Tin Ears

Francis Ford Coppolla's The Conversation was born, twin-like, at the same time that Watergate's narrative unfolded. In the film, a surveillance expert named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) attempts to keep his sanity while also puzzling out the implications of a conversation he recorded for a private client known only as The Director, a conversation that implied a murder was imminent. Watergate, being real life, was slightly less tidy in its dramas, but also, of course, featured surveillance and directors and insanity. 

Thirty-six years later, the technology on display in The Conversation looks robust and bulky, yet somehow also fragile. The spy microphones require briefcases and large wall clocks to be concealed; the reel-to-reel tape machines necessary for post clean-up require an entire warehouse loft in San Francisco; the techniques of the trade often involve rotary phones, dangling earpieces, and surreptitious brushes in a crowd. But there's nothing snicker-worthy about the tech, ancient as it feels. This isn't shoe-sized cell phones. The film has aged well despite its constant gaze on the gadgets, because it makes surveillance feel omnipresent, and ugly, and unwanted.

Today's invisible gadgets -- for they aren't really gadgets at all, but harvested bits sown from the rushing, ethereal river of our constant communication, active and passive -- are no less ugly, and certainly more omnipresent. The only thing about The Conversation that comes across as quaint is Caul's heavily, sincerely Catholic guilt at having been a cog in the murder machine. A single death is too much blood for his hands, and he nearly falls apart. What member of the enormous Homeland Security shadow government (note: link goes to outstanding Washington Post series, not a conspiracy website) would feel such qualms today? Indeed, which surveillance expert in today's compartmentalized, bureaucratized domestic spy machine even hears or understands enough to know when blood is about to be shed? 

The fact that nobody does understand the implications of what they glean might go a long way to explaining why 9/11 was not, and could not have been, prevented by surveillance.

But I was more intrigued by a subtext in The Conversation than the obvious period paranoia. Like most resonant films, The Conversation is also about filmmaking, or art in general. Caul plays a saxophone, alone in his apartment, along with jazz records. He's an artist by implication -- the second act does much to bolster his credentials as a wizard in the field of eavesdropping, and his saxophone playing is quite good -- but an artist on the fringes of society, too shy to add his own voice openly, choosing a sort of jazz karaoke instead. Also, too dependent to create anything of genius by himself. (Coppolla also wrote the film, and as a director, he must have this notion of collaborative artistic struggle more deeply embedded in his soul than most.) When asked a question, Caul stays silent, or mumbles, or lies with a soft, high-pitched voice. He lies about his age, about whether or not he has a telephone, even about his sins in the confessional. When the spotlight shines on this fringe ensemble artist, all he has are lies, and he knows it.

To write fiction (!) about a corrupt presidency ... Lies! To fight the truth! But silence is too awkward, and everybody's begging.

Caul's most interesting moments are when he mumbles. Hackman was in the full bloom of his leading man status, and even in this early period there's a frisson to watching such a boisterous and eloquent performer, who can snap off lines of angry dialogue and still make room for an ironic smile, mumble and trail off. The genius combination of Hackman and Coppolla (who knows whose decisions are final?) led to lines that end on precisely the right word, even when that word is in the middle of a clause in the middle of an unfinished sentence. And Caul doesn't just trail off. He says half a sentence and stops talking and waits for the pause to do the job, allowing everyone else in the room to focus their eyes and see the ellipses for the period that it is. Like a jazz solo that cuts off abruptly and never returns, it's the arresting move of a gifted artist who has chosen silence.

In an age of surveillance, and even more so in an age of constant chatter, how can an artist make use of silence? Would it be a shock to see a popular blogger post, one day:

<html>

<body bgcolor="#fff">

</body>

</html>

? (Yes, I know that's deprecated, but I can't get the point across as cleanly with CSS.) Would a podcast with five minutes of silence mean anything? Does a black YouTube attract views? The answer is no, because in each case an error would be assumed. 

In the physical presence of an artist, when silence and stillness come out -- even abruptly, such that the audience initially assumes a line is forgotten -- the silence attains a power. On the internet, silence is the sign of a poorly loaded program, a missing asset, a bug in the code, an out-of-date plugin. The machine has tin ears, and copper eardrums, and a binary brain that chooses on or off, off or on. There's precious little poetry in choosing 'off' when the medium demands 'on'. 

The Conversation, despite its name, is a quiet movie. When there's dialogue, it bristles, to be sure, but there are long set pieces without a word, and they tend to be the most memorable ones, and they tend to feature Caul: he watches a couple, he bugs a hotel bathroom, he peels apart the layers of his apartment looking for bugs, he attempts to wrestle past security guards on a stairwell, he ignores a young Harrison Ford's offer of Christmas cookies, he looks down in perturbed anger at a pen. The movie's first scene, in fact, is a long slow zoom from above on Union Square, where a mime performs.

We all have power in silence. Artistic power, but also personal strength. I hope the generation being born, twin-like, with the internet comes to know that power. And I hope the hall monitors of the government are pulled apart by it, rendered scared, and mute, and confused about what they haven't heard.