The Subject of "The Conversation"

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

The Subject of "The Conversation"Author(s): Dennis TurnerSource: Cinema Journal, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Summer, 1985), pp. 4-22Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1224893 .

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The Subject of The Conversation by Dennis Turner

I think that I know how to look, if it's something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity,...

Julio Cortazar, "Blow Up"' I'm going to present here a variety of overlapping operations, and in each I will be concerned with questions of boundary. Initially, on the level of the textual, I will be reading Francis Coppola's The Conversation as one of a series of early 1970s crime movies which, in presenting their protagonists with "unreadable" mysteries which defy solution, seem to out-noir the classic film noir. Such a reading runs quickly into difficulty, however, because The Conversation cannot be resolved by its audience any more than the

mystery which confronts its protagonist can be solved within the diegesis. Unlike Chinatown or The Parallax View, in which the failure of the hero to

figure out his mystery is recuperated in the audience's successful compre- hension of the "plot" (in both senses of the term), there is no final ironic resolution to aid the spectators as they put their coats on and head up the aisle. For this reason the film has been read variously as nihilistic, "arty," or failed. Without trying to assign it to any of these categories, I talk about the film on another level of possible appreciation-the intertextual. The

open-endedness of its diegetic situation can be understood (i.e., resolved or

closed) in terms of the way the movie seems to refer outside itself to a variety of films against which it sets itself up to be read. Its filial relationship to Hesse's Steppenwolf, to Antonioni's Blow Up and Cortizar's story of the same name, and its parental relationship to De Palma's Blow Out, for exam-

ple, provide ways of talking about the work which free us from having to determine whether the film "makes sense." This question of the text's referral outside itself parallels a third possible level of intervention, which concerns the functioning of the text in the regime of the spectatorial. This analysis involves a discussion of the film's failure to mean in the context of its relative-

ly idiosyncratic suturing operation. Where the classic cinema involves the

spectator in the text by means of a continual appropriation of her or his look

by the characters on the screen, The Conversation undercuts this involve- ment by establishing untraditional relationships between images and sounds. The opacity of the plot is thus paralleled-and perhaps caused by- an unusual demand system made upon the spectator-auditor. This problem further involves a discussion of the way in which the subject is created by the

Dennis Turner was assistant professor of English at Wayne State University until his death in July 1984.

4 Cinema Journal 24, No. 4, Summer 1985



narrative, constituted by the process of narratization which is staged for, by, and through her or him. Such a consideration of the spectating subject's position returns me to a final attempt at reading The Conversation, this time with all three registers simultaneously in mind. In my reading I show that the film is concerned with its own textuality, engaged in an ongoing drive to constitute itself as narrative, yet haunted by a memory of a divided subject. The hero within the film strives to make narrative out of nonsense in an attempt to ward off the fragmentation and dismemberment which he has caused in the past. The text itself strives to be a genre film at the same time that its origins are in a fractured past of the fantasy tale and the Continental art film. Spectator auditors in the theater experience displeasure to the extent that the

ruptured narratives and unreadable sound track fail to provide that discursive ribbon of specularity in which they have learned to constitute themselves in a comfortably integral subjectivity.

According to Coppola, the subject of The Conversation is the technology of sound reproduction.2 Harry Caul, the protagonist, is a professional wire-

tapper assigned by the nameless director of a large corporation to the task of recording the dialogue of a young couple who weave in and out of the lunchtime crowd in San Francisco's Union Square. He does so by using spe- cial directional microphones equipped with telescopic sights which his operatives, newsreel cameramen turned sound technicians, point at the target source. The initial problem posed to Harry in the text is thus a technical one. This is also true of the initial question posed to the viewer by the text, since the opening shot is a long, slow zoom-in to the scene of the conversation and

bugging operation, accompanied by an almost unreadable soundtrack of static, crowd noise, music, and dialogue being picked up on three separate microphones. This technical problem is solved early in the film when Harry reassembles the conversation from his three sources and provides his client with an intelligible tape in which the young wife of the director and her lover set up a hotel rendezvous.

The second more enduring enigma is one of interpretation. Made uneasy by the behavior of his clients the wiretapper returns to his deciphering machines and discovers an ambiguous line which had been previously masked. In this sentence the young man tells his lover, "He'd kill us if he got the chance." Haunted by the memory of a prior assignment in which his recording had occasioned the deaths of several people, Harry abandons the stance of the objective technician and becomes concerned about the fate of the "targets," as he calls them, of his bugging operation. The mystery takes an unexpected turn at the end when Harry discovers that he and his machines have missed a key intonation. Where he had reassembled the noise on the tape to read, "He'd kill us if he got the chance," in actuality the accent had been upon the word "us" and not "kill" and the young man had said, "He'd kill us if he got the chance." Thus the victims turn out to be the killers,

Cinema Journal 24, No. 4, Summer 1985 5



Harry's recording has been used to lure his client to his death, and what Harry has taken as a prediction of one murder had in fact been the rationali- zation of another. In the film's climactic moment Harry checks into a hotel room next to the one in which he believes the murder will take place, and in a perfect illustration of his impotence, he eavesdrops electronically on the crime. Incapable of actively involving himself, he seems to feel that if he attends the event it will perhaps turn out differently from what he has anticipated. The irony of course is that it does, since with the help of a co-conspirator, the tape has been given to the husband by the lovers precisely to ensure that he will confront them during their rendezvous and they can kill him. Harry never sees the actual killing but only hears the sound of violence while on the screen is projected his imagined version of the crime. It isn't until a day later that the report of an accidental death of the husband in the newspaper alerts him to his mistake. Characteristically, he goes to the office of the clients, not to confront them, but merely to stare helplessly at these people who have used his tape to bait a murder trap.

The film ends with Harry the victim of his own technology. Alone in his apartment he is telephoned by one of the conspirators. "We'll be listening to you," says the voice on the phone before, as a demonstration of Harry's vulnerability, a recording of him playing his saxophone in his apartment blares through the line. In the last sequence he tears his apartment apart in a frenzied but fruitless search for the bug, then settles down in despair to play saxophone solos in the ruins of his home. The final images of the film, recorded by a slow pan which sweeps past Harry in his living room like a surveillance camera at work in some supermarket, reveal the wiretapper in physical circumstances which approximate the internal desolation with which he has been living all along.

Read as a kind of Orwellian morality play, The Conversation sermonizes on the danger of a naive faith in technology, particularly when, as in Harry's case, it is used as a shield against "human" contact. This is made clear throughout the film as Harry demonstrates an extraordinary refusal to provide information about himself. In response to his snoopy landlady's request for emergency keys to his apartment, he says, "I would be perfectly happy if all my belongings burned up in a fire because I have nothing personal, nothing of value, except my keys." When his mistress, ironically named Amy, asks him the simplest things about his life-his phone number and address, his age and profession-because she wants "something personal" to happen between them, he lies to her, leaves her rent money in a cupboard as a kind of tip, and walks out on "all her questions." When his technical assistant ex- presses curiosity about the people in their assignment, because "it's human nature to be curious," Harry responds that the conversation doesn't have anything to do with either one of them and that he doesn't know anything about human nature or curiosity. Harry's denial of the personal turns out, of




course, to make him all the more vulnerable and unprepared when he takes an uncharacteristic interest in the terms of the conversation he has recorded. When coupled with the sleazy characterization of the other wiretap- pers and the frequent repetition of the "Good-German" phrases they use to describe their work-"It's just a job. You're not supposed to feel anything about it, just do it"-the ending of The Conversation takes on an undeniable liberal humanist valence.3 Harry's depressing impotence in confronting the

Kafkaesque world of "the Director" can be traced to a personal failure on his part, and, so, the nihilism within the film is recuperated by the moral the audience is led to draw. Yes, Big Brother exists, but he is only dangerous to those who surrender their individuality in his service. Outside the register of the diegetic, a solution is still possible for the newly educated citizen. "No man is an island, Do unto others..., etc."

The problem with such a reading of the film is that it fails to deal with a

very strong instability within the diegesis. Many questions remain unanswered at the end of The Conversation. For one, the bug is never found by Harry even after he has literally taken his apartment apart. One common ex-

planation for this is that the mike which has been used against him is the Moran S 15, a telephone listening device which the fabulously sleazy Bernie Moran demonstrates at the Surveillance Experts Convention. But this device, we are told in a bit of characteristically difficult to read dialogue, must be in- stalled in the target's phone-and Harry's first response to being bugged is to dismantle his receiver. Another problem centers around the role played by the Harrison Ford character, the director's assistant who is presumably in league with the lovers. He is very anxious to steal the tapes from Harry and intercept them before their arrival in the hands of the director; but later we see him playing them for his boss anyway. Similarly, it seems that the lovers knew they were being recorded, which is why they were able to set up the murder in the hotel room. But if that is the case, it is not clear why they would go to such lengths to make Harry's recording task so difficult. Most

perplexing of all is the fact that if Harry's whole epiphany-which we get in flashback after he learns the "truth" about the killing-hinges upon the inflection of the pronoun "us," then the killers have admitted to the murder in anticipation of their victim's hearing them. Or they anticipated the machine's inability to record and to understand the terms of a shifting emphasis and knew that Harry would read it the way he did.

The Conversation is difficult to read because it codes itself in the man- ner of the classic detective film, but refuses the closure usually associated with that genre. True to the formula of the cop thriller, the film contains no

sequences at which the protagonist is not present, and thus offers no information to the audience which is not also available to Harry. This on-screen

presence of the mystery-solving protagonist in every scene, the treatment of

corporate and official corruption, the depiction of the policeman and sur-




veillance technicians working with Harry, the relative unimportance of female characters, even the way in which Harry dresses, in an ironically transparent plastic raincoat, all identify the text as a classic detective

mystery. But since Harry is being baited and fooled to the point of his final

disintegration, it could be argued that what we are seeing is only what he

imagines-in his guilty paranoia-to be taking place. Perhaps the phone does not ring at the end of the film, perhaps the reconstruction of the murder which he images at the end is not the correct one. This accumulation of

inexplicable data has led certain critics to argue that it isn't possible to tell

exactly what is going on in The Conversation, because the film anchors its

images in the disintegrating consciousness of its protagonist.4 When the audience, led by the truth-seeking Harry, follows the threads of the plot to their origin, the result is not the security of solution, but the threat of mise-en-abime.

One way to understand this apparent shift in the text's terms is to shift the mode of appreciation and to see the film as a loosely organized exercise in intertexual play. This seems to be particularly valid in a Coppola film, because he has devoted so much of his career to working with material from

previously written texts.5 He made The Godfather from Mario Puzo's novel of the same name, Apocalypse Now from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and The Outsiders and Rumblefish from two S. E. Hinton novels. He also wrote the screenplay for Jack Clayton's version of The Great Gatsby and has been involved in film restorations, as with Abel Gance's Napoleon. Most recently- in perhaps the ultimate intertextual exercise-he has produced Wim Wenders' version of the Joe Gores novel Hammett-a work in which a real

personage is made into a character who behaves like the characters the real

person has created. In his more recent projects Coppola has made explicit a

quality which was only implied at the time of the shooting of The Conversa- tion.6 In most of his subsequent films a contemporary text articulates itself in a diacritical relationship to some prior text, intruding upon a narrative terrain which has been previously occupied and achieving signification-to a greater or lesser degree-according to its means of interaction with the in-

digenous discourse. Literary theorists characterize this kind of discursive

practice, which more or less explicitly invokes an anterior discourse, as

"polyvalent." This figure is a central concept in such critical practices as those in play in Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and Andre Malraux's Voices of Silence, each of which takes the prior text to function as the gener- ating instance of the subsequent work which comes into being through the

negation of its antecedants.7 My own understanding of the figure is less

Oedipal, and is closer to that of Roland Barthes, for whom polyvalence is

"intertextuality," a term which designates that quality inherent in all texts

through which they are "completely woven with quotations, references, and




echoes ... cultural languages .. . past or present, that traverse the text from one end to the other in a vast stereophony."8

Coppola's insistence upon the fact that his film is "very different" from Blow Up, the film which inspired it, and his refusal to acknowledge its debt to Hitchcock, although he screened Hitchcock's films while working on The Conversation, suggest a case of Bloomian misprision.9 One writer misreads another in order to "clear an imaginative space for himself" and enable the creation of his own text'?. But I am not primarily interested in Bloom's Oedi- pal hermeneutic of the aggressing signified. Of more interest is the way the film's specific reworking of material from earlier texts raises the problems of boundary and textual authority which are suggested within its own diegesis. In the regime of the text, a trained expert records a conversation, distinguishing discourse from the non-signifying noise in which it is em- bedded. In the regime of the intertextual, the film establishes a series of relationships with its antecedant texts via a similar operation. The inability of the film's protagonist to come to some understanding of his sound track sounds a cautionary note. Just as the noise of the crowd and the beat of the steel band resonate through Harry's recording of the conversation, so the references and echoes from prior texts float through the narrative of The Conversation, sometimes providing coherence to the story, sometimes functioning as a kind of competing static which inhibits any given reading of the film. These echoes are many; the idea of a soundman whose act of recording interrupts a couple in an illicit transaction comes from Antonioni's version of Cortazar's "Blow Up." The love triangle of an older man and a younger couple Coppola intended as a "political romance" based on the story of

Henry VIII." The story of the obsessed man, living in San Francisco, trying desperatively to avoid repeating an act which he cannot avoid and which leaves him emotionally crippled, harkens back to Hitchcock's Vertigo; the foregrounded theme of voyeurism calls to mind nearly every Hitchcock film, but especially Rear Window, while the discovery of the murder clues in the pristinely antiseptic bathroom, blood against the tile, body wrapped in plastic, can be seen as an invocation of Psycho.12

The function of these various references in The Conversation is remark- ably similar to what Julia Kristeva has described as one of the principal strategies of intertextuality: "a permutation of texts," by which "in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neu- tralize one another."'3 To take the first example of reference which occurs in the film, in the opening sequence the camera does a very slow zoom-in to the crowded square in which Harry, one of his operatives, and the two targets constantly circle about. Also present and interacting with the four identified characters is a mime who entertains the lunchtime crowd. As a couple of critics remarked,'4 this mime seems left over from the set of Blow Up, in which




an entire troop of young people in white grease paint appeared at odd mo- ments in the film, which ended with them playing pantomime tennis with an invisible ball. It could be argued that the mimes in Blow Up function as ironic commentators on the photographer-protagonist's naive faith in the visible. In this sense the appearance of their dumb fellow at the opening of The Conver- sation bridges this beginning and that ending at the same time that it offers a similar ironic comment on the naive faith that Harry puts in the audible. That Blow Up is being used as an ironic prophecy of Harry's fall is further

suggested by another bit of intertextual material; the two young women who

apply their makeup using Harry's truck windows for a mirror recall the two "dollies" who chase the photographer in Blow Up. When Stan takes their

pictures here, asking for "some tongue" as he does so, he completes a photo- erotic session which had been only half accomplished in Antonioni's movie. Another connection is made when Harry pins a series of photographs of his

targets, as did David Hemmings in Blow Up, up above his workbench. The failure of the pinned-up prints in the former film to lead the photographer to a solution is called into this text as a kind of sign that this project-the as-

signment of meaning to a series of mechanically reproduced sounds-is as doomed as was the earlier search for meaning in the ever enlarging blow-ups.

In this reading, the material from Blow Up is hardly neutralized, since

any modern reader-spectator recognizes that the communication of an irony is as stable an event as contemporary art provides. But there is a way in which the discourse from Blow Up competes against this irony and undermines its stability as a final reading of the text. In another sequence based

heavily on Antonioni's film Harry dreams of a confrontation with the Cindy Williams character, the young woman he is afraid he has set up for a murder. This meeting takes place on the staircase of a public park, landscaped on several levels and enshrouded in fog. Read as information from Blow Up, this park interview recalls the staircase meeting in the London park in which the photographer takes his fatal picture and confronts the Vanessa Redgrave character.15 But coded as a dream sequence in The Conversation-it takes

place while Harry sleeps with another woman and continues the act of personal confession he has begun with her-the sequence does not take an ironic

position toward Harry's struggle, but simply represents his need to express himself to this woman who obsesses him. The film anchors this "surreal" se-

quence, as Coppola has labeled it, in such a way that it fits perfectly into the

generic representation. A shot of Harry talking to one woman and then fall-

ing asleep is followed by cloud-filled images of him speaking to a woman who does not know him and who does not respond. Then we see Harry in bed

waking up to find his female companion gone. Despite its echoes from the more indeterminate sequences of Blow Up, this scene is here represented in terms of a perfectly normalized grammar of dream sequences from the

1 0 Cinema Journal 24, No. 4, Summer 1985



Hollywood cinema. In that cinema dreams are often represented by clouds and usually connected to some plausible, exciting cause from the wide-awake world (The Wizard of Oz). That we are to read these images in the syntag- matic context of the Hollywood cinema is further emphasized by the noir code detail that the woman with whom Harry has been sleeping is the classic femme fatale, working for his enemies and robbing him of his prized tapes. Thus material which in Antonioni's film had functioned as part of an invocation of the fantastic and supernatural is here recuperated by the rationality of the detective story.

Another parallel sequence in which The Conversation veers towards the detective film and away from Blow Up helps make this point. In the latter film a photographer's random picture-taking leads him to discover the body of a murder victim. But nobody ever sees the corpse except Thomas, the protagonist, and when he returns to verify his discovery, the body has disap- peared without a trace. So too have his blow-ups. In both these details Thomas's situation resembles that of Harry. But there is an important difference, one which further establishes the opposition between The Conversation and its European parent. Harry discovers further evidence of the crime; he

may not be able to prove who is guilty, but, and this is evident especially at the end, in the three shot-reverse-shot sequences between the wiretapper and the conspirators, Harry thinks he has witnessed something real. Even if we take the stance that he is not a reliable witness, the audience's experiences have been identical to Harry's, and his version of the story, fantasized or real, is still presented to the spectator as his story. The final shot of Blow-Up raises a very different possibility. To use the script's description, standing in the park where he had found the missing body, "Thomas is erased from the screen and the titles 'The End' and 'Blow Up' are superimposed on the green expanse of the field."'6 Coming as it does after the tennis game scene, this final erasure is obviously aimed at the audience. The characters on the screen have begun to see things we cannot see, and have begun to disappear before our eyes. In this way the problem of the visible is deliberately thrust out onto the spectating audience, as in the "art film," and not sealed off inside the text, as in the genre film of detection. But it cannot be said that the existence of an intertextual relationship between the two films does not leave traces of the indeterminacy of Blow Up upon The Conversation. Coppola's movie os- cillates between Antonioni's work and works like Out of the Past, summoning into itself material which establishes itself and then effects its own negation, and which functions intra and extra-diegetically at the same time. It is, in fact, impossible to make rigid these various invocations of separate registers of signification precisely because the text signifies indeterminately-fluctu- ating between the fixity of the genre tale and the open-endedness of the surreal or fantasy tale. In this sense it accomplishes a true intertextuality-

Cinema Journal 24, No. 4, Summer 1985 1 1



"transposing one or more systems of signs into another" and accomplishing what Kristeva has called "a new articulation of the enunciative and denota- tive position."17

The notions of enunciation and denotation seem particularly apposite to a discussion of The Conversation, because the material from the earlier texts, like the changing inflections and pronouns in the recorded conversation, function as what linguists have called "shifters." These are those elements in a language, such as personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place such as "here," "there," or "now," and inflections which change their semantic reference according to the context of their enunciation. For example, the pronouns "we" and "us" refer to different couples or groups according to the community in which the speaker articulates them. And the inflection upon a given pronoun-such as "us" in "he'll kill us if he gets the chance," can radically alter the semantic content of the sentence in which it is enunci- ated.'8 In this sense the error committed by Harry Caul was to fail to understand the position of the speaker, or enunciator, of his tell-tale tape. Locked into his own subjectivity-his own narrative of selfhood-he read things as if they had been articulated as pure denotation, devoid of the shading and nuance of discourse. Any attempt to read the quoted material in The Con- versation as fixed and unresponsive to the terms of its enunciating position is doomed to a similar error.

A related distinction which has been useful to film scholars is that made by Emile Benveniste between discourse and history.19 They are "both forms of enunciation, the difference between them lying in the fact that in the discursive form the source of the enunciation is present, whereas in the historical it is suppressed. History is always 'there' and 'then' and its protagonists are 'he' 'she' and 'it.' Discourse however, always also contains as its points of reference, a 'here' and a 'now' and an 'I' and a 'you.' "20 Although it cannot be made as a blanket statement, film scholars are generally agreed that genre films, especially ones with mysteries to be "solved," present themselves as histoire, as enunciations which suppress their status as statements spoken by someone or thing. Characteristic of the genre film is "the absence in the text of a point from which the enunciation stems."21 Of course, as organized spectacle, incorporating the exhibitionist performance of actors, movies by definition establish an intersubjective relationship with a spectating subject, but, with perhaps the exception of musicals,22 the genre film brackets its discursive properties in such a way that the overall effect is one of an histoire. Other kinds of films seek to disrupt this illusion of historicity and to underline their discursiveness by foregrounding the processes by which films are articulated-as in the cinema of Godard, Straub-Huillet, and Fass- binder. Another discursive property in self-reflective cinema-more to the point in this discussion-is the practice of rendering homage to an earlier text. Although Coppola's invocations of other works seem less deliberately




adulatory-in fact he seems to have disguised their functioning in his films even from himself-the various echoes of material from earlier works provide multiple points of entry for the audience into a discursive relationship with the subject who speaks the text. Like audience asides in a drama and "dear reader," authorial intrusions in a novel, these citations address the viewing subject of The Conversation in a way substantially different from the histoire-plot of the genre material in the text.23

Within the confines of its own diegesis The Conversation repeats this play of text and intertext, history and discourse. In the first half of the film, Harry records the conversation, assembles it after various replayings, then dismantles it and reinterprets it to find the ambiguous prophecy. In the second half of the film, the tape is replayed over other kinds of action: at the

party in the loft by Stan, by Harry himself when he confides to Meredith and goes to bed with her, and finally by the director in the scene in which Harry comes to collect his money. In each of these instances the action on the screen, including the spoken dialogue, is inflected by the recorded words of the young couple who are only present via the tape. Some of the conversa- tions seem random, as when Amy, who never hears the tape, sings "The Red, Red Robin," the same song the young woman had sung in the park. But most of these lines reinforce the words spoken by the visible characters. As the tape comments pityingly about a sleeping itinerant in the park that he "was once somebody's baby boy" a brief flashback to the bum lying in the park is followed by a shot of Harry, lying flat on the pallet in his studio in a similar position. A bit later in the same scene Harry tries to tell Meredith about his fears about what will happen to his targets by reciting in unison with the tape playing off-screen, "he'll kill us if he gets the chance." This line also plays off-screen at the moment in the film when Harry asks his client, "What are you going to do to them," providing what Harry believes to be the obvious answer to his unanswered question. Later these lines assume an even greater potency when Harry uses them himself, as if some other power is speaking through him. In his dream he tells the Cindy Williams character that, "He'll kill you if he gets the chance," and after he has dis- covered that it is the director, and not her who is dead, he "recites" them in his head, this time with the different inflection. In this sense, the words on the tape are always coloring the words spoken by the visible characters, making them problematic, overlaying the indeterminacy of the discursive upon the histoire of the text.

The word visible is quite important here because, to a large extent, The Conversation sets the sound track against the image track in an ongoing in- terrogation of film's central signifying elements. The words from the tape eventually take on a power which undermines the story presented in the vis- uals, competing with them for the attention and trust of the spectator- auditor. In this competition we find another instance of The Conversation's




refusal of a classical functioning, and another avenue of approach, which we can call the spectatorial, to its difficult signifying practice. Such an approach requires a brief rehearsal of some ideas currently in use in film analysis. As

many critics have argued, "the desire of the film text can be localized in two broad regimes, whose borders are by no means specific or well-defined, but which can be separated;"24 these are the textual and the spectatorial. The former is that field in which desire is represented and objectified, translated into a series of figures which can be mapped-and thus read-in the pro- gression of the text towards an ending. The spectatorial regime is "less tan-

gible and easily grasped" in that it involves the play of desire which is set up between the viewer and the projected images, "organized in a space which unites the eye and the screen, and yet paradoxically maintaining them in a distance which is both physical and psychological."25 This theory takes as its

starting point the Lacanian idea of the plenitude enjoyed by the spectator before the movie screen, "the analogical security," to use Roland Barthes'

phrase,26 of a perfectly blended and copresent signifier and signified. Through various conventions-limitations of the cinema, however, the view-

ing subject becomes aware of a lack; the screen is also a frame, for example, and thereby excludes things, cancelling some not visible signification and thus signifying a negation. This awareness of the full image as also a negation breaks the security of the viewing subject, unless the ribbon of movie

representation can efface it. This is precisely the activity accomplished by editing, the device through which the classical cinema unites the textual and the spectatorial27

The point of intersection at which the two registers continually cross, and in so doing reinforce one another like the two strands of a narrative

cable, is "the look." This term refers to the conventions-shot-reverse shot, eyeline matching, off-screen glance-by which the narrative film has represented vision, or looking. A character looks at something or someone on or

off-screen, triggering in the spectators the question, "What is being seen?"

Subsequent shots supply the answer to the question and in so doing suture the spectators into the text. By surrendering their gaze to the figures on the screen the viewers enable the film to function as a discourse of textual desire. The images within the diegesis are not theirs, but are in some sense recu-

perted as theirs via their consumption by the sponsored characters on the screen. The spectators are locked into a specific role as conductors of a scopic current whose origins and terminus are by definition exterior to them, but which, in the case of the normalized textuality of the genre film, masks this

exteriority in the conventions of the narratized look. There is, however, another kind of look and another kind of looker

beyond this regime of the textual. Films also represent images for which no

pair of eyes present on the screen can be taken as a point of origin. Some obvious examples of these nonnarratized and unrecuperated gazes include




many conventional establishing shots, most images distorted by long and wide angle lenses, and the opening and closing credits of nearly every film ever made. In these instances the problem of the spectatorial itself is presented; pictures flash from a source of light behind the spectator onto a

viewing screen in front of him. Some are recuperated in the textual and as-

signed to narratized lookers on the screen, and many are not, but even when

they are, there remains a kind of precipitate of consciousness which knows that these images are being offered and organized by some larger figure outside the register of the text. For auteurists it is the director who stands in the

place of that figure, and, on a certain level of textual work, they are correct to put the director there. But, on another level, this figure beyond the text who performs the film functions as a kind of transcendental subject, presenting the images before the spectator as a world always already full of meaning. Although this is a point I will return to, it bears emphasis here. In the movie theater the camera, through its surrogate and mirror the projector, "unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena of lived experience into

unifying meaning,"28 holding at bay the scandalous figures of discontinuity, fissure, and need. Going to the movies thus involves the spectator in a dou- ble ideological misalliance. In the regime of the textual the paying customer identifies with those figures whose presence on the screen provides her or him with images of bodily unity and verifies his individual subjectivity. In the regime of the spectatorial the viewer submits to an even higher level of

mystification, identifying "less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with that grander presence which stages the spectacle, makes it seen [and obliges] the individual subject to see what it sees."29

Implicit in all this is the notion that the film sound track is a secondary register of signification, supplementary to and supported by the primary chain of visual signifiers on the image track. Stephen Heath, for example, has argued that the "sound track is hierarchically subservient to the image- track," and that the voice, as "the presence of character in frame, [is] a sup- plement to the dramatization of space."30 A recent challenge to this hierar- chy has been mounted by Rick Altman, who argues that sounds are more, rather than less, primary than images. This is so because an image without a sound is common in nature, a person standing quietly alone, for example, while a sound without an image is an impossibility. "Sounds are always produced by something imageable.... Images rarely ask, 'What sound did that image make?' [but] every sound seems to ask, unless it has been previously categorized and located: 'Where did that sound come from?' Thus far from being redundant, the sound has a fundamental enigmatic quality which confers upon the image a quality of response." Going to the movies involves the customer (one can hardly say spectator) in a kind of "sound hermeneutic-whereby the sound asks 'where?' and the image responds 'here.' "31




In this exercise I am not interested in arguing a comparative ontology of either the image or sound track. The important thing is that both systems of filmic signification function by means of a circuit of desire which passes through the spectator and which, as Altman argues for the sound track (and every theorist of the suture argues for the image track), requires its own effacement in order to secure its functioning. A sound emanates from a loud- speaker and the eye searches the screen for a source, by definition mistaken, to which the sound can be assigned. The successful completion of the hermeneutic-the image's "here" responding to the sound's "where?"-must be accomplished through a lie, which helps ensure the bodily coherence of the spectating subject. The sounds from the Dolby machines are never assigned to their real speakers but always to those narrated bodies which fill up the screen.

The theory of suture is interesting in regard to The Conversation, because the film presents problems to its spectator at both levels of self- construction. First, it includes a variety of images which are not readily assignable to characters in the frame. For example, at one point there is an inexplicable, because not recuperable, flash-forward to the same shot of the murder victim fleeing his killers which will occur during the slaying. This image seems to spring from the film's unconscious more than from Harry's. At another time the camera records inanimate objects in sequences which have no diegetic justification. In Harry's apartment we are given a view of the telephone which does not ring until after the camera has panned away from it. While Harry is in the chair we see the phone; when the phone rings we have already left it for the newly vacant chair. In the building of the director Harry runs into the young man and woman, both of whom react oddly after Harry has stared at them. We know from the final exchange of incriminating looks that they are capable of recognizing Harry. But in these two sequences their gaze either fails to register their bugger (the Forrest character scans right past him) or isn't even turned his way, as when the young woman rides the elevator with Harry and never looks at him. In both these scenes screen space is made problematic and the spectator is dis- oriented because look is not matched to look, thereby forestalling the completion of the scopic circuit. We don't know what characters are looking at, and we don't even know what their position is relative to the space estab- lished in the previous shot. This visual tearing of the suture is accompanied by the radical disjunctions in the sound hermeneutic which I have already described. Voices and images often cannot be matched up. Rather than sup- plement the dramatized space on the screen, the taped voices and frequently inaudible speeches of the film's characters explode the security of the dramatic text and threaten to dismantle that organizing presence behind the projector who guarantees the spectator's coherent subjectivity.

This dismantling of the viewing subject in the regime of the spectatorial




enables a more comprehensive reading of The Conversation in the registers of the intertextual and the textual, because in each of those regimes it is similarly enacting a drama of the disintegrating subject. First, as a genre film which will not close and an art film which refuses to present itself entirely in the superior and ironic codes of the art film, The Conversation is haunted by the literary narrative which inspired Antonioni's film. Although both he and Coppola seem to have ignored this fact, Julio Cortazar's "Blow Up" directly engages the problem of the constitution of the speaking and viewing subjects. Cortazar begins his story with the following paragraph. "It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell."32

This agonized recital of the dilemma of the speaking subject is made all the more explicit and dramatic by the deliberate conflation and confusion of all the shifting pronouns. The protagonist at the beginning of this story is already locked in the scandal of disunity, unable even to know who it is he must become in order to narrate, and thus be made whole. In this important sense the three filmmakers who have followed Cortazar have radically altered his narrative. They begin with a presumably whole protagonist and move him toward the tragic or ironic recognition of his own weakness. Curiously, Cortazar's tale reads in the opposite direction, beginning with a protagonist unable to locate a speaking position-and thus a self-and moving him to a position of integrated subjectivity, albeit a fantastical one. By the end of "Blow Up" the speaker of the tale is articulating coherent, grammatically self-sufficient sentences from the security of a first person selfhood. "That was what I saw when I opened my eyes... the clear sky, and then a cloud that drifted in from the left, passed gracefully and slowly across and disap- peared on the right.... and little by little the frame becomes clear, perhaps the sun comes out.... And the pigeons once in a while, and a sparrow or two."33

What is extremely important here is that the speaker of Cortazar's story has achieved this security via the cinema, by becoming a spectator before a movie screen. In a trope excised from each of the three films it inspired, "Blow Up" ends with the photographer's final enlargement hanging on the wall of his studio and taking on the properties of a movie screen. In a parody of film viewing, the figures in the photo come to life, then exit from the field of vision while others enter. The frame occasionally moves in an imitation of the effects of a film camera as the writer sits glued to his seat, moving with the images in the frame but immobile before the screen, speaking in the secure voice of an integral subjectivity.

It is impossible here to determine with any finality why it is that the film




versions of this tale all sought to suppress this examination of the cinematic subject which lay at the heart of the narrative.34 But it should be pointed out that the institution of the cinema-spectatorial, historical, capitalistic-wills the construction of a unified spectating subject who by definition cannot be conscious of her or his own constitution within the filmic apparatus.35 Thus Cortazar's foregrounding of the process of subject assembly, his thematiza- tion of that process, threatened the very ideological foundations of that institution, and the story had to be retold by Antonioni as modernist, by Cop- pola as ironic, and by De Palma as just plain sincere.36

With Cortazar's treatment of the coherence of the speaking and viewing subject in mind, I would like to return one last time to the text of The Con- versation to discuss its explicit treatment of the same problem. Harry Caul seeks to create a narrative different from the one which haunts him from his past. In his previous case of the Labor Union Welfare Fund, Harry's tapes had been used as a pretext for the murder of three innocent people. It is important to remember about this case that the victims had been literally butchered, "their heads and bodies found in different rooms of the house." Harry is thus hounded by a narrative of dismemberment, which he seeks to evade by rewriting it in the terms of his present assignment. For this reason he undergoes a kind of character change during the film. Initially opposed to personal contact and obsessed with his privacy, as the tale of his present subjects starts to resemble that of his mutilated former targets, Harry begins to tell stories about himself. He tells Meredith about his dread of what may happen to the young couple, he goes to confession to tell a priest about his fear of someone being hurt again because of his work, and in his dream he talks to the Cindy Williams character about his childhood.

These narratives are characterized by two things: a return to childhood and an emphasis on religion. As he speaks to Meredith while the tape plays off, Harry exclaims, "Oh God, what have I done? Oh God." Her response is to undress him, put him in bed and call him, repeatedly, "Baby." When he goes to confession he also returns to the religiosity of his childhood. A boy about eight years old precedes him in the confessional and his first two con- fessed sins, as warm-ups to divulging the anxiety of murder, are having "taken the Lord's name in vain" and "taking newspapers from the racks without paying for them." In his story to Cindy Williams he tells of being paralyzed as a child and left alone in a bathtub by his mother. Unable to sup- port himself he slipped slowly into the water and almost drowned. When he awoke from unconsciousness he was covered with the holy oils of the Ex- treme Unction his mother had administered to him. Throughout this re- markable convergence of reveries of childhood, dreams of mother, memories of immobility, and encounters with God, runs the promise of a unified and coherent subjectivity. In psychoanalytical terms it is the constitution of the infant in the one-to-one relationship with the mother which interpellates the




subject into an imaginary unity. In ideological terms it is her or his position relative to the all-knowing deity, the transcendental subject personified, which inserts the subject into a social order made secure by its fabrication out of a body of free individuals. (In terms of this overlay of mother and religion it is interesting that when Harry tears his apartment apart he leaves the statue of Mary to last, and when he does smash it, the Blessed Mother holds nothing, neither the electronic listener nor the idealized other.)37 In cinematic terms it is the location of the viewing subject before the screen in a paralyzed position-having surrendered her or his mobility to the figures in the representation and to the all-powerful representor himself who moves the camera-which enables the spectator to experience her or himself as a viewing subject.

Of course, these various political and artistic strategies do not take, and Harry once again finds himself in the middle of a murder. Fleeing in horror from the sounds of the struggle in the next unit, the wiretapper stands in his motel bedroom, staring at the mural of San Francisco Harbor which covers the wall. Finding this representation insufficiently distracting, he steps on to the balcony, only to discover the bloody hand of the victim imprinting the sign of murder on the plastic partition which separates the units. Again Harry runs from the inadmissable message; reentering his room he turns on the television, seeking the comfort and subjective coherence of a screened narrative. On the tube a newscaster is talking. Unable to lose, and therefore find, himself in this discourse, Harry searches even further back into memory for a story which will cancel out the vicious reality of murder. Opting for the security of a prediscursive position, the wiretapper curls up on the bed, covers himself with pillows and blankets, and falls asleep. Presumably the spectating position of the dreaming child is secure from the scandal of pri- mal disunity being enacted in the next room. The effectiveness of this strat- egy seems proved when Harry wakes up several hours later, and Wilma Flintstone is giving birth to a child on the TV set. Harry goes next door to examine the scene of the slaying. Pristinely clean, on the surface it yields no evidence of the crime. But then, in an echo from Psycho, Harry's eye is caught by the gleaming porcelain of the toilet. Unable to resist testing this ultimate machine of denial, he flushes it. When he does so the drain pipes choke back up the blood of the stabbed victim, spewing it to the surface and spilling it all over the screen, obliterating the bedtime story of the coherent and unified subject.

Notes. 1. Julio Cortazar, "Blow Up," Blow Up and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New

York: Collier, 1968), 104. 2. See "Francis Ford Coppola Interviewed by Marjorie Rosen," Film Comment (July 1974):

43-49; and "The Making of The Conversation: An Interview with Francis Ford Coppola,"




Brian De Palma, Filmmakers Newsletter (May 1974): 30-33. In each of these interviews Coppola recounts a meeting with Irvin Kirshner in 1966 in which talk about surveillance microphones gave him the idea for a film. According to Coppola the project was unique for him, because it was the puzzle of handling the technology, rather than the personalities of the characters, which inspired him to make the movie.

3. The most detailed reading of the film along these lines is James W. Palmer, " 'The Con- versation': Coppola's Biography of an Unborn Man," Film Heritage 12, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 26-32. Palmer sees Harry as ".. . a symbol or cipher for modern man immersed in a tech- nological society that undermines human values and thwarts human needs." He makes much of the name Caul, pointing out that Harry is covered with a kind of symbolic mem- brance which shields him from birth into the true human community. Another good reading is that of Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (New York: Oxford Universi- ty Press, 1980), 194-205. Other analyses in the moralizing spirit include: David Denby, "Stolen Privacy: Coppola's The Conversation," Sight and Sound 43, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 131-33; the review by Robert Hatch in The Nation, 27 April 1974, 539-40; Peter Cowie, "The Conversation," Focus on Film, no. 18 (Summer 1974): 15-17; Lawrence Shaffer, "The Conversation, " Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 54-60; the review by Penelope Gilliat, The New Yorker, 15 April 1974, 116; Jay Cocks, "Sounds of Silence," Time, 15 April 1974, 703; Andrew Sarris, "Who Wants Privacy," The Village Voice, 13 June 1974, 68-69; Jon Landau, "The Peeper Principle," Rolling Stone, 23 May 1974, 82; and Paul Zimmerman, "The Bug People," Newsweek, 13 May 1974, 130-1.

4. This point is made by Denby, Kael, Hatch, and Palmer. For example, Hatch: "Obviously, Harry is 'flipping'(sic) a good deal of the time and I couldn't always tell fact from fancy," 540. (It is interesting to note here that we never really find out that the young woman is the director's wife.) Terry Peaver has written a useful article in which he discusses this instability in the plot of Cortazar's story and Antonioni's film, and has argued that the viewer must understand this instability as the point of each work. They are explorations of "the possibilities and inherent differences of two art forms." Terry Peaver, "Blow-Up: A Reconsideration of Antonioni's Infidelity to Cortazar," PMLA 94, no. 5 (October 1979): 887-93.

5. See the Rosen interview. "Eighty percent of the effect [a film] has was preconceived and precalculated by the writer," and "I feel that basically I'm a writer who directs" (45).

6. For a brief summary of various views of "intertextual polyvalence," including those of Shklovski, Bakhtin, Harold Bloom, Milan Parry, and Michael Riffaterre, see Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 23-25.

7. It is in this vein that Fredric Jameson connects Shklovski's concept of "ostranie" to Mal- raux's description of texts which effect, on the level of a psychology of creation, a radical break with the past. Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1972), 51-54.

8. Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structur- alist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 73-81, 77.

9. See the interview with De Palma, who, as the ultimate imitator of Hitchcock (and Coppola and Hawks) detects many Hitchcockian overtones in Coppola's film. See also Rosen, for similar discussion. De Palma, of course, made Blow Out, a film which tries to make Cop- pola's film more like Hitchcock than ever.

10. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1973), 6-7.

11. De Palma, Interview with Francis Ford Coppola, 33. 12. Coppola has also mentioned Marty and Rashomon as influential, and many of the critics

also cite Kafka and Graham Greene as voices present in the text.




13. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36. 14. See Sarris and Shaffer. 15. Coppola discusses this scene at length with De Palma, but only to comment on the techni-

cal difficulties involved in shooting with mechanical fog. Interestingly, he never discusses Blow Up's park sequences, but does liken his work to "surreal shots" from "art films" made in San Francisco in the 1940s.

16. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 116. 17. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 15. 18. Strictly speaking, these "deictic" utterances are not the same as intonative discrepancies,

which linguists code differently. But the analogy holds because the ambiguity rests, in both cases, on the enunciating position of the speaker.

19. See, for example, Christian Metz, "History/Discourse: Note on Two Voyeurisms," trans., Susan Bennett, Edinburgh Magazine 76, no. 1 (1976): 21-25; and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "A Note on History/Discourse," in the same number: 26-32.

20. Nowell-Smith, "A Note on History/Discourse," 27. 21. Ibid. 22. For a discussion of musicals as self-reflective see Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) or her article in Genre: The Musical, ed. Rick Altman (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

23. "What is interesting to register here is the existence of different economies (in the sense that one can talk, for example, of a 'libidinal economy') which are not homologous with each other but overlap and interfere with one another at various points. One such point of interference would be precisely the production of films as (ostensibly) history rather than discourse, which is in part guaranteed by the relative anonymity of the productive apparatus and by the production of films as marketable objects. Conversely the existence in films of multiple points of entry into relations which are discursive can be correlated to the diverse inheritance of previous forms of art and entertainment assumed by the cinema and reprojected onto the narrated fiction." Nowell-Smith, "A Note on History/Discourse," 29.

24. David Rodowick, "Vision, Desire, and the Film-Text," Camera Obscura, no. 6 (Fall 1980): 55.

25. Rodowick, "Vision, Desire, and the Film-Text," 55. 26. The full citation is useful. "The Historical subject, like the filmgoer... is also glued to

the ideological discourse. He experiences its coalesence, its analogical security, the preg- nance, the naturalness, the "truth"; it is a lure (our lure, who can escape it?). Ideology is, in effect, the imaginary of an epoch, the Cinema of a society." Roland Barthes, "Upon Leaving the Movie Theatre," Communications 23 (1975), rpt. in University Publishing, no. 6 (1979), trans. Bertran Augst and Susan White.

27. At the heart of this argument is the concept of the suture, which has been widely discussed in film theory. A short list of important texts includes Jacques-Alain Miller, "Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)," Screen 18, no. 4 (1977-78): 25-26; Jean-Pierre Oudart, "La Suture, I and II," Cahiers du Cinema, nos. 211, 212 (April-May 1969); Daniel Dayan, "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema," Film Quarterly (Fall 1974): 22-31, rpt. in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 438-51; Stephen Heath, "Notes on Suture," Screen 18, no. 2 (1977-78). 48-77; and a long discussion of all these theoreticians in Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiot- ics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194-236.

28. Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28 no. 2, rpt. along with "The Apparatus" and "Author and Analyzable Subject" in Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 34.




29. Baudry, "Ideological Effects," 27. 30. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 54. 31. Rick Altman, "Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism," Yale French Studies 60, no. 1:

73-74. 32. Julio Cortazar, Blow Up and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier,

1968), 100. Peaver recognizes this problem for the protagonist of the short story, but does not discuss it in terms of the subject but rather in terms of the "artist," 889.

33. Ibid., 115. 34. Beyond my rather general reading of the politics of subjectivity, several other possible in-

terpretations with a political valence have been suggested to me. Daniel Cottom has pointed out that this film underlines the politics of discursive situations, in that authority is never a neutral aspect of a given speaking situation, nor a purely formal property of the subject (intention, meaning, etc.) as Harry seems to regard it, and as it is organized in the classical cinema. Rather authority is worked through a play of forces that are material, in- stitutional, and strategic, including the very kind of violent interventions-in both the speaking and acting senses of the term-which are performed by the characters in the film and by the film upon its audience. Another insight offered me by Gerald MacLean and Donna Landry is that the film enacts a patriarchal fear of female succession; the boss's wife is coming into power, setting into play a series of memories and fantasies which are explicitly addressed to the Cindy Williams character and never to her male co- conspirator. Similarly the eruption of blood which fills the screen at the end of the film and represents Harry's darkest fear, recalls the reign of female dullness which triumphs at the end of The Dunciad: "and Universal Darkness cover'd all." The triumph of the female is thus the end of male articulation and conversation.

35. For a discussion of the effacement by the various mechanisms of the cinema of their own signifying practice see Heath, Dayan, Baudry, Nowell-Smith, Silverman. For each of these theorists it is the Althuserian definition of ideology which holds: "The representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."

36. In this light it is interesting to note that in Blow Out, De Palma, as the director furthest inside the Hollywood mode of production, chose to put the visual and audio tracks togeth- er. From Coppola he took the idea of a sound man, but he also has another accidental witness on hand to take photos of the crime which is at the center of his film. Thus his Coppola style protagonist marries his soundtrack to the photos taken by this photographer borrowed from Antonioni. His film reassembles a listening and a spectating subject simultaneously. There is no conflict between the two signifying systems, and as a result the film is not nearly as interesting as any of its forebears.

37. I am indebted to Charles Baxter for this observation.




The Subject of "The Conversation"

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