The Subject of "The Conversation"

Abstract

I think that I know how to look, if it's something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity,... Julio Cortazar, Up' I'm going to present here a variety of overlapping operations, and in each I will be concerned with questions of boundary. Initially, on the level of the textual, I will be reading Francis Coppola's The Conversation as one of a series of early 1970s crime movies which, in presenting their protagonists with unreadable mysteries which defy solution, seem to out-noir the classic film noir. Such a reading runs quickly into difficulty, however, because The Conversation cannot be resolved by its audience any more than the mystery which confronts its protagonist can be solved within the diegesis. Unlike Chinatown or The Parallax View, in which the failure of the hero to figure out his mystery is recuperated in the audience's successful comprehension of the (in both senses of the term), there is no final ironic resolution to aid the spectators as they put their coats on and head up the aisle. For this reason the film has been read variously as nihilistic, arty, or failed. Without trying to assign it to any of these categories, I talk about the film on another level of possible appreciation-the intertextual. The open-endedness of its diegetic situation can be understood (i.e., resolved or closed) in terms of the way the movie seems to refer outside itself to a variety of films against which it sets itself up to be read. Its filial relationship to Hesse's Steppenwolf, to Antonioni's Blow Up and Cortizar's story of the same name, and its parental relationship to De Palma's Blow Out, for example, provide ways of talking about the work which free us from having to determine whether the film makes sense. This question of the text's referral outside itself parallels a third possible level of intervention, which concerns the functioning of the text in the regime of the spectatorial. This analysis involves a discussion of the film's failure to mean in the context of its relatively idiosyncratic suturing operation. Where the classic cinema involves the spectator in the text by means of a continual appropriation of her or his look by the characters on the screen, The Conversation undercuts this involvement by establishing untraditional relationships between images and sounds. The opacity of the plot is thus paralleled-and perhaps caused byan unusual demand system made upon the spectator-auditor. This problem further involves a discussion of the way in which the subject is created by the