The Conversation
Saturday, January 07, 2006
The Conversation
I wanted to start this by saying that American movies are about professionalism, but that's a little like saying that American movies are about Americans. Movies have at their core a strict morality: in America, moral life is defined by professionalism. The transcendent and fairly socialist nature of Christian faith would have been debunked in American life long ago if it had not transformed itself from a legitamite religion into a fearfully organized political bloc.
So Godard has his indolent teenaged Marxists beset by the vacuous Americanized girls around them, and Howard Hawks has his go-to professionals, beset by greedy bosses from above and by mendacious or semi-crippled employees from below. Godard interrogates his actors and by implication the audience. Hawks makes himself, as he'd say, "indispensable" to both. His characters, From Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings to John Wayne in Rio Bravo, are always the best at what they do. His employees need him. His employers couldn't live without him. In short, his protagonists are always directors: like Hawks, super-competent, super-virile, super everything. The perfect middle managers.
Francis Ford Coppola's best movies have at their heart this Hawksian concern for professionalism: he wants to be more sympathetic to the European cast of mind but can't do it. It's not coincidental that his best films were made at the time he was most engaged in the struggle to launch his independent studio. Like every middle manager, he wanted to become the boss. And so he turned Michael Corleone's struggle into his own, and turned his professional obligations into classical drama. Almost too classical, actually, which makes Coppola's best (or at least his most Hawksian) film The Conversation.
If you haven't seen it, the film's titular "conversation" is recorded by Gene Hackman, playing a freelance surveillance specialist, in the masterful first scene. A proto-yuppie couple is walking through a park. We see that they are being followed, watched. Close-up on a shopping bag: it must be more than what it seems. The young couple are having a conversation. Close up on a mirrored van: we see that Hackman is inside, surrounded by a lavish assortment of sound equiptment. The conversation is being recorded using the most state-of-the-art, the most invasive--the most professionally standard--equipment available. The conversation itself is awash in banality and ambiguity. It's about nothing, about the scene around them. They may or may not be talking about a murder though the word is not used, and either way it doesn't matter. What is exciting is the way in which Hackman is recording it. We hear the conversation from his range of hearing--that is, behind the distorted crackling of his device. Like any professional, he knows this can be fixed later. But as viewers, we see their lips move at odds with the "false" recording. We are surveilling them, too, removed from the action, encouraged to settle in to watching the movie as if it were another job. Only later will the implications of that word--murder--become apparent, and this ambiguity tests Hackman's limitations as a professional as the film progresses because it is one thing to be professional with some object in mind and another to be professional in one's attitude towards the truth. None of this matters in the opening shot of the film. To watch Hackman work is exciting enough. The rest of the film--the growth of Hackman's conscious, his consideration of the meaning of that word, murder--is a fall from cinematic grace. There is no better scene in the film that this opening scene, no better question than the one which asks, will he get away with this?
I think that Coppola thought something different when he was making this movie. He was after "art" in the continental sense. He mentions Antonioni often enough when talking about this film that it's safe to bet he was striving for an American version of Blow Up. If he had followed that plan to the letter the result would have been awful. Blow Up is an indication that European art cinema is simply dumb in a different way than the Hollywood kind. It will suffice to say that I find the comparison of the free play of my spirit to a bunch of mimes playing tennis deeply offensive. But Robert Evans dug it, probably for the cheesecake, so what we're supposed to take away from Antonioni's "masterpiece" was that it was a core document of the American Cinema of the Seventies, and probably Coppola was as starstruck by it as the rest of them.
Coppola did not, fortunately, achieve the level of artiness that Antonioni achieved, falling back on the framework of most good American storytelling: crime. There is no mistaking the mimes that appear in The Conversation for anything but street hustlers, just one part of the action being caught, an ostentatiously silent and unrecordable presence among others not so ostentatious, all of which fall away as unnecessary to the ear of the professional surveillance man. In this role, Gene Hackman has no periphery and has not had one for a long time. To allow himself one would mean letting in not just some information but absolutely all of it, the whole myriad universe. Thus he is alone in the world and unable to deal with friendship or love. He keeps his girlfriend in an apartment and spies on her. he keeps his telephone in a desk drawer, like a gun. He is the only freak in the room who truly loves his job, alive and attentive to its every nuance. He is like every boss I've ever had. He runs on that mixture of fear and self-righteous, nearly adolescent, disgust for which ordinary moral choices are "not job-related" and which defines modern professional life from politics to academia to plumbing.
I think that Coppola can relate to Hackman. I would go so far as to think that Hackman is his avatar. And if that's not the case, Hackman is at least a stand-in for the film's sound editor, Walter Murch. Murch’s soundtrack is the star of the picture in a very real way. It dominates the picture like a thrash metal guitarist soloing on his back with a bowstring. It's fascinating to hear but somewhat distastefully showoffy. He must have missed a year's worth of his kid's baseball games in order to finish this film. If so, such professionalism paid off: it's a great performance, and his work on the titular conversation, the way it gets manipulated through static and interference gives it a life of its own. At a certain point someone begins innocently to play the tape of this conversation during a party and it's as if a monster began ballooning through the door.
So how are we to feel about the ending of this film, the idea that Hackman, in falling outside of his professional strictures and pursuing instead the "truth" of the crime his taped conversation only alludes to, would be led into insanity? Is Coppola telling us, stick to the job or you'll go nuts? What's happening here is the same thing that happens in old gangster movies. The explicit message is crime does not pay; the implicit message is, but look at all the liquor and women. The same thing happens in The Conversation. Sure Hackman winds up insane, playing his saxophone alone in a gutted apartment; but he was the best.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:45 PM,
