Francis Ford Coppola is known for his three great masterpieces from the 1970s: the two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now. His fourth masterpiece, «The Conversation» from 1974, is unfortunately overlooked, perhaps because it is not as grand in its form. In return it is an ice-cold and eerie warning of the surveillance and control system we live with today, where the EU has just introduced its controversial chat control, which is yet another means of surveilling and censoring Europeans.
The film’s protagonist, Harry Caul, is a professional wiretapper. He records a young woman and her lover on tape while they walk around in a crowded park in San Francisco, and his task is merely to deliver the tape to the client who has ordered it. But one single sentence in the recording, «he’d kill us if he got the chance», turns out to be able to mean the exact opposite, depending on where one places the emphasis. Caul becomes obsessed with finding out what the sentence really means, because he senses that his work this time does not merely deliver information, but possibly a death sentence.
But reality is not as one thinks it is, and soon Caul becomes entangled in a paranoid universe that ends up destroying him.
The church as a sanctuary
Harry Caul regards himself as a neutral professional. He delivers a product and believes that he has no responsibility for what it is used for. This is a classic abdication of responsibility that one today recognises in tech engineers, police officers and civil servants in the deep state, who live by surveilling, controlling, censoring, regulating and arresting citizens who exercise their freedom of speech.
But Caul is in reality not as cold as he gives the impression of being. He carries a heavy sense of guilt from an earlier case, where his wiretapping work led to three people losing their lives, and the film shows him seeking the confessional in order to be able to talk about it.
The church and the Christian conscience is the counter-image Coppola sets up against the surveillance ideal of total transparency. The church is a space where the human being can meet its own conscience without being registered, analysed or held to account by any other authority than God Himself.
A society that eradicates such sanctuaries in the church, in the private home, in free communication, has deprived the human being of its soul. The film’s final scene, where Caul tears his own flat apart in the search for a microphone he never finds, is the image of what happens when this sanctuary disappears. It ends in a total, paranoid breakdown, in the completed isolation.
From Watergate to the Durham report
Coppola wrote the script for and shot the film while the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and it carried the whole of the American distrust of power institutions that the revelations of Nixon’s wiretappings triggered.
Fifty years later the Durham report’s review of the FBI’s investigation of Trump documented how the intelligence apparatus was used to surveil a political opponent and invent false stories on the basis of information delivered by the Democrats, which the party and the progressive media could use against Trump.
While Harry Caul was one man with a tape and a bad conscience, the Durham report shows an entire state apparatus seeking to destroy its political opponents, without any individual technician needing to be held accountable.
Arrests and controlled VPN
In Britain the film’s paranoia has long since become an institutional reality. The police make around 12,000 arrests a year for statements on the internet that are regarded as offensive or threatening, so-called «non-crime hate incidents».
At the same time the British House of Lords has voted to introduce control of all users of VPN services – a tool that otherwise has given citizens the possibility of communicating outside the state. That sort of thing is otherwise known only from totalitarian states such as China.
While Caul’s fear of being wiretapped was individual, the European (self-)censorship has become a mass phenomenon. In 1990, for example, 80 per cent of Germans believed that one could express one’s political opinions freely. Today only 40 per cent believe that. Most Germans believe that one should be very careful.
It is that kind of invisible, inner control that Coppola’s film already in 1974 sensed the contours of: a surveillance that does not need a tape or a microphone, because it has moved into the citizen’s own fearfulness.
The EU’s chat control
The latest edition of this story is unfolding in the EU, which not only introduces censorship instruments such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), but has now also introduced the notorious law on mass surveillance, the chat control law, which enables the scanning of citizens’ private messages, even though there was no majority for this in the European Parliament, and even though both the Council’s own legal service and the Parliament’s research service have concluded that the proposal conflicts with the Charter’s provisions on privacy and data protection.
Technology expert Anders Bæk writes.
«This is a historically major intervention in our privacy, and several have compared it to laws one usually only sees in autocracies… We have recently often criticised the USA for moving in a more autocratic direction. But that is nothing compared to what we are now seeing from the EU.»
While Caul’s wiretapping equipment required a person with headphones in order to be able to listen, the EU’s arrangement requires no one listening at all. The scanning is automated, built into the infrastructure itself, and it runs regardless of whether any human ever takes a position on what it finds.
The disappearance of the sanctuary
«The Conversation» is an outstanding film, in which Coppola manages to create a suffocating atmosphere of paranoia solely through sound design, editing and Gene Hackman’s introverted, restrained acting. That the same sound recording is played several times, and each time seems to give a new meaning, is an elegant way of dramatising the uncertainty of interpretation without explanatory dialogue.
The film’s slow, observational tempo and its sober, almost documentary visual style create an unease that settles in the viewer, and which makes the film more unsettling than many far more violent thrillers.
And because the film refuses to give a clarifying ending, where the riddle is solved and order is restored, it appears as one of the most precise portraits of the psychological costs of surveillance ever made on film.
Fifty years ago Harry Caul learned that a human being without a sanctuary for its conscience sooner or later tears itself apart in the search for something it never finds. What is at stake today is not only our data and our possibility of free exchange of opinion.
It is the inner space where the human being can be alone with its conscience, without anyone listening in.