Surveillance Rituals and
Exhibition: Extending The
Conversation
Nathaniel Pope
December 2007
“Seeing these technoloiges and practices over and over in our popular
culture, and particularly in cinema, we witness a scorn for the
boundaries between the public and the private, between the interior and
the exterior. And in doing so popular culture has created the sense
that surveillance is normal--the aesthetic accompaniment to the end of
privacy. Films that feature surveillance as a vehicle for spectacle,
suspense, and violence demonstrate how we are no longer affected or
unsettled by the video gaze or bodily intrusion. They have become
ordinary images.”
-John Turner
Since the birth of cinema, film and cultural critics
have noted the emergence of the spectacle as a challenge to traditional
rituals of art – especially concerning the medium's capacity to
“distract” the masses. In 1936 Walter Benjamin famously warned of the
loss of artwork's so called “aura” in the age of technological
reproducibility stating that “even the most perfect reproduction of a
work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space,
its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220).
Benjamin saw spectacle as “politicizing art” such that cult values gave
way to that of exhibition, art losing all claims of “authenticity.”
However, recent advances in information technologies have seen this
debate transmuted to encompass surveillance technologies and concerns
of privacy in an era of mechanical and digital reproduction, plotting
the collapse of boundaries between public and private spheres.
In this paper I will examine the work of paranoia in
an era of surveillance spectacles, tracing important roots of this
emergent genre back to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 favorite, The Conversation. I will use a
Benjaminian cultural approach to analyze the film, engaging the
critiques of Peter Cowie, Leo Braudy, John Turner, Dennis Turner, James
Clark, Patrick Chabal, and published interviews of Coppola himself. My
argument will most closely follow that of John Turner who has argued
that “spectacle and surveillance become increasingly merged in popular
culture, particularly evident in popular cinema” (95). Turner cites The Conversation (1974) as “a kind
of Orwellian morality play about electronic eavesdropping” (109).
I will focus on the tension between cult and exhibition value embodied
in the film, paying particular attention to the way paranoia is
pacified through distractive modes of reception. Ultimately, all that
is cult melts into an exhibitionist air of post-Watergate voyeurism,
the rituals of the film brat all but apparent as the viewer is
subverted to the position of the eavesdropper- distracted as Harry Caul
comes to terms with his profession. This spectatorial position requires
no attention. The public becomes an absent-minded eavesdropper.
Prior to delving into the subject of The Conversation, there are two
interrelated questions we should keep in mind. Mainly, what are the
moral stakes involved in the collapse of the category of surveillance
with that of spectacle and are viewers really unremitting given the
voyeuristic pleasure and intoxicating value of surveillance as
commodity (Debord)? The primary moral stake is that of privacy,
dignity, personal space and solitude coming into direct conflict with
the demands of entertainment and scopophilia. While individuals are
generally reluctant to give up their own personal sense of privacy,
they are generally far too willing to embrace the cinematic gaze,
becoming peeping toms as long as their victims remain unaware or unable
to prevent their surveillance. Assured of their own privacy, film
viewers are able to maintain a sense of detachment while peering in on
the lives of others. However, The Conversation challenges traditional
rituals of privacy, encouraging viewers to embrace panopticism by
reworking traditional Hollywood narrative thematics, formal devices and
spectator relations all flowing from Coppola’s interest in audio and
surveillance culture. For it is the underlying morals that constitute
the real paranoia to be found in the film, yet one whose glorified
exposure ultimately distracts spectators.
Peter Cowie in his review “Picking Up The Conversation” describes the
film as the most intense and impassioned film in the Coppola cannon,
relating Harry Caul to Coppola, both “Catholic[s] disturbed by the
collision during the 1970s between a commitment to faith and an
obsession with the new technology” (83). Not so ironically, Cowie
traces the roots of the film back to a conversation between Coppola and
director Irvin Kershner quoting Coppola, “we were talking about
eavesdropping and bugging, and he told me about some long-distance
microphones that could overhear what people were saying” (83). Cowie
explains that subsequently thereafter, Kershner sent Coppola an article
about a San Francisco sound wizard– Hal Lipset, whose expertise would
subsequently be called upon during the Watergate investigations. In
1967, Coppola then developed the film’s basic premise: that of an
audio-surveillance expert, inspired by Lipset, Antonioni’s
Blow-Up and Herman Hesse’s Steppenworlf. It is this basic
authorial foundation, grounded in a cult glorification of technological
wonder, great men of science, and auteur cinema that constitutes the
ritualistic background of The Conversation and film brat cinema in
general. James Clarke even notes that Coppola’s “acknowledged love of
technology partly fuels the premise” and made the film ripe for a
post-Watergate release. (57) Catholism can be understood as filling in
the rest of the ritualistic background and foundation. All in all,
technology and religion underlie paranoia to be found in the film,
their collapse coinciding with that of private and public spheres.
Technology becomes cult religion to be exhibited.
Leo Braudy in “The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola,
Depalma, Scorsese” explains that Coppola “is committed to storytelling
and narrative of an older sort, in accord with his commitment to genre
and family ritual as structures of feeling that he wishes would still
retain their ability to compel belief” (20). In other words, Catholic
upbringing manifests itself in Coppola’s self-conscious film making
style. Braudy also compares Caul to Coppola and the figure of the
director, “whose technical mastery has been his passport to success”
(22). Yet this duality causes tension, an “interplay between the
technological future and the mythic past...a dialectic, a
Jekyll-and-Hyde split in his commitments as film-maker and moral
story-teller” (22). In other words, we see a Benjaminian pull between
rituals of storytelling and exhibition of the spectacle, particularly
manifest through Harry’s technological expertise, but simultaneous
angst and ultimate social isolation.
But how does the spectacle and surveillance become
increasingly merged in The Conversation, paranoia pacified through
distractive modes of reception?
Patrick Chabal in “Copping out with Coppola”
explains that thematically, The Conversation constitutes “a combination
of Blow-Up and The Pawnbroker,” Harry Caul a “reclusive electronic
eavesdropper, persecuted by guilt, anxious to avoid entanglement and
moral responsibility” (187). Chabal understands the film as “heavily”
Antonionian, especially through “the frantic attempt to preserve a
dissolving identity” (189). Dennis Turner in “The Subject of the
Conversation” adds that “the film is concerned with its own textuality,
engaged in an ongoing drive to constitute iteself as narrative, yet
haunted by a memory of a divided subject” (5). James Clarke notices,
“the film beautifully fuses mainstream narrative demands with more
esoteric, psychological and philosophical elements, which are the
film’s points of real interest....The film was released post-Watergate
and so was regarded as especially, and errily, prescient” adding that
“Coppola’s concept hinges on the moral aspects of the story rather than
the mechanics of a whoduit” (57). Coppola himself, however, is known to
have simply stated that what we see going on with the characters is
exactly what is going on with the audience. And it is here that we can
begin to note surveillance as a narrative device of the spectacle- both
inter and extra textually. I will now examine the The Conversation in terms laid out
by John and Dennis Turner.
John Turner in "Collapsing the Interior/Exterior
Distinction: Surveillance, Spectacle, and Suspense in Popular Cinema,”
explains that “many of the films that address the practice of
surveillance or use surveillance technologies in their narratives do so
as an opportunity to celebrate the spectacle elements invested in
surveillance or to integrate the use of surveillance as a narratival
device to promote suspense” (94) citing the evolving relationship
between Caul and his equipment as a prime means of collapsing
distinctions. Turner notices that Caul “moves from a fetishistic
relationship toward his equipment and his tapes toward a voyeuristic
drive to solve the mystery of what is going to happen to the young
woman whose vice he has been commissioned to tape” (108). It is in this
drive that Harry becomes a “trained expert thoroughly enmeshed in ‘the
apparatus,’ and the spectator becomes distracted, lost in a moral tale
of “audio-voyeurism” that discredits privacy by conditioning viewers to
pervasive surveillance. (108) Turner laments that this panopticism
“transforms the will and practice of the surveillance society into a
spectacle,” explaining that “by mixing the activity of invasive
monitoring devices with entertainemnent, Hollywood cinema and
television productions gloss over the collective anxieties about being
spied upon and reduce it to the seductive emotion of voyeuristic
delight” (107). Although Harry is the “best in the business,” his
paranoid secrecy ultimately seals his fate. Dennis Turner adds that
“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” (5).
However, the film ultimately works to normalize this outcome rather
than rejecting it as Harry finally finds peace with his saxophone in a
disheveled reality, overcoming paranoia to accept his surveillance.
The Conversation
compels spectators to passively accept pacified paranoia through
distractive modes of representation. On the surface, this stems from
the very act of voyeurism, looking in on Harry. As Turner (D) reveals,
there is an uncomfortable viewing displeasure that partially limits the
validity of this claim. As such, the film’s ending remains our ultimate
source of evidence. However, a closer look reveals that the blurring
distinction between ritual and exhibition as manifested by a culture of
citation coupled with scopophilic aesthetics limit viewers’ ability to
think and learn beyond the scope of the text. They are but warped
representations, creating new realities rather than informing everyday
life. John Turner explains this in terms of inter-textual citation:
“Just as in Blow-Up, a film The Conversation pays obvious
homage to, there is a naive faith in the visible and audible; in the
piercing of public and private boundaries; the erosion of interior and
exterior distinctions….information from surveillance practice does not
necessarily produce “knowledge,” and that surveillance technology and
its technicians may be more directly involved in creating reality
rather than making a record of it” (109). The reality created is one of
passive reception that warms viewers to the idea of surveillance
through an aesthetic end to privacy.
In conclusion, reading The Conversation as a surveillance
spectacle is an important step to take in order to understand how films
come to affect viewers, altering very foundational moral principles,
mainly those concerning privacy and dignity that one feels towards
public boundaries. For although there is no academically
respectable way to maintain that surveillance spectacles intrinsically
desensitize viewers, the unfamiliar, mystifying and entertaining
quality of The Conversation
deny viewers the ability to fully digest and comprehend the positive
and/or negative ramifications of the invasion of privacy, collapsing
boundaries, and voyeuristic pleasure without extending the conversation
beyond the scope of the film. Furthermore, as surveillance becomes more
and more ubiquitous, people have become less aware that such
ramifications even exist– surveillance has become a part of everyday
life. If the moral debate existed around the time of The Conversation’s initial release,
it has since melted into a sea of surveillance spectacles. Yet as
surveillance becomes more and more quotidian, how will viewers respond?
Will Benjamin’s claim, “the adjustment of reality to the masses and of
the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for
thinking as for perception” (Benjamin 223) hold true? Will the
conversation continue?
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken
Books: New York, 1968.
Braudy, Leo. “The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese” Film
Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3. (Spring, 1986), pp. 17-28.
Clark, James. Coppola. Virgin Books: London, 2003.
Cowie, Peter. Coppola. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1990.
Francis Ford Coppola Interviews. Eds. Gene D Phillips and Rodney Hill.
University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 2004.
Chabal, Patrick and Paul Joannides “Copping out with Coppola” Cambridge
Quarterly XIII: 187-203.
Turner, Dennis, “The Subject of "The Conversation," Cinema Journal,
Vol. 24, No. 4. (Summer, 1985), pp. 4-22.
Turner, John S, “Collapsing the Interior/Exterior Distinction:
Surveillance, Spectacle, and Suspense in Popular Cinema” Wide Angle,
Vol. 20, No. 4. (October, 1998), pp. 92-123.