Overhearing (in) Touch of Evil and The Conversation: from “real time” surveillance to its recording

ABSTRACT

Across the twentieth century cinema transitions from the depiction of surveillance as a “real time” event toward its representation as what leaves an artifact or record. This essay concerns the heightened intensity of paranoid listening, or “overhearing”, that accompanies this technological change. Touch of Evil (1958) serves as a “transitional object”, insofar as its denouement features “real time” pursuit yet points toward a different outcome, one that would involve analysis of the recording produced during its final scene of surveillance. By emphasising both the return to audio via recording as well as the unique point-of-audition of its protagonist, The Conversation (1974) radicalises the potential for overhearing already to be found in Touch of Evil. In The Conversation, “simple” listening becomes overhearing: a hyperbolic and paranoid form of interpreting what has been gleaned through eavesdropping. Somewhat unexpectedly, it can be shown that Touch of Evil carries within itself, in embryo, all of the ambiguity and dissonance of the later film: that it, too, is fascinated by the possibility of auditory surveillance that might become an overhearing, or hearing awry, driven by the psychic need of the listener.

KEYWORDS:

• The Conversation
• overhearing
• point-of-audition
• sound design
• surveillance
• Touch of Evil

From event to record

The twentieth century history of cinematic surveillance can be divided into several distinct modes of overlooking and of overhearing. In designating these modes one ought to consider both the technical possibilities of the medium as well as the incorporation of other media into film. So, for example, there is a difference in the type of surveillance that can be represented in the silent era versus what can happen after the arrival of sound.¹ And a major shift occurs once audio may be recorded on to tape and a film is able to “play” voices tape recorded within its diegesis. Surveillance first appears as an event. But as the century advances, cinematic investigators, as well as audiences, become increasingly interested in what they are able to do in the aftermath of surveillance with its record.²

To give an example of the “event” paradigm, in Modern Times (Chaplin 1936), a zealous boss monitors the employees at his factory and disrupts, via a futuristic telescreen, the smoke break Chaplin’s distressed character attempts to steal for himself in the workers’ bathroom. It does not appear, however, that the panoptic overseer possesses the means by which he could construct an archive of such moments of indolence. Rather, the event is significant for the way it unfolds in the “present tense” of the film, that is, for the way Chaplin’s repose is observed and interrupted in something like “real time”.³

It takes a couple of decades for surveillance to be combined with recording technology such that a return to the scene of surveillance becomes a possibility. Touch of Evil (Welles 1958) is one of the first films to combine surveillance with recording. The film appears just as some of the first portable tape recorders, such as those made by Nagra, were becoming commercially available and represents something of a “cutting edge” use of technology. It should be noted that the proliferation of audio recording (and, by extension, audio surveillance) anticipates the proliferation of video (more viable as a surveillance technology than film) by several decades. The recording of audio figures fairly prominently in midcentury US cinema and shows up as early as the denouement of Laura (Preminger 1944), if not before. And there is a minor flurry of audio surveillant activity in the 1970s no doubt influenced by the Watergate affair and its revelation of a secret taping system used at the White House.⁴ It takes until roughly the late 1980s for video technology to catch up and for recorded visual surveillance to become more frequently embedded within cinema.

Though the type of technology available in a given era affects both the stories that are told as well as the method of telling, whether one listens to a “real time” event or to a recording of a prior event, the structure of listening itself is fundamentally one of return. A listener’s ears are struck, and thus begins a process of attempting to identify or decipher, as well as work with and through, a given sonic material.⁵ Listening confounds the division between active and passive. One is passive toward the acoustic event, the initial energy that strikes one’s eardrums, yet, insofar as one listens, one returns to an analysis of the sound, chews it over, ruminates on the blow. In this sense, various recording technologies do not constitute new capacities so much as they amplify and extend what is already inherent to listening, its circuit of return. In returning to what has struck the ear, a listener seeks to identify and to interpret acoustic phenomena through an ongoing comparison of sound with previous sounds. The listening subject is always already embedded in a sequence of listening to which it continuously returns. Listening is listening to listening. And listening, therefore, could be likened to a form of (auto)surveillance.

Sur écoute, by the philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy, expresses this relationship between listening and surveillance. Though it has been translated into English as All Ears, Szendy’s key concept, surécoute, is actually a “calque”, an effort on his part to bring the English word “overhearing” into French but with an additional meaning – not just eavesdropping but excessive, “super” listening. Szendy writes:

Sur écoute: in two words, in French, it means that someone – a politician, a criminal, or a journalist who is undesirable or too inquisitive – is to be surveilled, spied on, in short, placed under suspicion or sur écoute. Mettre or placer sur écoute means to have someone’s phone tapped.

But, as a single word, the neologism surécoute could be understood as an intensification of listening [écoute], as its hyperbolic form, brought to incandescence, to its most extreme and most active point. In short, surécoute as a synonym for hyperesthesia, a superlative super-listening.⁶

Sur écoute and surécoute: the one who overhears is also overheard – if only by herself. At a minimum, a listener listens to her own listening. But, in the case of non-technologised, everyday surveillance (eavesdropping), the listener is usually close enough to her target that she risks being overheard by that person in turn. In that case, the listener may quickly find herself falling prey to a paranoid and imaginative listening for signs of the other’s listening. For Szendy, listening is always structured by the listening of the one who precedes the listener.

If listening itself is prone to paranoia, perhaps even structured by paranoia, it no doubt is all the more likely to become manifestly paranoid when the stakes are high, a matter of life and death, as in much cinematic surveillance dealing with crime. In what follows, I explore how the final scene of Touch of Evil constitutes a transitional moment, one that allegorises cinema’s receding concern for surveillance as a “live” event and its emerging interest in the product or record of surveillance. In conjunction with this aesthetic and technological shift, what is at stake in Touch of Evil is the transition between a mode of listening one could describe as “confident” (i.e. not wracked by paranoid fears either that one has misheard or been overheard) and a mode of listening – overhearing – marked by precisely such fears and anxieties.

The second, paranoid, mode of listening or “overhearing” is rendered more intense by the audio technology that enables not just a return to sound but an amplification of certain frequencies and an attenuation of others: a high-tech immersion in the details of a recording. As an example of such intensive concern for the recording, I move away from Touch of Evil to discuss in The Conversation (Coppola 1974) what I call the “agony of playback”: the desire to attain, via a recording, to an ever truer version of events. I aim to show, via a close reading of a few scenes, how the desire for greater understanding is marred by the doubts and uncertainties inherent to repetitive overhearing – understood as both surveillance and as excessive, hyperactive listening. Despite being made prior to the revolution in digital technologies that have transformed both audio and video in the last 30 years or so, The Conversation remains one of Hollywood cinema’s most compelling examples of the “recording” paradigm: of a listening that is structured, if not ruined, by the return to sound enhanced by technology.

One could say The Conversation “rewinds itself” by replaying its famous opening sequence – a conversation between two people in San Francisco’s Union Square that is recorded by surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) – several times over the course of the film. In the manner of the photographer in Blow Up (Antonioni 1966) – a key intertext for The Conversation – Caul returns to the conversation repeatedly both “in his head” as well as via technology – the composite recording of the conversation produced by his careful mixing of three source tapes which derive from three different microphones having been present at the scene. Caul brings to these sources something like the “dynamite of the tenth of a second” which Walter Benjamin claims that various film processes (slow motion, close-up) introduced into our understanding of everyday reality.⁷ That is, he is not satisfied with an apparently complete recording but forces himself to delve ever deeper into the interstices of the audio in search of previously unheard fragments – what Benjamin describes as “entirely new structural formations of the subject”.⁸ While Benjamin was speaking about the visual field or what he termed “unconscious optics”, with some modifications, this idea could be brought to bear on the acoustic dimension of cinema, its “unconscious acoustics” or even, since audio may be felt as well as heard, “unconscious haptics”. Though he is ultimately depicted as a despondent, tormented listener, preyed upon by a listening power that exceeds his own, Harry Caul nevertheless points the way toward a practice of re-mixing cinema’s barely heard or unheard acoustic archive. This utopian notion is at odds, however, with Caul’s subjection to the power of surveillance at the end of The Conversation.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it can be demonstrated that Touch of Evil carries within itself, in embryo, all of the ambiguity and dissonance of the later film, that it, too, is fascinated by the possibility of an overhearing – surveillance – that might become an overhearing or hearing awry – a hearing – really a listening – scored by the paranoid imagination of the listener. The film seems taken with the power of surveillance at the same time as it investigates the possibility of being mistaken about it, that is, the possibility for misidentifying or mishearing what has been recorded. Touch of Evil culminates in a killing whose sounds are captured on audio tape. Though there is no real doubt who the killer is, the film nonetheless tantalises an audience with the possibility that, were one to listen to the audio alone, it might not be possible to reconstruct the event and to identify the killer. In other words, the recording might provoke the same sort of overhearing – obsessive listening given over to paranoia and epistemological uncertainty – which characterises The Conversation from start to finish.

As a catachresis, “overhearing” could be said to denote both a creative possibility in listening – the Benjaminian plunge into the well of sound – as well as the potential to import into an acoustic situation elements which would not be audible to another – subjective auditory fantasy. Both Touch of Evil and The Conversation may be seen as modern parables that point toward the openness of audio recording to imaginative reinterpretation as well as to dangerous if not deadly misapprehension – to creative and destructive forms of overhearing.

Sound evidence: Touch of Evil

In the famous long opening to Touch of Evil, the camera follows investigator Mike Vargas (Charleton Heston) and his wife Suzy (Janet Leigh) through the streets of a Mexican border town. The outlandish choreography of the initial tracking shot, which begins by showing a bomb placed in the trunk of a car, seems designed to build suspense and maintain the importance of the action as it unfolds in “real time”. But despite the power of the camera to track its subjects throughout the opening, there is no suggestion that, in the film’s world, this power is linked to a power of recording. Whatever the technical prowess of the shot, it remains of a different order from the technology deployed in the diegesis. In the world of the film and of its various police officials, there is no possibility of a mediatised return to an analysis of the crime (the explosion of a car), no listening to the voices of the deceased or to the “ticking noise” one of them says she has heard throughout their brief ride.

By replacing the camera with a person – Mike Vargas – the film’s final sequence retains its preoccupation with the drama of events as they unfold in “real time” (indeed, Vargas will shape the closing pursuit to disastrous effect), but this time the element of recording (audio only) is also introduced. Strangely, then, the final scene remains bound to the logic of the “real time” event, at the same time as it points to the possibility of a different interpretation of events enabled by their recording. Hence, the film’s status as what I am calling an “allegory of transition”: one that retains early cinema’s interest in movement and in pursuit while also depicting the changes brought about by emergent media. Despite the film’s apparent confidence in technologies of recording, the final sequence nevertheless emphasises both the ambiguity of language as well as the inadequacy of recorded audio, its inability to offer a complete account of what has occurred, not to speak of the possibility for silence or interference to have marred the record of events. The ending sequence features several close ups of the recording device itself as if to emphasise the difference between “live” sound and what may actually make it onto the tape.⁹

The final pursuit takes place in a desolate landscape of abandoned buildings, trash and oil derricks. The target of the surveillance, Hank Quinlan, has committed a murder mere hours before and attempted to frame Suzy Vargas for the crime. It is important to note that while the audience is aware of Quinlan’s guilt, having watched him strangle the petty crime boss Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), no other character has been a witness to this crime. In other words, the audience knows Quinlan is guilty of more than a “touch” of evil, but the film is at pains to establish two epistemological tracks: one for the audience, the other for characters in the film.¹⁰ This distinction is crucial to an understanding of what Touch of Evil is actually saying about the inadequacy of audio evidence. We may know from the outset that Quinlan is guilty, but we are invited to consider how difficult it might be to establish his guilt, by means of audio, in the world of the fiction.

In order to establish Quinlan’s guilt, Vargas convinces Quinlan’s long-time partner, Menzies (Joseph Gorreia), to wear a hidden microphone and draw Quinlan out into conversation. Vargas is doubtless hoping for a full confession from Quinlan, one that will exonerate his wife and also implicate Quinlan in a series of frame-ups stretching back many years. The pursuit is a tour de force of direction as well as of audio and visual editing. It is arguably even more impressive for being built upon a ludicrous oversight: there is no reason why Vargas should be willing to allow the audio from his tape recorder to escape into the air. Perhaps because he believes he will always be far enough away that the machine will not be heard, he allows the audio to emerge from a tiny speaker on the front of the recorder. An amateur magician, Welles was clearly interested in cinematic misdirection, and one could argue that the complex editing of the final scene distracts a viewer from its questionable premise – that an investigator tailing a suspect would be foolish enough to allow audio to escape from his recorder. In any case, the surveillance tape recorder heard in real time functions as the perfect “transitional object” in this allegory of transition. It allows access to “live” sound at the same time as that sound is being preserved for future listening.

While Vargas’s “oversight” – allowing the audio to be overheard – seems as unnecessary as it is reckless, it allows for several dramatic moments to arise during the pursuit, as Vargas struggles, and fails, to prevent Quinlan from discovering the plot to record him. Moreover, the nearly comical setup enables the filmmakers to cross-cut between two kinds of audio: the tinny, filtered sound of the policemen’s voices heard through a speaker and the fuller sound of their voices heard at close range. By alternating between the two kinds of sound, the audience is made aware of the process of recording and able to pose the question of the fidelity of the tape (there are even moments of static interference which cast doubt on its integrity). In addition, the dual audio tracks focus attention on what Quinlan actually says and raise the question of whether or not his speech actually constitutes an admission of wrongdoing.

The spoken evidence is fairly ambiguous. Take, for example, this exchange between Menzies and Quinlan, apparently captured by the machine:

Menzies:

Defend yourself? Hank, you must be crazy, insane.

Quinlan:

Sure … sure I’m crazy

M:

Hank, you murdered Grandi.

Q:

I left my cane by his body, that was sure crazy.

While this is an important admission, it does not constitute a confession. Quinlan’s imaginative gift is the ability to reconstruct events in such a way that either the person he accuses looks guilty or he himself looks innocent (or both). Forgetting the cane (a sign his ability to manipulate reality is slipping) actually constitutes something of a leitmotiv in the film, for he is shown to do it no less than three times over its duration. Quinlan dies before he must answer for the murder of Grandi, but one wonders how he would have attempted to talk his way out of leaving his cane at the scene of the crime. After killing Grandi, Quinlan himself reports the death to the police, telling his partner where to find the body. Therefore, it would actually be quite plausible that he came upon the murdered Grandi and left his cane there.

Later in the pursuit, this exchange occurs:

Quinlan:

Look at the record. Our record, partner. All those convictions.

Menzies:

Convictions. Sure. How many did you frame?

Q:

Nobody.

M:

Come on, Hank. How many did you frame?

Q:

I told you. Nobody. Nobody that wasn’t guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Every last one of ‘em. Guilty.

M:

All these years, you’ve been playing me for a sucker, faking evidence.

Q:

Aiding justice, partner.

This is probably the most self-incriminating thing Quinlan says. In saying he has been “aiding justice”, he does suggest having tampered with evidence. But might not a skilled lawyer claim that Quinlan, if he did alter or plant evidence, only did so to convict those about whose guilt he was already convinced? Might not such a lawyer claim that Quinlan had first been able to establish guilt by means of other evidence, and that his tampering served only to guarantee a conviction? And how many courts would be willing to re-open the case of a defendant who, confronted with fictitious evidence, nevertheless admits to the crime for which he is accused? This is, in fact, the story of Touch of Evil. Confronted with evidence planted in his house – two sticks of dynamite – the suspect confesses to the film’s opening explosion.

The film’s reflection on the tenuous nature of sonic evidence reaches its peak when Quinlan discovers he is being recorded and kills Menzies for having been willing to “wear a bug” for Vargas. Quinlan becomes aware of the recording when he hears the echo of his own voice coming from beneath a bridge he and Menzies are crossing. Suspicious that Vargas is hiding below, he leans over the edge, says “Vargas?” and then hears a somewhat distant and comical repetition of his query. The unnecessary echo – unnecessary in that Vargas should be wearing headphones or at least turning down the volume on his machine – is the clue that allows Quinlan to unravel the pursuit. He turns on his partner and shoots him just as Vargas leaps onto the bridge. Significantly, just prior to Vargas’s leap, we hear the tinny sound of the argument between Quinlan and Menzies coming from the tape recorder itself. The camera frames the recorder in a close-up to reinforce the filtered sound of the audio. The device captures the whole affair: Quinlan’s meditation on the echo, his argument with Menzies and the sound of him shooting his partner.

If one were to listen to the section of the tape that begins with Quinlan leaning over the bridge and saying Vargas’s name, the next few minutes would no doubt sound like evidence of a crime. But it is crucial to note that, as mere audio, the recording can not be said to incriminate Quinlan absolutely. As fantastic as it sounds, if one were to hear the tape by itself without the film’s visual cues, one would have to entertain the possibility that, as Quinlan would have it, it is indeed Vargas who shoots Menzies. Quinlan, imaginative until the very end, goes so far as to shout “Vargas!” before he fires. He is already laying the groundwork for the story he plans to tell: that Vargas killed Menzies, and that he called out Vargas’s name in an effort to stop him from shooting. In calling out “Vargas!”, Quinlan is clearly imagining the future use and audition of the tape in the context of police work or at a trial proceeding. And, as the film stresses, he is an expert at planting false evidence. While the film does not go on to explore the uncertain nature of the sonic evidence, it is careful to plant a seed of doubt as to whether the audio alone could have been effective at a later moment in establishing what has occurred¹¹ [play supplementary audio].

The film plays with the possibility of Vargas being accused of the killing by not showing Quinlan firing the gun. Instead, the moment the gun goes off, we see Vargas looking toward the offscreen spot where Quinlan and Menzies are standing. Just after, the film cuts to an image of the dying Menzies, his mouth open in apparent shock that his friend has shot him. A reverse shot then shows Quinlan who holds the gun and looks on impassively as Menzies leaves a bloody trace on his shooting hand. The image makes it clear enough that Quinlan has shot Menzies, but, to repeat, the film does not emphasise what has been witnessed; rather, the visuals point toward the possibility of a different interpretation of events on the basis of audio evidence alone.

Quinlan will indeed make the case for a very different sequence of events, but, in a Shakespearean twist, not without having to confront the blood on his hands. In a gesture reminiscent of Lady Macbeth, he staggers toward a river of stagnant, dirty water to wash off his partner’s blood. After collapsing, he is shown in close up, his face a weathered ruin, a single tear running down his cheek. Even in extremis, however, his imaginative gift has not yet left him:

Vargas:

Well, Captain, I’m afraid this is finally something you can’t talk your way out of.

Quinlan:

You wanna bet? You killed him, Vargas.

V:

Come on now. Give me my gun back.

Q:

You didn’t understand me. You killed Pete. The bullet is from your gun.

V:

You think anyone would believe that?

Q:

They always believe me. Anyway, they’ll never believe I killed him.

It is unclear whether the tape recorder captures this conversation. Quite possibly, Menzies lies too far away for his microphone to pick it up. And even if the exchange were recorded, were it to have come to a trial, it would have been one man’s word against another’s. The tape, while damning of Quinlan, would not have been an out and out smoking gun.

Welles’s background in theatre and in radio no doubt fed his interest in a mode of storytelling that emphasises the “present tense” or “real time” of the fiction. One need only think of his famous War of the Worlds broadcast (1938) to understand the potential effect of a drama that unfolds in “real time”. While in Citizen Kane (1941), Welles displays a complicated relationship to time and to the possibility to re-visit the past cinematically via flashback, in Touch of Evil, the narrative moves in only one direction. There are no flashbacks or scenes from the past (despite the unrelenting air of nostalgia that suffuses the film and the pianola theme that is repeated several times). Nevertheless, the film does stage a kind of “auditory flashback” and closes with Vargas’s American friend, Schwartz (Mort Mills), playing the very recording Vargas has just made. Schwartz arrives on the scene shortly after Menzies’s death. The audience sees him rewind the tape and press play on the recorder. It then listens to some of the audio it has heard only minutes before, once again hearing Quinlan’s “confession” – his reference to “aiding justice” – his argument with Menzies, shout of “Vargas!” and the sound of the gun going off. When Quinlan hears the sound of the gun on the recording, he says to Menzies, who lies dead above him: “That’s the second bullet I took for you, Pete” – a reference to his having once protected Menzies in a gun fight. By having Quinlan reinterpret a bit of audio, the film highlights the inconclusive nature of audio evidence, but it is also at this moment that what we might call Quinlan’s luck – his ability to re-mix and to reconstruct reality – finally runs out. He cannot overturn the incontrovertible fact that Menzies lies dead above him, that he has killed him. A few drops of blood fall from Menzies’ hand onto Quinlan’s own. The sound of the shooting is apparently not enough to condemn Quinlan. He does not heed the acoustic call to conscience, at least not entirely. But the blood, the touch of evil, is too much. It appears to overwhelm Quinlan who falls backwards into water and dies.

One could say the touch of blood draws the film to a rapid close. As a dramatist and Shakespearean, Welles no doubt preferred this ending to a more protracted one that could have explored the insufficiency of the tape to reconstruct reality. But as an allegory of transition from “real time” to recording, from one technological and auditory regime to another, Touch of Evil points the way to a very different outcome: an aftermath in which the audio recording of a crime is returned to again and again, the meaning of its sounds debated in ways that reveal the fragility and uncertainty of acoustic evidence. The Conversation is the film that picks up the tape and becomes fixated with its playback.

The agony of playback: The Conversation

“In that denouement of Touch of Evil, Welles worked out something that’s very close to my heart because it’s so similar to the beginning of The Conversation – namely, to make the resolution of the story depend on different shadings and perspectives of sound”.

Walter Murch¹²

Where Touch of Evil closes with a scene of audio surveillance, The Conversation begins as one, although it is not really possible to comprehend this at the outset. Almost immediately, The Conversation signals its concern for the reliability of audio evidence (and for overhearing) by stressing point-of-audition, or the unique perspective from which something is heard or listened to. There is a strange perspectival misfit between the first image in the film – a high shot which slowly zooms into San Francisco’s Union Square – and the initial audio – mostly the somewhat muffled sound of a jazz band playing “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home?” interspersed with a few noises. Immediately, one wonders: “who is listening?” and “who is watching?” The great height of the opening shot is somewhat consistent with the dampened sound of the music, but the noises on the soundtrack are harsh and electronic, inexplicable at this point. The shot seems nearly aimless, but after more than two minutes of tracking a mime at work, the camera begins to follow the protagonist Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), whom we will soon learn is a surveillance expert monitoring a couple in the square.

After a continuous take of more than three minutes (reminiscent, in its length, of the start of Touch of Evil), the opening shot cuts to one of a person on the roof of a department store adjacent to the square. In most films, we would recognise that the initial shot was meant to be from the perspective of the figure on the roof, an establishing shot of the square leading to one that reveals who is looking at it. Here, however, after a few more cuts, we come to realise that the angle of vision of the man on the roof does not match the perspective of the opening shot. What does match, however, is the audio which is continuous across the various cuts. The man on the roof of the department store wears headphones and uses a telescopic sight and a special microphone in an effort to capture the conversation of two people below. At least some of the audio we have been listening to has presumably been from his highly mediated perspective, or point-of-audition. Thus, the cut to this figure explains one enigma – the origin of the strange audio – while leaving a second mystery unresolved: from whose point-of-view, if anyone’s, do we observe the square initially?

Later in this scene we learn that a second observer – also in possession of a scope and a high-powered mic – sits in another building that overlooks the square. But, like his counterpart, his perspective is also not aligned with that of the opening shot. Even if it were, one might well ask why would this initial observer spend so much time apparently focused on a mime and then on Harry Caul? He might be a semi-competent employee of Harry’s who allows his attention to wander when he should no doubt be scanning the square in search of the target couple. But on further reflection, it seems unlikely that the opening shot is meant to be from the perspective of a character in the fiction. Instead, the slow zoom into the square seems intended to ease the audience into the claustrophobic environment of surveillance (and of paranoia) which will characterise the film from start to finish. Furthermore, the opacity of the opening sequence is no doubt meant to underscore the structure of playback with which the film is so preoccupied, that is, that one must “replay” a scene several times in order to grasp its significance. Finally, it should be said that the opening sequence also anticipates the final shot of The Conversation in which Harry, unable to detect a bug he knows lies hidden in his apartment, sits dejectedly playing saxophone while the camera (in the manner of a surveillance camera) slowly pans back and forth across his ruined home. In other words, the cinematic apparatus itself is revealed, from the beginning – although, properly speaking, only in retrospect – to be an instrument of surveillance analogous to those on display in the film. That Harry should be surveilled in the film’s opening shot is a foreshadowing of one of the film’s central dynamics, namely, that a power of surveillance exists which is greater than his own.¹³

The retrospective clarification of the opening scene is one of the most characteristic gestures of The Conversation, which is consumed by the “agony of playback” – the desire to understand the true nature of events and to overcome the limitations of one’s unique and isolated points of view and audition. The “agony of playback” refers to the possibility (if not likelihood) that the more one listens, the more one overhears, each repetition only compounding the enigmas of the prior overhearing. Initially, Harry Caul, the surveillance and audio expert, claims to want nothing more than a “big fat recording”. He professes to be uninterested in the content of what he records and only interested in high fidelity. But something changes for Harry as he listens obsessively to the recording of the couple from the square. He is consumed by a desire to comprehend the meaning of their conversation and returns repeatedly to the recording in an effort to improve his understanding.

In Touch of Evil, the playback of the shooting on the bridge motivates Welles’s character, Quinlan, to stand beneath the body of his dead friend in an effort to justify his action. There, the audio functions as a “call to conscience” or accusatory echo. In The Conversation, audio has a similarly haunting and accusatory function for Harry who says (in a dream) that he is not afraid of death but is afraid of murder. An important part of the backstory to the film’s intrigue is that Harry once recorded a man who was later killed because it was believed he had leaked information. His entire family, in fact, was dismembered. Harry does not want to repeat this scenario and does not want his work to lead to murder. Thus, after a failed attempt to give the tape to his client, Harry returns to his lab to listen to it over and over in an effort to discern the real situation, to determine if the couple he has recorded are indeed in mortal danger.

But before returning to his lab, Harry first sees, standing in front of an elevator, Mark (Frederic Forrest), the man he recorded in the square. Harry takes a different elevator down, but, in a kind of nightmare logic, Ann (Cindy Williams), the woman he recorded, boards this elevator on a lower floor. The sound of the elevator is unnaturally loud throughout this entire sequence as if to emphasise both Harry’s rising discomfort and the fact that he is a “sound man” to the core, one who, perhaps in the manner of a threatened animal, is given to extraordinarily sensitive listening at moments of danger.¹⁴ The audio seems to reflect Harry’s tortured state, as it comprises not just the loud sound of the elevator, but non-diegetic music (David Shire’s melancholy piano score) and, at the end of the sequence, a high-pitched noise. This screech or wail is only revealed in the next shot to be the sound of Harry’s tape machine being rewound. As with the opening of the film, a sequence of shots enables a retrospective understanding of sound – an overcoming of one’s limited point-of-audition – at the same time as a mystery is left unresolved. The audience still does not know, at this juncture, the status of the couple in the square, whether they are in danger or not.

The transition from the elevator to Harry’s workshop is notable for featuring three distinct types of sound: (1) diegetic: the elevator, although its great volume pushes it toward the realm of the hallucinatory; (2) non-diegetic: the piano track, highly evocative of Harry’s psyche, insofar as it is a lone instrument and Harry is very much a lone operator; and (3) diegetic-proleptic: the sound of a real device in the world of the film heard prior to its being seen, indeed, heard prior to the moment the character who hears it shares the same space as the machine (a special type of acousmatic sound, one in which sound anticipates the space and time of its source). One is tempted to call this last sound an interior, diegetic sound, a sound Harry hears in his head before he reaches his lab, but it is fundamentally undecidable whether it is an interloper from another space and time, heard only on the soundtrack and not by Harry in the elevator, or whether it is a “real” interior sound he in some sense already hears prior to manipulating the actual machine.

In her reading of The Conversation, Kaja Silverman lays stress on Harry’s subjection to sound, as well as on the undecidability of the origin of various sounds which oppress him: “Far from being in a position of secure exteriority to the sounds he manipulates, [Harry’s] subjectivity is complexly imbricated with them – so much so that it is often impossible to determine which originate from ‘outside’ of him, and which from ‘inside’”.¹⁵ The confusion of exterior and interior sounds becomes most pronounced when Harry returns to listen to the tape.¹⁶ Retroversion, rewinding, is the gesture par excellence of attempting to gain mastery over sound.¹⁷ After listening several times to a segment of the tape which seems to contain a garbled communication from Mark to Ann, Harry finally finds what would appear to be a technical solution to the interference. After applying a kind of filter to the sound, he is able to hear Mark say to her: “He’d kill us if he got the chance”. In its final iteration, the line sounds clear and uninterrupted, but it is important to recognise that the line may be as much of an interior voice, one Harry needs to hear, as it is an exterior voice others would hear in the same way. Harry’s attempts at overhearing move inexorably toward a hearing in excess of itself. They should be understood, thematically, in relation to his guilt over the use to which his work has been put in the past and, rhetorically, in relation to the acoustic design of his experience on the elevator.

When Harry boards the elevator, he is clearly disturbed. He wants, for whatever reason, to find some evidence that Ann and Mark are in danger. Perhaps he wishes to atone for the awful deaths for which he was somewhat responsible in the past. Possibly, as he stands next to Ann, he begins to feel some sympathy or attraction for the woman he has taped. Or perhaps, as Silverman argues, Harry longs to be blanketed by a comforting female voice, the model for which is the maternal voice, and, having listened so closely and intently to Ann, who expresses a kind of maternal solicitude both for a homeless man in the square and for the man who would seem to be her boyfriend, Harry does not want to see her come to harm, to do damage to her voice. Of course, these three “thematic” elements are not mutually exclusive.

On the “rhetorical” side, the sound design of the elevator scene suggests that the film does not articulate sound in the typical way, that is, one cannot take for granted that everyone hears events in an identical fashion. No one, for example, is likely to hear the elevator the way Harry does. The film is at pains to establish Harry’s point-of-audition as influential on the relative volume and intensity of several “incidental” sounds: train noises, passing cars, music, etc.¹⁸ Significantly, when Harry isolates the crucial line, he is alone. No one else is there to comment on it or to second his interpretation of it. Later in the film, other characters, including his client (“the director”) will hear the line, but Harry’s presence in such scenes generates the possibility that only he hears it with the same clarity and stress with which the audience hears it. In other words, it is arguable that Harry’s point-of-audition governs the audibility of nearly the entire film. At the limit, it is even possible no one else hears the line about killing, as it is never commented on explicitly.

Nowhere in the film is Harry’s unique point-of-audition given greater emphasis than in the scene in which he goes to the Jack Tar Hotel to eavesdrop on what he fears may be a violent confrontation between his client and the couple from the square. From an adjacent room, Harry listens to the client play back to Ann, apparently his wife, the very tape Harry has made. Harry hears the two argue and struggle. He then rips off his headphones and seems to want to ignore the situation but eventually makes his way on to a balcony just outside. There, he sees a hand trace a bloody smear on a glass partition separating his part of the balcony from the part belonging to the adjacent room. At the moment the hand appears, we hear a woman scream and, indeed, can just make out Ann’s form beyond the glass. The implication is that she is being attacked, and the soundtrack underscores this notion by picking up the sound of her real scream and turning it into an even higher pitched electronic wail. Just as the scene in the elevator ends with a sound apparently “introduced” by Harry’s psyche, this scene also moves towards a high pitched sound related to Harry’s mental state. The border between the human scream and the electronic one is so thin, however, that it is impossible to hear exactly when the human voice leaves off and the electronic sound takes over [play supplementary video].

The distorted, electronic cry is clearly meant to convey Harry’s nearly psychotic state of mind at this point. While it is inspired by a real scream, it is unclear if any real screaming is supposed to go on while it repeats accompanied by a kind of metallic clanging. One could posit that Harry hears the real scream and overhears its echoes, that is, hears them as projections or fantasy. In this regard, one should note the feminised, high-pitched quality of the secondary screams which mimic Ann’s scream. Harry believes she has been attacked, probably killed, and the electronic timbre of the echoes are perfectly suited to this belief, for his electronic surveillance has led to this bloody outcome. After seeing the bloody hand, Harry collapses for an indefinite period of time. Afterwards, he breaks into the adjacent room to look for clues as to what has occurred. He is, of course, looking primarily for blood, and the scene recalls Psycho in its emphasis on the shower as a possible locus of horror.¹⁹

During Harry’s search for blood, The Conversation could have taken a very similar turn to Touch of Evil and produced blood as a kind of insurmountable signifier of violence and guilt. In an eerie allusion to Psycho, Harry runs his finger along the drain of the tub, but no blood stains his hand. The killers seem to have done a very thorough job of cleaning up after themselves. On the point of leaving, Harry checks one last thing: the toilet. The film is careful to show Harry, on entering the bathroom, attempting to flush the toilet which does not work. So it seems likely that when it begins to pour forth a great quantity of blood this is a pure hallucination on Harry’s part. The soundtrack underscores the highly subjective character of this bloody shot by repeating the sound of the electronic scream Harry hears on the balcony. If the sound is imaginary, overheard, then the visual seems likely to be imaginary as well.

In Touch of Evil, blood signifies the incontrovertible truth that Quinlan has killed his partner and friend. In The Conversation, blood instead points to Harry’s highly distressed state of mind. In both instances, blood is a sign of guilt, but Harry’s agony is misplaced. The high-pitched, feminised nature of the screams he hears suggests he believes Ann has been killed, but this is not the case. On the contrary, she and Mark appear to have conspired to kill Harry’s client. Only after Harry sees them both alive does he realise how badly he has misunderstood the situation. A chaotic scene in which Ann tries to fend off a mob of reporters is intercut with shots from both the initial conversation in Union Square as well as shots showing Harry’s client being attacked in his hotel room. At this point, the notion of retroversion, of rewinding or replaying, reaches its peak, for Harry hears the crucial line “He’d kill us if he got the chance” with its “correct” emphasis “He’d kill us if he got the chance”. This terrible reworking of the sound reveals his concern for the couple to have been entirely misplaced. He has overheard the line, overheard the scream. They have been plotting murder all along. Playback, Harry realises, was his first mistake, one that has taken him down a path he no doubt wishes he could return to the start of.

Error, or point-of-audition

Although separated by nearly 20 years, both Touch of Evil and The Conversation seem animated by faith in the evidentiary value of audio recording at the same time that they raise questions about how reliable audio evidence can be. Touch of Evil questions the value of audio evidence in sly fashion, by means of the contrast between the confidence of the lead investigator in his surveillance and the very shooting and recording style of the film.²⁰ As we have seen, that style, careful to keep an actual killing offscreen, pushes the film’s audience to imagine the contents of a surveillance tape and to admit their inadequacy.

The Conversation radicalises the potential for overhearing already to be found in Touch of Evil. It does so by highlighting Harry Caul’s agonised return to the tape he himself has assembled, his obsessive practice of replaying the conversation and working with it to achieve greater fidelity to the original event. In addition, the later film links overhearing to Harry’s unique point-of-audition in a way that exceeds the compass of the earlier work. By sometimes framing the recording device, as well as by changing the quality of the audio, Welles demonstrates in Touch of Evil an interest in point-of-audition. He no doubt wishes to telegraph the precarity of the recording as well as the singularity of listening. But point-of-audition does not quite rise to the level of an organising principle as it does in The Conversation.

While it takes relatively little effort to represent a character’s point-of-view, it can be difficult, in many common cinematic situations, to represent point-of-audition. Take, for example, the fairly common occurrence of several characters holding a conversation together in a room. One character says something important. How could one indicate that not everyone has heard the sentence in the same way or with the same stress? Probably there are ways involving repetition and close ups on ears to indicate a particular character is listening, but they would be likely to appear clumsy. Instead, the moment a character speaks around others, one tends to believe one has heard the “objective” version of the enunciation, the version to which all participants in the scene would agree. One of the great strengths of The Conversation is that it isolates Harry Caul so often and to such a degree that his point-of-audition blends seamlessly with the “objective” sound of events. His “error” becomes one that anyone watching the film can make.

If one were to intercept the written message “He’d kill us if he got the chance”, it would be at least partially unreadable insofar as the stress could fall either on “kill” or on “us”. The Conversation takes this basic unreadability of the statement a step further by saying, even with the passage from inscription to enunciation, a listener can still make a mistake, not hear the sentence correctly and put the emphasis in the wrong place. This is the element of human error, of the possibility for the listening subject to overhear what he or she wants or needs to hear: a tendency that speaks against the allure of surreptitious recording as the shortest path to the truth about others.

In our era, more than 40 years after the release of The Conversation, a new lure has been added to the old one, namely, the hope that automation, computerised scanning of phone calls and phone call records, can substitute for the need for human ears and human interpretation in the “war on terror”. This “subject-less” listening is, in fact, what is anticipated by the opening shot of The Conversation – and also, truth be told, the first shot of Touch of Evil – a shot, as we noted previously, of total surveillance from no one’s point of view, from the point of view of the apparatus itself. If we were to heed the warning of these two films, we would not be so quick to hand our interpretive faculties over to machines, but would instead admit that reading is what is required by the unreadability of faces, inscriptions, voices and gestures. Close, time-consuming, patient reading is the only just response to the world we have created, overwhelmed by data, and so quick to be divided into friends and enemies.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bard College for its support as well as the Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for inviting me to deliver a version of this essay as a talk. I also wish to thank Adrian Daub, Johanna Gosse and Rebecca Sheehan for comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental audio and video for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1487650.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Copenhafer

David Copenhafer is an Assistant Professor in the Literature Department at Bard Early College Queens. His writing, which has appeared in various print and online publications, concerns the manifestation of sound and music in nineteenth and twentieth century literature and film.

Notes

1. Though stark, the sound design of Fritz Lang’s M, could hardly be more effective in its economy. The obsessive killer whistles a distinctive tune – Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” – that leads to his identification (by a blind man) and eventual capture.

2. In his compelling micro-history of cinematic surveillance as it plays out between roughly 1990 and 2000 (“Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real Time’”), Tom Levin posits a third type of relationship between cinema and surveillance. During the last decade of the twentieth century, he claims, surveillance cinema pivots away from concern for the recorded event to emphasise the “real time” unfolding of action as seen from the perspective of one or more potential (or “real”) diegetic surveillance cameras. For Levin, the shift to a “real time” surveillance aesthetic is meant to compensate for the loss, associated with the rise of digital technology, of “reality effect” previously attributed to the photogram – the photographic basis of the original “cinema”. While I agree that a “real time” surveillance aesthetic informs recent cinematic and especially televisual production, I think it is worth asking to what extent a narrative as well as a discursive concern for recordings – whether audio or video – travels against the grain of that aesthetic. Moreover, I wonder to what extent the rise of a “real time” surveillance aesthetic represents a reaction not just to the loss of “reality effect” associated with photography but to the assault on “reality” audible in such films as Touch of Evil and The Conversation.

3. “Real time” is a flexible concept which would have to be modified to reflect the significance of television as well as the possibility for “live” monitoring via CCTV or the internet. For the purposes of this essay, “real time” means more or less “the present” of the fiction, even if that present may be interrupted or elided by editing. Interestingly, one of the more memorable scenes in Modern Times finds Chaplin drawn into the gears of the machine that feeds his assembly line. While the scene does not feature a return to previous audio, it does take a “rewinding” of the film for Chaplin to escape the clutches of the machine. Though the overall sequence concerns the inexorable, “one way” flow of factory time, the scene thus figures the openness of cinematic technique to a different experience of time marked by repetition, looping, inversion, etc.

4. See especially Alan Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976).

5. This threefold structure can be found in Roland Barthes’s “Listening” in The Responsibility of Forms, 245–260.

6. Szendy, All Ears, 11. Translation modified.

7. Benjamin writes: “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling”. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 236.

8. Ibid.

9. In an article on the instability of the racialised voice in Touch of Evil, Tony Grajeda also takes note of the final scene’s emphasis on sound technology: “What the film points to here, at least in so far as sound itself becomes the subject of the film, is the degree to which technological mediation has become the reality of experiencing sound”. Grajeda, “A Question of the Ear,” 216.

10. The title “Touch of Evil” works on numerous registers. Among them, it very likely refers to Quinlan’s preferred mode of killing: strangulation.

11. In writing of the influence of radio on film noir, Neil Verma refers to a scene at the end of The Big Sleep in which Humphrey Bogart’s character, Marlowe, manipulates by means of gunshots some listeners at a distance. The use of “offscreen” gunshots is related to Quinlan’s efforts to control the interpretation of reality in Touch of Evil. See Verma, “Radio, Film Noir, and the Aesthetics of Auditory Spectacle”.

12. Quoted in Ondaatje, The Conversations, 194. Credited with “sound montage” on The Conversation, Walter Murch supervised the “restoration” of the original sound design to Touch of Evil (re-released in 1998). I would like to acknowledge Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman whose posting of 18 July 2011 – “Play it again (and again), Sam: The Tape Recorder in Film (Part Two on Walter Murch)” – on the website Sounding Out! brought this quotation to my attention.

13. In Surveillance Cinema, Catherine Zimmer offers a different interpretation, taking the opening shot to be from the point of view of one of Harry’s associates. While Zimmer and I disagree about the nature of the visual, we are in substantial agreement concerning the meaning of the audio in the sequence. Zimmer writes: “this scene (and the rest of the film) highlights the degree to which the smooth unfolding of the images is completely dependent on the sound engineering that The Conversation suggests is also the work of audio surveillance: the construction and reconstruction of sound from several sources to serve as a kind of architecture without which the narrative becomes structurally unsound”. See Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema, 19. For a third detailed reading of the opening, see Carolyn Anderson, “The Conversation as Exemplar and Critique of Sound Technology”.

14. For an intense literary portrait of such a creature, see Kafka’s story “The Burrow”.

15. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 96.

16. In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai makes a similar point about The Conversation’s confusion of objectivity and subjectivity. Where Silverman and I stress the confusion of objective and subjective sound, Ngai, through a close reading of a “silent” scene, highlights a visual confusion. In her reading, the camera shows Harry Caul entering a hotel room, then pans away as if to reveal Caul’s subjective point of view, only to have Caul re-appear in the frame after the “subjectivising” pan. Ngai writes: “the shot’s cunning re-objectivisation suggests just how uncertain this surveillance expert’s grasp of the visual field has perhaps been all along”. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 18–19.

17. Toward the beginning of the film, Harry is shown playing saxophone along with a record. Though today the turntable has been displaced by other technologies, it remains a fairly common technique among musicians to pick a needle up and drop it back, or to perform the digital equivalent, to replay the same cut or passage and attempt to imitate or surpass it on their own instrument.

18. In a fascinating scene toward the film’s middle, Harry has an intimate conversation with Meredith, a woman who will both seduce him and steal the tape he has withheld from his client, “the director”. As Harry talks to Meredith, we notice how background sounds and diegetic music recede as if to signify his desire to share a private space with her. Prior to their most intimate exchange, however, the sound of ice cubes in their glasses is maybe a touch too loud. As with other sonic mysteries in the film, we only discover later the origin of this odd detail. Another surveillance professional has hidden a microphone, disguised as a pen, in Harry’s breast pocket. The ice cubes clink loudly next to this mic. What is disconcerting about the audio mix here is that no one in the world of the film seems at this moment to be listening to the sounds passing through this mic and being recorded by a remote tape recorder. Only the audience – identified, at least in part, with a machine of which it has no knowledge – hears this way.

19. The emphasis on screaming is also, of course, a reference to Psycho. It is worth noting that, in the earlier film, image and audio are inextricably linked (although the soundtrack provides an eerie surplus): one sees Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh) open mouth and hears her scream throughout the attack on her. In The Conversation, one strains to see Ann through a translucent partition and wonders if, indeed, it is her scream represented by the electronic soundtrack. The horror of the first film is “real”; the horror of the second “virtual”.

20. Just before the close of the film, Vargas’s American friend, Schwartz, arrives on the scene and asks him: “You sure you got enough [evidence on tape]?” With confidence, Vargas replies: “More than enough. It’s all on the tape. Play it back. You’ll see”.