Winner of the Palme d’Or (golden
palm) prize in the Cannes Film Festival for 1974, The Conversation (1974)
was written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola; it was a film that
he really wanted to make, whereas he had made The Godfather (1972) to
make money. In both films, business comes to be something more than business.
In The Godfather, Sonny tells Michael not to take being hit in the jaw by
the corrupt police captain McCluskey personally. That Sollozzo expects Tom
Hagen to objectively present a business proposal to Sonny after Sollozzo has
had the Godfather gunned down with five shots and still he survived just
shows how ludicrous it is to suppose that the consequences of the murderous
tactics of that business would not be taken personally. Even so, the
moral dimension does not enter into the considerations. In contrast, Harry,
who runs a small business recording third-party conversations for clients in The
Conversation, gradually comes to take his work personally in a moral sense.
Whereas the murders in The Godfather are personal in the sense vengeance
being part of the motivations, those in The Conversation are personal in
the sense of moral responsibility being increasingly felt by Harry.
Accompanying this realization of guilt, however, is a recognition of the extent
of surveillance on him, and this too changes him. If the problem were
just being morally responsible for what clients do with his tapes, then he
could solve the problem by doing something else for a living. Being a target of
surveillance himself, however, is something that he cannot change. Even in
tearing his apartment apart, he does not find the “bug,” or listening device
that his client’s assistant is using. By implication, we can reflect on just
how much we are watched in the modern world—that is to say, how much the world
in which we live has come to be characterized by surveillance. I contend that
we are largely oblivious to it because it has encroached so gradually that its
incrementalism is difficult to detect.
Harry repeatedly finds his
privacy invaded throughout the film. He arrives at his apartment and finds that
his landlady has left a birthday gift for him just inside the apartment.
Concerned, he picks up the phone. “I thought I had the only key,” he tells her.
“Well, what emergency could possibly . . . alright.” She has undoubtedly said, in
case there is a fire, but would she really enter an apartment on fire? “I’d
be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burned up in a fire because I
don’t have anything personal, noting of value . . . no, nothing personal except
my keys, which I would really like to have the only copy of.” The notion that
she would enter his apartment during a fire to save his belongings is of course
ludicrous. She would be on firmer ground citing a plumbing (water) emergency
because of possible damage to the apartment below. Then he notices that she has
written his age on the card accompanying the gift. “How did you know its my
birthday?” he asks. She undoubtedly tells him that she had seen his birth date
in his mail. Another invasion! “As of today my mail will go to a post office
box, with a combination [lock] and no keys.” He is reacting to this extreme
because her excuses don’t hold water, and thus support his view that she is
abusing her authority as a property-owner. Anyone who has rented a room in a
house being lived in by its owner knows that without any moral reservations,
the roommate can change into the boss.
Of course, Harry exempts himself
from the immorality of invading other people’s privacy. Asked by his assistant
Stan, who is played by the actor who had played Fredo in The Godfather,
about what the man and woman on the tape are saying, Harry dismisses Stan’s
claim that curiosity is simply part of human nature. “I don’t know anything
about human nature. I don’t know anything about curiosity. That’s not part of
what I do,” Harry insists. Furthermore, what his client does with that tape is
none of Harry’s business—it is literally not part of his business. In the
confessional at his church, however, Harry admits to having some moral
misgivings. “I’ve been involved in some work that can be used to hurt these two
young people. This happened to me before; people were hurt because of my work.
I’m afraid it could happen again.” But then his denial quickly returns for its
last stand. “I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible,” he tells the
priest. Well, people were indeed hurt. The president of a labor union had
thought that his accountant had talked, so the accountant, his wife, and kid
were found naked, tied up in their house, with the hair on their bodies gone
and the heads found in different areas of the house. Bernie, one of Harry’s
competitors, reminds Harry of this during a post-convention party at Harry’s
business. Harry blurts out, “Had nothing to do with me; I just turned on the
tapes.” He insists that what his clients do with the tapes in their own
business, but we know from Harry’s confession that the line of ethical
responsibility is not so clear to Harry himself.
At the convention, Bernie had
placed a microphoned pen in Harry’s suit pocket. Bernie records a conversation
that Harry has with Stan, who is now working for Bernie, and a conversation
that Harry has at the party with a woman who works for Bernie. At the party,
with everyone listening, Bernie plays the emotionally intimate, and thus
private, conversation that Harry has just had with the woman—the same woman who
would steal the tape of the current project from Harry after sleeping with him
that night. Bernie does not understand why Harry is so angry at him, and Harry does
not indicate any awareness of this extent of his competitor’s invasiveness.
These suggest that the extent of invasiveness in the society is more serious
than even the practitioners realize. At the party, Bernie tells Harry, “There’s
no moment between human beings that I cannot record.” This statement should be
chilling for all of us.
After Harry realizes that
Bernie’s employee has taken the tapes that Harry has been holding back from his
current client, presumably out of fear that the client would kill his cheating
wife, Harry calls Martin, his client’s assistant. “You don’t have my telephone
number,” Harry says when leaving a message for Martin. When Martin calls back
anyway, he tells Harry, “We prepare a full dossier of everyone who comes in
contact with the director. You know that means we’ve been watching you.” Well,
it doesn’t follow that having a dossier on someone also entails constant
surveillance.
Fearing that the director will
kill his wife and her lover, who works for the director, Harry gets a hotel room
next to the one where the wife and her lover were scheduled to meet. He
witnesses a murder there, and goes back to his apartment in fear, where Martin
calls. “We know that you now. For your own sake, don’t get involved any
further.” Harry then hears his own music playing on the phone, which suggests
that Martin has a listening device planted in the apartment. Harry tears it
apart looking for the bug, but he can’t find it.
The message of the film goes
beyond the moral lesson that Harry is indeed morally responsible for what his
clients do with his tapes, for without them the harm would not take place.
Interwoven with this realization in Harry is also his gradual realization that
his own privacy has been so utterly violated. Both realizations characterize his
character-arc.
I submit that we, like Harry, are
not aware of the extent to which we are subject to surveillance when we are in
public. Indeed, the trend, at least in the U.S. since 2001, has been almost
certainly been in the direction of increasing surveillance rather than more
liberty from it. Just as Harry comes to realize that his own business activity
has an ethical dimension, so too we may come to realize that being watched
involves a harm, and so the perpetrators can be culpable ethically.
One example of unethical
surveillance is the flawed theory that by intimidating people by maintaining a
nearly constant visible stationary presence, whether on a street or in the
produce section of a grocery store, police can use deter people from committing
crimes. At what cost though? The increasing trend points to the absence of a
check on the municipal employees with guns. Freedom from intimidation, and,
moreover, from fear, especially in a society replete with instances of police
brutality, is arguably an important part of political freedom in a democracy.
The gradual depletion of that part of liberty can easily go unnoticed because
the change is so gradual.
Receptionists in business offices
are gradually replaced by security guards, who not only must check us into a
corporate or bank building, but also check us out! In some cases, we can’t
leave the building unless we stop by security. This becomes even more
questionable legally where the security guards are replaced by police, who by
law cannot stop anyone without probable cause, at least in the United States.
It is in that country that I think the trajectory is perhaps especially
evident. Security guards at the main doors of a grocery store get replaced by
police, and they start wearing bullet-proof vests, and then they stand in the
produce section as if customers should be shot if they put a cucumber in a
pocket.
Security guards at (even small) colleges and universities have been replaced by, or, even worse, supplemented by private police departments, and those police employees can patrol off-campus to enforce the regulations of academic administrators, who don’t have democratic legitimacy. Yale is a case in point. The implication is that private organizations, in the case of private colleges and universities, have municipal police power. The sad thing is that students and faculty get used to being constantly observed, and even come to be oblivious to it. Yet the gradual psychological effects from the passive aggression, culture of paranoid distrust, and routinization of emergency lights on security and police cars that are stationary on a campus even on class days take their toll. In the film, Harry is surprised at the extent to which he has been under surveillance by non-state actors. Faculty, students, and alumni on campus may similarly be so oriented to their tasks, teaching and learning ideas, that the innocents are oblivious to the extent that they are being recorded by cameras and (yet, as if the cameras were not sufficient) watched by security and private police employees. Perhaps university stakeholders should have a conversation with university administrators about the extent of surveillance as being antipodal to academic culture and atmosphere, and thus with the free exchange of novel ideas.
As a student, I had taken the documentary seminar. As an alum, I put what I had learned to use, unobtrusively holding my phone-camera once I realized that a virulent security employee was continuously eyeing me as I was innocently leaving a film screening in December, 2023.
