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Movie: The Conversation
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Year: 1974
Artwork by:
sixfoot
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Harry Caul listens to people. They don’t know he’s doing it. Most likely they’ll never know. Whether it’s in a crowded outdoor plaza or a private phone call, he will find a way to tap in and record whatever is being said. Guaranteed. Professional surveillance technician, bugger, wiretapper, snoop… whatever title you want to attach to it, that’s Harry’s game, and he’s the best there is at it. He’s made a life out of listening from the shadows, recording secrets, and slipping away sight unseen to his next freelance job.
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation can be an easy film to miss. Sandwiched in between the legendary cinematic duo that is The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, it appears, at first glance, to be a simple little movie about a man who’s good at listening. But Coppola, at the height of his powers in the early 70s, found a way to deliver a masterpiece of a paranoid thriller, exploring themes of isolation, secret observation, and failure through success.
It’s a plot that starts simple enough via a cold open. Harry has been hired to trail and record a young couple for a mysterious business executive. It’s a tough job, given the couple having their conversation in the middle of a crowded open-air square in the middle of downtown. Not to mention they’re leery of being recorded and already wise to most surveillance methods. They feel confident they can talk and not be overheard. But Harry just performs his feats of magic and high-tech cross-recording from multiple angles and buildings, and after a few passes, he’s got it. Harry’s done it again. Not surprising, given that he’s at the top of his game. There’s nobody he can’t bug, save, perhaps, for a mime that’s performing and dancing through the square with the couple (a sly joke that Coppola couldn’t refuse making).
From this point, Harry heads home, and we begin to develop a wider view of just who he is. Using camera angles and pans that are more akin to security cameras than movie shots, we, the audience, begin to trail Harry through his day-to-day life, secretly spying on him just as he spies on the world. From the very beginning, the atmosphere is one that is dripping with secrets and paranoia. And the first thing we noticed is the pure loneliness of his life. His apartment is a threadbare one, so blank as to sometimes make one question whether someone’s living there at all. The only mark of personality is a tiny statue of a saint on the shelf and a saxophone in the corner (perhaps the only object Harry shows any real affection for in the movie that isn’t a piece of recording equipment). Conversely, his workshop is densely crowded, shelves and desks overflowing with all the tools he needs and all the ones he makes himself. But the space itself sits walled off within a cavernous warehouse loft. The suggestion it brings is that all this isolation is intentionally self-imposed, as though Harry wants to keep this grand distance between himself and the world.
This distance extends, to a certain extent, to the subjects of his work and the nature of what he does. Because while Harry is constantly recording, he doesn’t much care about what it is that the subjects are saying. All he cares about is taping what’s said. The actual content is irrelevant, a point he makes very clear in an early line: “I don’t care what they’re talking about. All I want is a nice, fat recording.” This is Harry’s personal creed, and it’s gotten him far. He’s the epitome of the quiet professional. However, as the movie progresses, we see that this core philosophy is something that is difficult for him to stick to. Because the real reason that Harry doesn’t care what they’re saying isn’t so much a matter of professionalism, or even an preference towards getting the recording just so, but rather a way for him to distance himself from what he’s involved in and try to find some level of deniability for what might result from his work.
The reason for this is made clear midway through the film. A group of other wiretappers, who are either in awe of Harry’s abilities, or jealous of them, have gathered for a party, and one brings up in conversation Harry’s crowning achievement in the field: the time when, while working for the government, he was able to successfully bug a union boss’ boat out in the middle of a lake. No one else was able to do it, and no one else has even been able to figure out how he did it. Harry’s not saying. It was his masterpiece. The job was so good, in fact, that said union boss initially assumed that the only way the information could’ve leaked was because the other person on the boat squealed. The result of it all was his close associate, along with the associate’s wife and son, being tortured and executed. All because Harry heard a conversation he couldn’t possibly have heard by anyone’s standards.
Harry denies responsibility. Why should he feel bad? He didn’t force anyone to do anything. He was, literally and morally, distant from the whole affair. With distance comes innocence, and Harry clings to that. He has to. Every job since he’s stuck to the idea of only going in to listen and leave. He repeats that mantra over and over again. And technically speaking, he isn’t wrong about it. How can he be blamed for such atrocities just because he was so good at the job he was assigned to do? But it’s obvious that it all weighs heavily on Harry. The isolation, the resolute lifestyle, the utter dedication to his work, it’s all more of a distraction to keep Harry from really examining himself. He’s an old school Catholic who confesses his sins, but he doesn’t stop committing them. He can’t stop. He’s too good at it, and it’s all he can do to justify what he does and who he is to keep doing it.
When asked directly, he simply says he has nothing to hide and leaves it at that. Part of that is clearly a lie, but at the same time, his work is his life, and as we’ve already seen, there’s not much at all going on in the background. From outside appearances, he is exactly what he appears to be whenever anyone glances his way in a professional capacity. It’s only inside where he’s a tightly round coil ready to break. No one can know that, as far as he’s concerned. That’s not their business.
As with any good surveillance man, Harry values his privacy to an almost fanatical degree. Multiple locks and a special alarm system guard his apartment, and he never tells anyone his phone number, or that he even has a phone, to the point that he makes all his calls from anonymous payphones. When a well-meaning neighbor learns his birthday (possibly via sneaking a peak at his mail), he grows very uncomfortable and brushes them off as quickly and sternly as he can. He has an almost business-like relationship with a girl that ends unceremoniously when she gets tired of him always keeping her in the dark on his life. His partner on the job is leery of him never sharing his tradecraft or techniques, only ever keeping him on a basic level. It isn’t that Harry is being cruel or greedy about who he is. It’s just that he never shares. He doesn’t trust anyone, whether it’s someone he’s worked with for years or someone he’s intimate with. His life is secrets, meaning he keeps his and finds out others. How can he be expected to trust anyone past himself?
At one point, during a party, a girl takes him aside and chats with him. Harry shows an obvious attraction to her, a quick break in from his solo lifestyle likely brought on by his aforementioned breakup. The two slowly grow closer, and she confides that Harry can trust her, so he, very slowly and tentatively, starts to wonder aloud about his relationship problems and how hard it is for him to connect with people. It seem like she can help. Then, minutes later, we find that a competitor bugged the conversation as a prank. Harry is furious at the moment, partly out of professional embarrassment (the best bugger in the business getting bugged himself never looks good) but mainly because he can’t believe a little private moment was found out by the world. It’s just one of many moments of hypocrisy in Harry’s life, and if the self-awareness gets to him, it only serves to frustrate him that much more.
Only the girl remains when he kicks the party guests out. And the next morning, Harry awakens to find her gone, his tapes stolen, and his masters erased. In his usual isolation, Harry feeds on his own loneliness and makes things work, and as soon as he tries to let anyone in, he gets burned. As far as he’s concerned, his paranoia is well-justified the more it leeches into his life.
Paranoia. On top of all that loneliness, there is the nagging fear that something isn’t right, that some hidden force is controlling events unseen. It’s a feeling Harry isn’t used to having on account that he’s usually one of the ones behind the curtain. But with this latest job, everything is coming out wrong. He can’t seem to actually meet the client directly, only ever getting his personal assistant, who then appears to start stalking him. As Harry continues to clean up the audio, he hears the couple worriedly talking about someone wanting to kill them, and then setting up a cryptic meeting point a few days later.
At one point during all this, Harry has a dream. It’s a foggy, otherworldly sequence, wherein Harry sees the latest couple that he’s been spying on. He runs after them, trying to get them to hear him, to hear his warnings. He shouts out random anecdotes from his rough childhood in a desperate attempt to justify what he’s done, to make everything alright while also absolving his crimes. But they can’t hear him. As usual, the only one who hears is Harry himself, although for once he’s actually listening.
Here a crossroad has been reached. Harry could just give in and hand over the tapes, but the lingering guilt from the last time someone died from his work keeps getting to him. It boils over when the girl from the party turns out to be working for the clients, and delivers the tape without his consent (another moment of situational irony for poor Harry). From here, everything that’s been set in motion is racing towards a dark conclusion, and Harry can see it coming. Something is going to happen, it’s going to happen soon, and it’s going to be bad. For perhaps the first time in his career, Harry, driven by years of guilt and the sudden drive brought on by being taken advantage of, he’s got to try and change the outcome. He’s got to use what he knows to try and proactively make things better by directly intervening on what he sees as a murderous setup planned for the still unsuspecting couple.
Secretly, Harry arrives at the meeting point early, where he takes to a room next door. He brings his whole bag of tricks with him. A hole is drilled through the wall, a bug is inserted, and the trap is set. Now all he has to do is wait. Wait for whatever’s going to happen to happen, so that he can… what, exactly? Did Harry think that far ahead? It’s tough to say. Living a life of non-involvement and non-intervention has made him a novice in this field. Expressions of doubt flash over his face, but before he can get a grip on himself, it’s showtime.
A nondescript argument breaks out in the next room. At first Harry hears the words, but as tensions grow, he can’t handle it. He falls back, hearing only nondescript sounds. He knows something is happening, and for once, he can’t bring himself to get the perfect bug. Then, a piercing scream sends him scuttling to the bed. He hides himself for hours, finally sneaking back out when everyone is gone. Breaking into the adjoining room, he finds it seemingly clean… until the bloodstains come out. Murder has occurred. The deed is done. And despite Harry being in a position to directly intervene, he didn’t. He couldn’t. He’s always kept his distance. He was always at the other end of the earphones.
Visually, the film points out Harry’s problem before he even gets to the meeting point. It’s all in his overcoat. When he’s lurking in the shadows and in his element, it seems solid and protective. But when exposed to the open light, it’s nearly transparent. Without somewhere to hide, he’s as clear and impotent as ever, and the result was all that could have happened.
Harry has failed. The ultimate professional has been let down by himself. And what’s more, it turns out he had misread the entire situation from the start, all thanks to him breaking his own rules in the first place. Because while Harry heard the words on the tape, he also let his emotions get the better of him. He projected what he was feeling on what he was hearing, had his fear mix with theirs, and combined with his heightened paranoid state and muddied past, it all got mashed together. A narrative formed in his mind, and he latched onto it, allowing it to repeat and mutate over and over. But through it all he missed the context of the original conversation, and he missed the proper inflections of exactly what they were talking about.
It wasn’t the couple that was in danger. It was the client. The couple was planning his murder, and they carried it out, all for the sake of one of them (the deceased’s wife) to take control of a major company. It was a game of corporate espionage, conspiracy, and murder. Harry’s role was a crucial component in the setup, his tapes providing the necessary motivation to send the client off to his doom. Once more, Harry was so good at what he did, people got killed. Only this time, the link from cause to effect was much more direct, and much more on him. Harry, a man so well versed in being in control and on top of things, was just another puppet who couldn’t see which way his strings were being pulled.
Even knowing the truth, Harry is powerless to do anything. He’s now too small a fish in too big a pond. The other powers involved are too great. In the closing minutes of the film, a cryptic phone call on the phone nobody knows and via a number Harry never gives out informs him that they’ll be listening in on him. As a final twist, they end the call by playing a recording of Harry alone from minutes before. Earlier when his competitor bugged him in an obvious fashion that Harry should’ve seen coming, he at least had a good sense of what happened and could handle it, at least in the technical sense. Now he’s been bugged again, only this time he can’t figure out how. Whipped into a frenzy, he systematically strip-searches and dismantles his apartment, right down to taking a crowbar to pull the floorboards up.
Nothing. Not a scrap of wire or microphone to be found anywhere. No matter how hard he searches and thinks, using all his tricks and gadgets, he’s at a complete loss. He’s been beaten from every angle, even the professional one, and he simply doesn’t know what to do. He has now been placed at the other end of the microphone. He has been pushed through the looking glass into a land he’s only observed, never interacted with.
The final shot of the film finds him seemingly lost and defeated, sitting on a chair in the middle of the wreckage of his home and playing his beloved saxophone. A simple moment of calm after the storm. The knowledge of what happened, and of what could happen to him, are pushed to the back of his mind. Instead he plays on with a soothing (yet also haunting) melody designed to lull the remnants of his conscious into a lasting peace he can live with. Right now, it’s the same as it’s always been, in that he’s the only person he can trust, and the only person he can trust himself to hear. Hopefully he had the presence of mind to record himself as well, and this time, to really listen to what he says.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Year: 1974
Artwork by:
sixfoot<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW______________________________________________________________________________________________The Paranoid ProfessionalHarry Caul listens to people. They don’t know he’s doing it. Most likely they’ll never know. Whether it’s in a crowded outdoor plaza or a private phone call, he will find a way to tap in and record whatever is being said. Guaranteed. Professional surveillance technician, bugger, wiretapper, snoop… whatever title you want to attach to it, that’s Harry’s game, and he’s the best there is at it. He’s made a life out of listening from the shadows, recording secrets, and slipping away sight unseen to his next freelance job.
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation can be an easy film to miss. Sandwiched in between the legendary cinematic duo that is The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, it appears, at first glance, to be a simple little movie about a man who’s good at listening. But Coppola, at the height of his powers in the early 70s, found a way to deliver a masterpiece of a paranoid thriller, exploring themes of isolation, secret observation, and failure through success.
It’s a plot that starts simple enough via a cold open. Harry has been hired to trail and record a young couple for a mysterious business executive. It’s a tough job, given the couple having their conversation in the middle of a crowded open-air square in the middle of downtown. Not to mention they’re leery of being recorded and already wise to most surveillance methods. They feel confident they can talk and not be overheard. But Harry just performs his feats of magic and high-tech cross-recording from multiple angles and buildings, and after a few passes, he’s got it. Harry’s done it again. Not surprising, given that he’s at the top of his game. There’s nobody he can’t bug, save, perhaps, for a mime that’s performing and dancing through the square with the couple (a sly joke that Coppola couldn’t refuse making).
From this point, Harry heads home, and we begin to develop a wider view of just who he is. Using camera angles and pans that are more akin to security cameras than movie shots, we, the audience, begin to trail Harry through his day-to-day life, secretly spying on him just as he spies on the world. From the very beginning, the atmosphere is one that is dripping with secrets and paranoia. And the first thing we noticed is the pure loneliness of his life. His apartment is a threadbare one, so blank as to sometimes make one question whether someone’s living there at all. The only mark of personality is a tiny statue of a saint on the shelf and a saxophone in the corner (perhaps the only object Harry shows any real affection for in the movie that isn’t a piece of recording equipment). Conversely, his workshop is densely crowded, shelves and desks overflowing with all the tools he needs and all the ones he makes himself. But the space itself sits walled off within a cavernous warehouse loft. The suggestion it brings is that all this isolation is intentionally self-imposed, as though Harry wants to keep this grand distance between himself and the world.
This distance extends, to a certain extent, to the subjects of his work and the nature of what he does. Because while Harry is constantly recording, he doesn’t much care about what it is that the subjects are saying. All he cares about is taping what’s said. The actual content is irrelevant, a point he makes very clear in an early line: “I don’t care what they’re talking about. All I want is a nice, fat recording.” This is Harry’s personal creed, and it’s gotten him far. He’s the epitome of the quiet professional. However, as the movie progresses, we see that this core philosophy is something that is difficult for him to stick to. Because the real reason that Harry doesn’t care what they’re saying isn’t so much a matter of professionalism, or even an preference towards getting the recording just so, but rather a way for him to distance himself from what he’s involved in and try to find some level of deniability for what might result from his work.
The reason for this is made clear midway through the film. A group of other wiretappers, who are either in awe of Harry’s abilities, or jealous of them, have gathered for a party, and one brings up in conversation Harry’s crowning achievement in the field: the time when, while working for the government, he was able to successfully bug a union boss’ boat out in the middle of a lake. No one else was able to do it, and no one else has even been able to figure out how he did it. Harry’s not saying. It was his masterpiece. The job was so good, in fact, that said union boss initially assumed that the only way the information could’ve leaked was because the other person on the boat squealed. The result of it all was his close associate, along with the associate’s wife and son, being tortured and executed. All because Harry heard a conversation he couldn’t possibly have heard by anyone’s standards.
Harry denies responsibility. Why should he feel bad? He didn’t force anyone to do anything. He was, literally and morally, distant from the whole affair. With distance comes innocence, and Harry clings to that. He has to. Every job since he’s stuck to the idea of only going in to listen and leave. He repeats that mantra over and over again. And technically speaking, he isn’t wrong about it. How can he be blamed for such atrocities just because he was so good at the job he was assigned to do? But it’s obvious that it all weighs heavily on Harry. The isolation, the resolute lifestyle, the utter dedication to his work, it’s all more of a distraction to keep Harry from really examining himself. He’s an old school Catholic who confesses his sins, but he doesn’t stop committing them. He can’t stop. He’s too good at it, and it’s all he can do to justify what he does and who he is to keep doing it.
When asked directly, he simply says he has nothing to hide and leaves it at that. Part of that is clearly a lie, but at the same time, his work is his life, and as we’ve already seen, there’s not much at all going on in the background. From outside appearances, he is exactly what he appears to be whenever anyone glances his way in a professional capacity. It’s only inside where he’s a tightly round coil ready to break. No one can know that, as far as he’s concerned. That’s not their business.
As with any good surveillance man, Harry values his privacy to an almost fanatical degree. Multiple locks and a special alarm system guard his apartment, and he never tells anyone his phone number, or that he even has a phone, to the point that he makes all his calls from anonymous payphones. When a well-meaning neighbor learns his birthday (possibly via sneaking a peak at his mail), he grows very uncomfortable and brushes them off as quickly and sternly as he can. He has an almost business-like relationship with a girl that ends unceremoniously when she gets tired of him always keeping her in the dark on his life. His partner on the job is leery of him never sharing his tradecraft or techniques, only ever keeping him on a basic level. It isn’t that Harry is being cruel or greedy about who he is. It’s just that he never shares. He doesn’t trust anyone, whether it’s someone he’s worked with for years or someone he’s intimate with. His life is secrets, meaning he keeps his and finds out others. How can he be expected to trust anyone past himself?
At one point, during a party, a girl takes him aside and chats with him. Harry shows an obvious attraction to her, a quick break in from his solo lifestyle likely brought on by his aforementioned breakup. The two slowly grow closer, and she confides that Harry can trust her, so he, very slowly and tentatively, starts to wonder aloud about his relationship problems and how hard it is for him to connect with people. It seem like she can help. Then, minutes later, we find that a competitor bugged the conversation as a prank. Harry is furious at the moment, partly out of professional embarrassment (the best bugger in the business getting bugged himself never looks good) but mainly because he can’t believe a little private moment was found out by the world. It’s just one of many moments of hypocrisy in Harry’s life, and if the self-awareness gets to him, it only serves to frustrate him that much more.
Only the girl remains when he kicks the party guests out. And the next morning, Harry awakens to find her gone, his tapes stolen, and his masters erased. In his usual isolation, Harry feeds on his own loneliness and makes things work, and as soon as he tries to let anyone in, he gets burned. As far as he’s concerned, his paranoia is well-justified the more it leeches into his life.
Paranoia. On top of all that loneliness, there is the nagging fear that something isn’t right, that some hidden force is controlling events unseen. It’s a feeling Harry isn’t used to having on account that he’s usually one of the ones behind the curtain. But with this latest job, everything is coming out wrong. He can’t seem to actually meet the client directly, only ever getting his personal assistant, who then appears to start stalking him. As Harry continues to clean up the audio, he hears the couple worriedly talking about someone wanting to kill them, and then setting up a cryptic meeting point a few days later.
At one point during all this, Harry has a dream. It’s a foggy, otherworldly sequence, wherein Harry sees the latest couple that he’s been spying on. He runs after them, trying to get them to hear him, to hear his warnings. He shouts out random anecdotes from his rough childhood in a desperate attempt to justify what he’s done, to make everything alright while also absolving his crimes. But they can’t hear him. As usual, the only one who hears is Harry himself, although for once he’s actually listening.
Here a crossroad has been reached. Harry could just give in and hand over the tapes, but the lingering guilt from the last time someone died from his work keeps getting to him. It boils over when the girl from the party turns out to be working for the clients, and delivers the tape without his consent (another moment of situational irony for poor Harry). From here, everything that’s been set in motion is racing towards a dark conclusion, and Harry can see it coming. Something is going to happen, it’s going to happen soon, and it’s going to be bad. For perhaps the first time in his career, Harry, driven by years of guilt and the sudden drive brought on by being taken advantage of, he’s got to try and change the outcome. He’s got to use what he knows to try and proactively make things better by directly intervening on what he sees as a murderous setup planned for the still unsuspecting couple.
Secretly, Harry arrives at the meeting point early, where he takes to a room next door. He brings his whole bag of tricks with him. A hole is drilled through the wall, a bug is inserted, and the trap is set. Now all he has to do is wait. Wait for whatever’s going to happen to happen, so that he can… what, exactly? Did Harry think that far ahead? It’s tough to say. Living a life of non-involvement and non-intervention has made him a novice in this field. Expressions of doubt flash over his face, but before he can get a grip on himself, it’s showtime.
A nondescript argument breaks out in the next room. At first Harry hears the words, but as tensions grow, he can’t handle it. He falls back, hearing only nondescript sounds. He knows something is happening, and for once, he can’t bring himself to get the perfect bug. Then, a piercing scream sends him scuttling to the bed. He hides himself for hours, finally sneaking back out when everyone is gone. Breaking into the adjoining room, he finds it seemingly clean… until the bloodstains come out. Murder has occurred. The deed is done. And despite Harry being in a position to directly intervene, he didn’t. He couldn’t. He’s always kept his distance. He was always at the other end of the earphones.
Visually, the film points out Harry’s problem before he even gets to the meeting point. It’s all in his overcoat. When he’s lurking in the shadows and in his element, it seems solid and protective. But when exposed to the open light, it’s nearly transparent. Without somewhere to hide, he’s as clear and impotent as ever, and the result was all that could have happened.
Harry has failed. The ultimate professional has been let down by himself. And what’s more, it turns out he had misread the entire situation from the start, all thanks to him breaking his own rules in the first place. Because while Harry heard the words on the tape, he also let his emotions get the better of him. He projected what he was feeling on what he was hearing, had his fear mix with theirs, and combined with his heightened paranoid state and muddied past, it all got mashed together. A narrative formed in his mind, and he latched onto it, allowing it to repeat and mutate over and over. But through it all he missed the context of the original conversation, and he missed the proper inflections of exactly what they were talking about.
It wasn’t the couple that was in danger. It was the client. The couple was planning his murder, and they carried it out, all for the sake of one of them (the deceased’s wife) to take control of a major company. It was a game of corporate espionage, conspiracy, and murder. Harry’s role was a crucial component in the setup, his tapes providing the necessary motivation to send the client off to his doom. Once more, Harry was so good at what he did, people got killed. Only this time, the link from cause to effect was much more direct, and much more on him. Harry, a man so well versed in being in control and on top of things, was just another puppet who couldn’t see which way his strings were being pulled.
Even knowing the truth, Harry is powerless to do anything. He’s now too small a fish in too big a pond. The other powers involved are too great. In the closing minutes of the film, a cryptic phone call on the phone nobody knows and via a number Harry never gives out informs him that they’ll be listening in on him. As a final twist, they end the call by playing a recording of Harry alone from minutes before. Earlier when his competitor bugged him in an obvious fashion that Harry should’ve seen coming, he at least had a good sense of what happened and could handle it, at least in the technical sense. Now he’s been bugged again, only this time he can’t figure out how. Whipped into a frenzy, he systematically strip-searches and dismantles his apartment, right down to taking a crowbar to pull the floorboards up.
Nothing. Not a scrap of wire or microphone to be found anywhere. No matter how hard he searches and thinks, using all his tricks and gadgets, he’s at a complete loss. He’s been beaten from every angle, even the professional one, and he simply doesn’t know what to do. He has now been placed at the other end of the microphone. He has been pushed through the looking glass into a land he’s only observed, never interacted with.
The final shot of the film finds him seemingly lost and defeated, sitting on a chair in the middle of the wreckage of his home and playing his beloved saxophone. A simple moment of calm after the storm. The knowledge of what happened, and of what could happen to him, are pushed to the back of his mind. Instead he plays on with a soothing (yet also haunting) melody designed to lull the remnants of his conscious into a lasting peace he can live with. Right now, it’s the same as it’s always been, in that he’s the only person he can trust, and the only person he can trust himself to hear. Hopefully he had the presence of mind to record himself as well, and this time, to really listen to what he says.
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The Conversation is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I really felt that Hackman excelled in this early role.
Where it gets really weird though, is if you decide to have a surveillance movie marathon, and run it back-to-back with Enemy of the State.
While Enemy of the State has diverse problems, particularly in both over and underestimating modern surveillance capabilities, something really strange happens with Hackman's character, Edward Lyle.
Edward Lyle's background is almost a direct pull from Harry Caul. I mean, it is absolutely believable that Edward Lyle is Harry, older and far wiser, operating under a new nom de guerre. It makes Enemy of the State a far more watchable movie, IMHO, if it is approached this way. I was an old fan of The Conversation since seeing it in a film class during the 80s, and when I saw Hackman in Enemy of the State, my mind immediately made the (right or wrong) connection.
Also, you missed mentioning what to me is the most brilliant piece of cinematography in the movie.
At the end, as Harry sits there, playing his saxophone, the very image of a man lost to the world, the camera pulls back slightly. It's viewing him at a slight downward angle, from a position perhaps, oh, eight feet or more in the air.
The camera holds on him a beat, then it slowly pans to the left. Stops.
There is another beat. It begins to pan to the right, passing Harry and once again stopping for a beat before panning back.
We, the audience, are looking through a surveillance camera, panning slowly back and forth on its automated track, and Coppola's brilliance is that by putting us 'in' the camera we cannot see it. Harry would see it if he looked up, and he has been looking up in his desperate demolition of his apartment. Ergo, the camera cannot have been there. And yet here we are.
Is the camera which imprisons him in Harry's mind? Foucault would suggest so. A society which knows it is under invisible surveillance polices itself out of fear that at any moment it might be being observed. The Panopticon of Bentham's prison architecture has writ itself large upon our existence, throughout much of the first and second world.
The Conversation was truly a movie well ahead of its time, calling into question a field of law enforcement which was just coming into its own, and was as invisible to most first-time viewers as Harry's hidden camera.
Where it gets really weird though, is if you decide to have a surveillance movie marathon, and run it back-to-back with Enemy of the State.
While Enemy of the State has diverse problems, particularly in both over and underestimating modern surveillance capabilities, something really strange happens with Hackman's character, Edward Lyle.
Edward Lyle's background is almost a direct pull from Harry Caul. I mean, it is absolutely believable that Edward Lyle is Harry, older and far wiser, operating under a new nom de guerre. It makes Enemy of the State a far more watchable movie, IMHO, if it is approached this way. I was an old fan of The Conversation since seeing it in a film class during the 80s, and when I saw Hackman in Enemy of the State, my mind immediately made the (right or wrong) connection.
Also, you missed mentioning what to me is the most brilliant piece of cinematography in the movie.
At the end, as Harry sits there, playing his saxophone, the very image of a man lost to the world, the camera pulls back slightly. It's viewing him at a slight downward angle, from a position perhaps, oh, eight feet or more in the air.
The camera holds on him a beat, then it slowly pans to the left. Stops.
There is another beat. It begins to pan to the right, passing Harry and once again stopping for a beat before panning back.
We, the audience, are looking through a surveillance camera, panning slowly back and forth on its automated track, and Coppola's brilliance is that by putting us 'in' the camera we cannot see it. Harry would see it if he looked up, and he has been looking up in his desperate demolition of his apartment. Ergo, the camera cannot have been there. And yet here we are.
Is the camera which imprisons him in Harry's mind? Foucault would suggest so. A society which knows it is under invisible surveillance polices itself out of fear that at any moment it might be being observed. The Panopticon of Bentham's prison architecture has writ itself large upon our existence, throughout much of the first and second world.
The Conversation was truly a movie well ahead of its time, calling into question a field of law enforcement which was just coming into its own, and was as invisible to most first-time viewers as Harry's hidden camera.
Hackman was aces in this movie. It's probably my favorite role of his, which is saying something, since he was one of those actors who just had to show up in a scene to knock your socks off.
And yes, I was thinking that the first time I watched Enemy of the State. It's a pretty fun action movie (and for all those faults, it still got into illegal NSA surveillance years before that was a "thing"), and the connection to Harry Caul by way of Hackman's casting was almost certainly an overt one, even if it was more of a casting gag than an in-universe callback. Not to say it also wouldn't totally work as a direct sequel to the character, which would be nice, if only because it gave Harry a chance to win.
And though I didn't focus on it, I do mention that camera movement at least indirectly (fourth paragraph). It's a very effective technique. It comes up earlier in the film as well, the first time Harry enters his workshop loft (it hides itself at first as a normal pan, but the camera moves just quicker than Harry walks, filling in for the Security Pan motif).
Love your analysis there. Pretty much what I agree with as well. It's probably worse for Harry considering how long he's been at the other end of all that invisible surveillance. His specific knowledge of what's out there just makes it worse when combined with the usual broad paranoia brought in by being watched. At least he still has his Sax. They can't take that away from him.
And yes, I was thinking that the first time I watched Enemy of the State. It's a pretty fun action movie (and for all those faults, it still got into illegal NSA surveillance years before that was a "thing"), and the connection to Harry Caul by way of Hackman's casting was almost certainly an overt one, even if it was more of a casting gag than an in-universe callback. Not to say it also wouldn't totally work as a direct sequel to the character, which would be nice, if only because it gave Harry a chance to win.
And though I didn't focus on it, I do mention that camera movement at least indirectly (fourth paragraph). It's a very effective technique. It comes up earlier in the film as well, the first time Harry enters his workshop loft (it hides itself at first as a normal pan, but the camera moves just quicker than Harry walks, filling in for the Security Pan motif).
Love your analysis there. Pretty much what I agree with as well. It's probably worse for Harry considering how long he's been at the other end of all that invisible surveillance. His specific knowledge of what's out there just makes it worse when combined with the usual broad paranoia brought in by being watched. At least he still has his Sax. They can't take that away from him.
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