A semi-clad model gazed out from the cover of the May 20, 1966, issue of Life magazine, a fearful expression on her face. She looked over her shoulder—perhaps aware, perhaps not, of the electronic recording device, about the size of a matchbook, taped to her bare back. The cover story addressed the high-tech surveillance beginning to infiltrate every aspect of American life; espionage devices and techniques had trickled down from the Cold War into the domestic consumer market, where they were used by mobsters, rival businessmen, and jealous spouses. “Bugging is so shockingly widespread and so increasingly insidious,” the story proclaimed, “that no one can be certain any longer that his home is his castle—free of intrusion.”
Around this time, a hotshot UCLA film student named Francis Ford Coppola learned about a long-range microphone so advanced that it could pick up the back-and-forth of a couple walking in a crowd. He imagined two people seen from far away, walking through a public place, a microphone trained on their mouths, their voices on the soundtrack. Over the next few years, as Coppola became one of the standard-bearers of the counterculture-savvy New Hollywood of the 1960s and ’70s, he gathered research about the field of surveillance and played with a script. Eventually, he decided his story should be an existential study of the man behind the microphone.
Coppola’s script became The Conversation, which took on new relevance as it went into production against the backdrop of a metastasizing Watergate scandal; the movie would be awarded the top prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. But the film’s distillation of twitchy unease and conspiratorial thinking was more ambient than politically specific. Though recent appreciations of The Conversation have aptly drawn parallels between the film and our semi-voluntary participation in the digital panopticon half a century on, Coppola’s film is more precisely a reflection of how surveillance shapes the power imbalances that define the world of work.
To participate in the modern workforce is to self-censor, in ways large and small—to bend one’s endeavor to the goals of an organization and avoid exposing the oppositional or even unproductive sides of one’s personality. During the time Coppola made The Conversation, the KGB installed the first keystroke logger on IBM typewriters in the U.S. embassy. Today, this tool, among many others, is commonly used by employers to monitor both salaried and contract workers alike, making the average worker feel perpetually monitored and morally compromised, even in private—conforming to a will that is not their own.
In The Conversation, Harry Caul, the genius wiretapper played by Gene Hackman, is himself an independent contractor ensnared in a web of surveillance meant to keep him compliant and complicit. In his own life, he takes precautions that teeter between pragmatic and paranoid: His door has three locks, he keeps his phone hidden away in a desk drawer, and when he receives a birthday gift from his landlady, he has his mail rerouted to a post-office box. (The scene will resonate with any viewer who’s ever been unpleasantly surprised, upon receipt of an e-card, to discover that her dentist knows her birthday.) Caul has seen firsthand the ubiquity of surveillance in daily life, and closed himself off accordingly. Previously employed by the United States government, he is a technical savant whose professional high-water mark—the recording of a seemingly unrecordable conversation between suspected co-conspirators—may have contributed to the suicide of the target of a federal investigation.
[Read: The 13 best movies about why you shouldn’t trust the government]
Feeling guilty over the fallout of this last government job, Caul moved West to San Francisco and now works in the private sector, which begins to seem hardly less venal. In the film’s opening sequence, Caul records a young couple on a lunchtime date in San Francisco’s Union Square, on behalf of a quasi-omniscient executive referred to only as “the Director”; the executive’s assistant (Harrison Ford) trails Caul to a professional convention and, like an especially malevolent project manager, hounds him to turn in his new recordings. That this work is degrading and unsavory comes through in Coppola’s depiction of the sad little party Caul hosts after the convention, where professional rivals drink brown-bag liquor and paw at the sales models they dragged there. They all listen to the Union Square recording, weighing in with callous shop talk and petty jokes as the young couple’s conversation, banal and intimate, echoes around the room. (A modern viewer might recall Edward Snowden’s account of NSA contractors routinely passing around intercepted nudes.)
Caul treats his invasion of the couple’s privacy in the opening scene as a technological problem, and the content of their conversation as immaterial. But he’s haunted by the worry in the girl’s voice when she says that someone, presumably Caul’s employer, would “kill us if he got the chance.” When Caul confesses his ambivalence and anxiety to one of the women at his party, she counsels a kind of ethical passivity, reassuring him that his work is “only a trick.” She corrects herself to say “job,” but the message is the same: He can choose to feel dirty or detached in his work, just as in sex work. She would know, as the Director’s assistant has hired her to sleep with Caul and steal his tapes.
Precisely such compartmentalization has, we gather, carried Caul to the apex of his field. His character was based on Bernard Spindel, described in the Life cover story as “the No. 1 big-league freelance eavesdropper and wiretapper in the U.S.” (Caul’s rival, played by Allen Garfield, tells an anecdote taken almost verbatim from the magazine, about tapping a tenement payphone.) At the time of his death, in 1971, aged just 48 years old, Spindel had begun the process of appealing a conviction for conducting illegal surveillance on the wife of the A&P heir Huntington Hartford. “I’m a private practitioner, and I work for anybody who wants to find out if anybody’s on ’em, and I don’t ask for a pedigree,” Spindel told Life.
This kind of amoral perfectionism takes its toll and leaves Caul hollowed out, as Coppola shows. The Conversation was heavily inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which a photograph, rather than an audio recording, is scoured for clues to a murder plot. Shooting in San Francisco, Coppola recycled the Italian director’s visual shorthand for the alienation of modern life, capturing San Francisco’s postindustrial architecture in defamiliarizing shots and making Caul an isolated figure in a strange high-tech world. The Director’s office is in One Embarcadero Center, which was then, alongside the Transamerica Pyramid, one of the newest and tallest skyscrapers attracting corporate tenants to the city’s rapidly expanding Financial District, now home to the likes of Wells Fargo and Salesforce. Coppola filmed its reflective facade and spaceship-white lobby at stark, off-kilter angles, and pointed his camera down eerily depopulated corridors, highlighting the artificiality and remoteness of the structures—physically and otherwise—that govern us. “Antoniennui,” the ’60s buzzword for Antonioni’s elegant aesthetic of spiritual exhaustion, also gets a downmarket American spin in The Conversation: Coppola strands Caul in settings reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting—as a solitary commuter on a creaky bus, a sad man in a telephone booth—that conjure the loneliness of the man in the mid-century urban landscape.
[Read: I turned my home into a fortress of surveillance]
Caul’s profound atomization makes him an ideal cog in the wheel of a terrible plot, until it doesn’t. He carries the weight of other people’s secrets as his own; a Catholic, he unburdens himself to a priest half-seen through the screen of a confession booth. As the priest, like an eavesdropper, lurks silently in the shadows, Caul is both watcher and watched, imagining himself spied on by God, and still atoning for his original sin: the recording that was so perfect, it may have gotten someone killed. The Conversation gives heft to the cliché of the “soul-crushing job”—the Union Square recording on behalf of the Director is one gig that really does come with life-and-death consequences (albeit not the ones that Caul imagines).
Eventually, Caul dissolves the wall between his professional life and personal values, attempting, with a desperation bordering on the pathetic, to save the lives he believes he has endangered. As he clashes with his employer and sweeps his apartment for bugs, his plight evokes a contemporary feeling. Bringing his work home, as it were, brings Caul to the edge of sanity, culminating in the film’s extraordinary climax, in which he tears up his apartment, even breaking open a statuette of the Virgin Mary. In another kind of film, he would find a device hidden inside, ironic proof that God is watching (or listening). Coppola offers no such definitive closure, and so Caul continues to rip up his life down to the studs.
As Caul takes apart his phone, stereo, and lamp, he begins to resemble the housewife protagonist of Todd Haynes’s film Safe, who becomes abruptly alienated from all suburban consumer comforts when she’s stricken with a mysterious “environmental illness.” Caul could be answering in the affirmative to the question posed by that film: “Are you allergic to the 20th century?” For modern viewers, it may be the 21st—you might recall the hours you’ve wasted turning off the tracking on various smart appliances, all the websites you’ve asked not to collect your data. Is it saner to simply shrug and acquiesce? The last shot of the film sees Caul sitting in the wreckage of his life, the camera sweeping back and forth like the perspective of a closed-circuit surveillance feed. Someone is still keeping tabs on him.
