The following is a paper I wrote for an introductory Cinema & Media Studies course at Wellesley College.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola
Cinematographer: Bill Butler
Distributor: Paramount Pictures, 1974
In her landmark 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey defines
scopophilia as the pleasure received by the “essentially active” act of “taking other people as objects,
subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze,” (307). In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The
Conversation , protagonist Harry Caul is a deeply religious loner whose only pleasure comes from his job
as a private investigator specially tasked with recording conversations. In illustrating this work
cinematically, Coppola constructs Harry’s mental image of a conversation taking place, effectively
allowing him to take on the role of a scopophiliac. Subtextually, Harry Caul is a scopophiliac who derives
sexual gratification from his work, which reduces the people whom he surveilles to mere objects onto
which he can project his own insecurities, and whose manipulation he can use to feel in control. The
scene in which Harry sits down to manipulate the recording he’s made of a young couple exemplifies the
film’s subtextual exploration of Caul’s fragile masculinity and desire, while also showing the guilt he
experiences in response to his pleasurable gratification project and its effects.
In the scene that begins roughly 33 minutes into The Conversation , Coppola demonstrates
Harry’s ability to perform the pleasurable act of mechanical manipulation. The scene can be broken down
into trimesters, which illustrate Harry’s project, its effects on his personal life, and the sense of pleasure
and pain it brings him.
The first trimester of the scene is made up of consistent medium close up shots of Harry listening
to tracks, juxtaposed with extreme close up shots of the machines he uses spinning and stopping at his
command. In the seventh shot of the scene, the audio suddenly matches up to an image of the
conversation occurring, one that the viewer understands is Harry’s visualization of the events. Sherry Turkle writes that individuals who grow attached to mechanical devices come to rely on their ability to
project life onto a screen, growing obsessed with the ability to “watc[h] their lives as though watching a
movie,” (129). In The Conversation , Harry is able to use his audio devices to translate the sounds of
recorded conversations, which he then visualizes. This visualization becomes a form of scopophilia: by
constructing an image of the couple matching his audio, Harry is able to observe the conversation as it
occurs, which he derives gratification from. Beyond merely observing, Harry seeks to actively participate
in the conversation, which he attempts by projecting his own loneliness and insecurities onto the couple
he observes. Harry derives his pleasure not from the mere act of imagining and thereby looking, but from
the act of involving himself in the intimate relationship of those he is observing. He fulfills himself by
interrupting and taking the active part of this relationship as a manipulator; as Mulvey writes, “The male
protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and
creates the action,” (310).
Turkle writes that “for those who are lonely yet fearful of intimacy, online life provides
environments where one can be alone yet not alone, environments where one can have the illusion of
companionship without the demands of sustained, intimate friendship,” (125). In the context of this film,
“online” can be understood as the virtual reality Harry constructs in his mental image of the conversation.
Harry prefers inhabiting this online sphere to actively participating in his own life, a phenomenon that
Turkle refers to as being “lost to alternate reality,” (130). For Harry, this obsession with virtual reality has
negative effects on his personal life, as illustrated by the second trimester of the scene.
Shot twenty of the scene depicts Harry’s virtual reality sphere of the couple walking and talking.
However, this sphere is disturbed by the sound of his associate Stan’s voice, which echoes through the
image it has no part in. The scene cuts to a medium shot of Harry and Stan in their studio, violently
pulling the spectator from the virtual reality image. Stan’s interruption, as well as his lack of perfectionist
obsession with his job, leads Harry to become irritated, and emphasizes the frustration Harry feels at being forced to confront a lesser reality after being pulled from his pleasurable daydream. The second
trimester of the scene departs from the virtual and deals with Harry’s tangible reality. In this section of the
scene, Harry’s words emphasize the denial he feels about being involved in the lives of his clients. This
denial adds credibility to the idea that Harry’s investment is unconscious, and can only be tapped into via
psychoanalysis. In their own conversation, Stan takes the mothering role, encouraging Harry to embrace
his own curiosity, claiming that it’s only “human nature” to do so. Harry, shameful and embarrassed,
sends him away. At this point in the scene, the cinematography signals a shift in the plot; previously only
showing Stan and Harry through medium close up, stationary shots, the camera begins to track Stan as he
gets up to leave, just as it tracks the couple in Harry’s conversation. Harry has successfully reduced Stan
to the object of his emotions (in this case, frustration), and denied him personhood through this act.
It is crucial that Harry deny the objects of his gaze personhood, for if he were to recognize their
humanity, the crushing weight of his guilt would become unbearable. Once Stan leaves the scene, the
third trimester begins, and Harry is finally able to piece together the full mental image of the recording.
Once he does so, however, his gratification at having accomplished his task is usurped by his guilt. As a
secretive person, Harry hopes that his gratification project will not have any external effects, naively
choosing to believe that the objects of his work will in no way be influenced by his actions, and by the
pleasure he experiences by manipulating them and projecting his own feelings onto them. But
unconsciously he understands that there are external consequences to his actions. His work once led to the
murder of a family. This makes him even more guilty; on a superficial level because his work led to a
murder, but on a subtextual level because the objects of his pleasure ended up being influenced by his
actions. In this vein, Harry is experiencing the guilt of a person who’s conflicted about his pleasure from
pornography. The person understands that he derives pleasure from watching people and reducing them to
objects onto which he can project his own desire, but when his gratification project is over, he is left with the understanding that the people whom he’s taken advantage of without ever having met may suffer
because of his actions as a consumer of an industry that does not ethically treat its actors.
At the end of the third trimester, Harry revels in his completion of the virtual reality’s image, but
feels the guilt associated with his actions having external effects. The third trimester of the scene includes
shots of Harry, frustrated at his inability to complete the full picture by decoding a crucial part of the
conversation, manipulating his devices to meet his whim. If one understands his devices as an extension
of his own body, as Marshall McLuhan suggests in his book The Medium is the Massage (41), Harry’s
physical manipulation of his devices, ultimately resulting in his gratification and then guilt, can be
understood as an act of self-pleasure. Extreme close up shots of Harry’s fingers moving the devices
emphasize this claim.
Once Harry is finally able to fulfill his gratification project, manipulating the devices enough to
clearly hear one of his subjects utter the critical line, “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” Harry’s pleasure
is emphasized in a close up, stationary shot (shot 58) in which he understands his success. However, his
guilt overcomes him in the shots to follow, and the camera juxtaposes his darkening reaction with the
tangible and intangible images of the couple- the photograph he has pinned to his wall, and his own
virtual construction. He understands that his actions will have a negative impact on those whom he’s
objectified, and he feels deep shame, akin to the pornography viewer after the video ends.
This scene emphasizes the ways in which Harry’s obsession with mechanical manipulation can be
understood as scopophiliac when contextualized by Laura Mulvey’s thesis, and explores the ways that
Harry must tether himself to his machine in order to feel human, speaking to the works of Sherry Turkle
and Marshall McLuhan. Harry fears that the pleasure he derives from his work will turn sadistic if he
continues to take an active part in the manipulation of his subjects. He worries that his controlling hand
will lead to the suffering of others, something that he cannot handle. The rest of the film presents a
potentially lifesaving project to Harry: either reconcile his scopophiliac obsession with its impact on others in order to tame his guilty conscience, or be forced into the passive role of the observed. Ultimately
Harry is unable to reconcile his feelings of pleasure and guilt, leading him to become the object of his
own punishing desire.
Sources Cited
Coppola, Francis Ford, director. The Conversation . Sakai Media Gallery , Paramount Pictures, 1974.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage . Gingko Press, 1967.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Criticism , 1989, pp. 303-315.. Sakai.
Turkle, Sherry. “Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self.” Handbook of Mobile
Communication Studies , MIT Press, 2008, pp. 121–134.
