film can and does happen in the real world, often with disastrous consequences. The Conversation spoke strongly to its audience because the concerns of its protagonist were the very same concerns that faced the American people in the wake of the Watergate scandal - concerns about espionage, privacy, corruption, and the degree to which those who hold power can be trusted.

On the surface, The Conversation is a film about a paranoid man pathetically trying to find privacy in a world he perceives as intrusive. However, on another, perhaps deeper level, it is a film about a spy who must face up to his moral responsibility to protect those he perceives as innocent, even if doing so means resisting the seemingly threatening demands of his employers. Torn by inner conflict, Caul’s life falls apart, and by the end of the film he destroys everything in his apartment - even his statue of the Virgin Mary - leaving only his saxophone intact. Caul’s psychological deterioration is a chilling moral warning about the consequences of a world without trust.