By constantly disrupting the mutual anchorage of voice in image, and image in voice (Altman, 74; Metz, 26), and by confining the transmission of both to the protagonist's scope of perception / imagination / comprehension, our own act of interpretation is suspended. Furthermore, Harry Caul's use of these two forms of mediation of experience reveals a similar need on his part to suspend confrontation with a personal truth, by maintaining indirect and concealed control over the voice of the other; by controlling all perspectives, and betraying none, through interpretation or participation.
Speaking through the quoted/replayed conversation of others, he can - like a ventriloquist - dub their own expressions over his actions and dreams, partake in the scene while controlling the gaze upon it, penetrate experience without risking invasion or placement: For the ventriloquist's problem is exactly that of the sound track - how to retain control over the sound while attributing it to a carefully manipulated lifelike dummy with no independent life of its own. But [...] why give away one's right to speech? [...] Whereas the head-voice speaks the society's polite language, the body-voice speaks a more sincere, personal, and unguarded language. (Altman, 77-78).
"As opposed to other sexual drives", says Metz (59) the "perceiving drive" - combining into one the scopic drive and the invocatory drive - concretely represents the absence of its object in the distance at which it maintains it and which is part of its very definition: distance of the look, distance of listening. Psychophysiology makes a classic distinction between the "senses at a distance" (sight and hearing") and the others all which involve immediate proximity and which it calls the "senses of contact" (Pradines): touch, taste, smell, coenaethetic sense, etc. Freud notes that Voyeurism, like sadism in this respect, always keeps apart the object (here the object looked at) and the source of the drive, i.e. the generating organ (the eye); the voyeur does rot look at his eye. If it is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent object, voyeuristic desire, along with sadism, is the only desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this fundamental rent. (Metz, 60).
In borrowing the words (quoting) and in appropriating the voice and gaze of another (tapping), Harry Caul, like the maker of a (suspense) film, withdraws from the scene he records. Yet for the illusion of control to be maintained, "something that lets itself be seen without presenting itself to be seen, which has gone out of the room before leaving only its trace visible there" must remain within the scene. (Metz, 63). Absence is marked by sophisticated technology (an indication of an achievement of omnipresence) recognized by Harry Caul's colleagues; In cinema it is signified by "the aperture of the screen with its inevitable keyhole effect" (Ibid.).
"There is something", says Lacan, "whose absence can always be observed in a picture - which is not the case in perception. This is the central field, where the separating power of the eye is exercised to the maximum in vision" (108). The screen (or the sound-signal of a recording machinery), the mark of the absent eye / ear (camera / tape recorder), is the means by which the eye / ear, while concealing itself, also signifies itself as absent. Thus it maintains its position (as lack) within the gaze it constructs, and undermines the threat of its unmarked presence within the image rendered by mere perception; an image which hence fails to encompass the complete scene. "The primary identification" (of the spectator with himself as a pure act of perception), continues Metz ( 97), is not "constructed around a subject-object, but around a pure, all-seeing and invisible subject [...] And conversely, the seen is all thrust back on the pure object, the paradoxical object which derives its peculiar force from this act of confinement".
A story, told by nobody, is nevertheless received, and so, "in a sense, it is the "receiver" (or rather the receptacle) who tells it." The position chosen by Harry Caul (and by the film's spectator and maker) is that of a speaker refraining from dialogue, confessing the story of another (a quote) to an absent ear. Refusing to enter commercial exchange by exhibiting his own work, Harry nonetheless participates in a convention. His relations with coworkers or lover likewise strive to sustain a paradoxical involved anonymity, resembling his attempt to extract speech (voice) out of sound, while maintaining a distance which hence reduces the utterance back to sound. The complex relations between sound and image, quoting and tapping, are repeated in a drive directed towards an object maintained at a distance, an ambiguous pull inward and outward which places the eye at the heart of an image constructed by it.
By Harry's attempt to maintain a distance between himself and the couple he records, between sound and meaning; by the filmmaker's own deliberate act of suspending the resolution of the questions his narrative posits, the two strive to artificially stabilize a hierarchy of gazes and embedded utterances (quotes). The illusion the two construct of a pure reproduction depends upon anchorage. The film induces us to anchor the visual translation of the recorded sound in Harry's point of hearing, while establishing the illusion of the latter's omnipresence at the scene of the conversation. Harry himself, anchoring the recorded speech in a still photograph of the conversing couple, is caught in the belief in his power to accurately transfer sound without mediating meaning. In both instances Harry's mediation is acknowledged only as an absence within the scene he records.
Yet suspense is not maintained neither on the level of narration nor of narrative. In both cases it is released through the act of interpretation, the search for meaning which transforms listening to articulation, thus exposing the fundamental gap between speaker and utterance, eye and gaze. By allotting himself the role of an eavesdropper, Harry opens the passage through which he himself is drawn into the conversation recorded. The identification with an omnipresent gaze involves the risk of being submitted to it. The experience of the mirror as described by Lacan, which underlies this act of identification, is not only "situated on the side of the imaginary"; it also "makes possible a first access to the symbolic" (Metz, 6). It is the moment in which the gaze of the other is acknowledged as one enveloping - and initially generated - by the self's own vision. Since speaking is intertwined with listening (quoting with tapping), one's own expression is always already also that of the other, and as such can never be ultimately controlled or anchored; its meaning spills over, commenting upon the context/agent of articulation.
The scene of "The Conversation" literalizes the ambiguous placement of its protagonist (subject / object), who is drawn to the heart of the dialogue by becoming the agent of his own as well as the husband's and our interpretation of the spoken words. A series of images dispersed throughout the film metaphorically represent the split inherent in the act of looking and being looked at by a mirror. Harry's van's windows form a one way mirror through which we see (and Stan photographs) two women looking at themselves, ignorant of the presence of another gaze. In the convention Harry himself, surprised by his reflection in a video monitor, asserts his control by opening a passage through the video camera and beyond the scope of his own reflection, only to reveal another gaze upon himself (that of the Director's assistant following him). And in the final scene we find him once again seeking refuge from an invading sound in his reflection in the mirror.
The glass plane of the mirror, receiving and confronting projected images
from both the self and the other, thus forms an arena of discourse (a
double monologue). It is upon this middle ground that the event / self
is projected as "already different" (see opening quote), as the "paradoxical
object" mentioned by Metz (7), "which derives its peculiar force from
this act of confinement" (looking). Voice, displaced by repetition and
mediation, indeed penetrates distinct contexts. With each new interaction
the indexical potential of the reiterated utterances is realized momentarily
in a different manner. It functions as a comment (upon "him"); an
address (to "you"), and a private expression (by "me"). Released from
its anchor in the
image / speaker, it overwhelms and intrudes upon them by its excess of
possible meanings. The balance sustained by illusion of closure and hierarchy,
the distance sought after by the voyeur or the mimetic reader, whereby
sound and image are mutually anchored, cannot hold. The image of the listener
is "spoken" by displaced utterances, which place him as object at the
heart of a gaze stemming from a vanishing point; a gaze which he himself,
as a private-eye, released.
Already in the first replay of the recorded conversation in Harry Caul's laboratory, one segment of the conversation is displaced from the reproduced visual image of the couple talking. It is a phrase which points at a third party ("O, look at him"), a beggar lying on a bench, observed by the woman. The quality of sound in this segment, an added echo, invokes the location in which the recording is heard, and which immediately sets a spatial relation between the act of speaking and that of hearing. Following is a cut to Harry's image in the lab, listening to the tape, over which the woman proceeds to express a relation towards "him". The transparency of the initial section of the recording (in which we see an image which corresponds to the sound heard) is undermined; sound is relocated in the settings of a third party, an audience (Harry), while the indexical mark itself ("him") transfers the gaze to this third party, reinterpreting his position as that of an outsider.
This interchange of references marks the initial stages of a process whereby the protagonist is drawn into a dialogue with the recorded conversation ("the simplest conversation presupposes the alternation of the "I" and the "you" (Metz, 46)), one resembling his musical dialogue with a record. In a later scene with the prostitute in his laboratory, after the party has ended, we find Caul "dubbing" the recorded conversation over his own dialogue with the woman now also openly interpreting and anticipating segments of it. A polyphony of voices is formed, fusing the identities of all participants through a slippage of indexical signs. We view the prostitute while hearing the recorded woman commenting about "him", her husband, and the image shifts to that of Harry, momentarily anchoring the indexical sign in him. Responding to what he hears, he expresses anxiety ("It makes me feel"), the appropriateness of which is rejected by the prostitute, who asserts the difference between the context of work and that of his private life, thus establishing a new layer of identification between her, a prostitute, and Harry, both (we find retrospectively) appropriating ("stealing") the voices recorded. Inserted into her speech is the overvoice of the woman - "what about me?" - voicing the victim (of a theft), as well as Harry's guilty conscience. The tape roles on, juxtaposing and relating fear, guilt, sex and religion, contrasting and mutually shaping the two scenes. Once again the woman's comment in relation to the beggar ("him") is dubbed over Harry's image, this time relying on the visual semblance between the two helpless lying figures. The prostitute takes Harry's glasses off, echoing a later recorded fragment ("you have something in your eye"); thus she displaces the lover as "you", while evoking the metaphor of blindness. Finally, a third figure is implied (in addition to husband and beggar) - ''do you see him, the man with the hearing aid?", a voice over Harry's attentive expression. Then the two scenes merge into one: the last segments intertwine with the present dialogue to a degree which extracts the voices or roles of man/woman from the particular scenes.
The web which relates, through a transposed third person index, between tapper, husband and beggar, is reinforced by later scenes in which we view the husband himself listening to the recording, and finally lying dead under a plastic cover (resembling Harry's rain coat) in a manner which mirrors the lying figures of Harry and the beggar in previous scenes. A parallel web relates tapper, lover and husband through the recurrence of a fragment in the first person ("I can't stand it any longer"), while a shift between "you" - the listener - and "him" - the murderer, is effected through the dialogue between Harry and the husband, in the latter's office: the segment referring to "him, the man with the hearing aid" is dubbed over Harry's image, only to shift through his gaze to a photograph of the husband. In response to Harry's question - what are You going to do with them, the recording answers "He'll kill us if he had the chance".
The interchange between indexical signs, and through them, between the various participants as well as between their roles, conveys a dialogue controlled by no one, which transgresses and displaces the boundaries of the identities of all, through a "gay relativity" of image and phrase. Appropriated, the voice and phrase of the other ("him"), rereads and speaks ("I") through the listener, the addressee ("you"). Harry, a third person outsider to the scene, is drawn into it, only to find himself as a mediator of the crime, speaking for the murderers / lovers, and hence a victim of their plot, an ultimate object (him) of their gaze, like husband or beggar. The two webs (Tapper-beggar-husband and Tapper-lover-murderer) are related through Harry's shift from an initial outsider's position (tapper), through his act of mediation of murder (by supplying the tape to the husband), to his ultimate isolation and victimization. A circular camera movement, stemming from Harry's point of view, in the scene of crime (the hotel room), only to conclude with a view of him, visualizes his entrapment within a gaze initiated by himself.
In "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences" Bakhtin defines form as "Stereotyped, congealed, old (familiar) content. Form serves as a necessary bridge to new, still unknown content". (Speech Genres and Other Essays, p.165). The two - form and content - are placed within a time sequence, which undermines the hierarchical distinction between them. There exists a continuity between the form of perception and the object perceived, a continuity denied by the voyeur. The gaze into the mirror is continuous with the moment of the recognition of the Other, with the moment of loss of control, where form (my point of view) is viewed as content by the new form it breads (the Other's point of view, implied by the mirror).
If form is a congealed content, then every gaze is potentially also an object to be looked at. There is no way of stabilizing that which is defined from within as the "outside". The latter is constantly co-opted into the frame, by new frames. It is this drift inward which underlies the claustrophobic experience expressed by the film. The recorded voice, a quote, in "search" of an anchor, draws every listener and every image into the scene of the conversation, by interpreting them, by making them its own referent (or content). Thus the pun (speaking/hearing; quoting/tapping), at its extreme moments of realization (opening scene v.s. final scene) encapsulates the antithetical instances of the drama. The indexical sign "him" refers both to the spectator/tapper, placed outside the conversation at the vanishing point of the image (its form of representation or perception); and to the spectacle, the object, the content of the quote (in the last telephone call, Harry's music is quoted by its replayed recording (I am relying here on Goodman's definition of the quote as a mode of containment and referral. (Ways of Worldmaking, 41)).
Indeed, inversion of roles and meanings, the product of interaction (dialogue), underlies the irony of the film (see also Doane's discussion of irony as the gap - of knowledge - between the gaze of the other and that of the self, Cinema and Language, 37). The sound of flushing water conceals Harry's tapping of the crime scene; and it is by the very same means that the crime is exposed. The dialectic relation between concealment (security) and exposure is implied also by Harry's transparent plastic rain coat (and images relating to it, such as the bathroom screen). It is when he feels most secure that Harry is exposed, tapped, betrayed (e.g. by Moran's pen, or when robbed of his tapes). And it is by the very same form of voyeurism he himself applied, that he is threatened and trapped (See also Palmer's discussion of the film's tragic structure (reversal): the identity between sin and punishment (Palmer, 31)).
Drifting from one end to the other, Harry Caul is trapped as an outsider (a "him'') within his own deconstructed home, an object of the arbitrary "gaze" of the objects surrounding him. Segments of the final scene are shot from the angle of the telephone, as well as from an invisible source which mirrors the direction of Harry's gaze (e.g. upon the icon of the Virgin), and yet which stems from a distinct source. A projection of Harry's view, the shot nonetheless objectifies the gaze of an absent other. Discontinuous with his own view, the projected gaze indifferently scans the room, no longer pointing at a particular "him". Thus it robs us, who are situated at the other side of the screen, from the illusion of a re/presented presence (indexicality); and interferes, by objectifying an arbitrary gaze, with our identification with it.
The transparent glass - the space of interaction (of dialogue, an interchange
of (indexical) signs) - is stained, thus frustrating the possibility of
an illusion of interaction (through a mutual projection of signs). Harry
exists for us and for himself only in the conspicuous mediation of his
own reproduction, only as "already different". The (mimetic) illusion
of viewing an event through a clear glass, the illusion of a three dimensional
world (I - you - him), is undermined. What we see in the final scene is
the glass itself, a reflection as such, the site of dialogue implying
and yet ultimately isolating its participants from each other.
Reference Cited:
1. Altman Rick, "Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism'', in Yale French Studies, 1980.
2. Bakhtin Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin, Univ. of Texas Press, 1986.
3. Doane Mary Ann, "The Film's Time and the Spectator's Space", in Cinema and Language, ed. Heath & Mellencamp, Univ. Publications of America, 1967.
4. Doane Mary Ann, "The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space", in Yale French Studies, 1980.
5. Goodman Nelson, Ways Of Worldmaking, Hackett Publishing Co.1978.
6. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psych-Analysis, ed. Jaque-Allain Miller, W.W.Norton & Co., N.Y.1973.
7.Metz Christian, "Aural Objects", in Yale French Studies, 1980.
8.Metz Christian, The Imaginary Signifier, Indiana Univ.Press, 1977.
9.Palmer James W., "'The Conversation': Coppola's Biography of an Unborn Man", Film Heritage, 12:1, Fall 1976, p.26-32.
10.Stam Bob, ''Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique", Postmodernism and Its Discontents, ed. Ann Kaplan, Verso Press, 1988.