Like The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)—set in mid-1960s Indonesia under President Sukarno—the political drama of reporters in a war zone becomes an exploration of capturing images and how they relate to moral heroism. Guilt hovers in the background as the characters question the consequences of tracking a potentially dangerous story. What should a reporter do with the material once he or she cannot claim objectivity? What are the limits of stealthy voyeurism and recording? To what extent does recording an event change it? Photos can lie, of course, but (as in Blow-Up) they can lead to the revelation of truth—in this case murder.
If a self-conscious opening is appropriate to Under Fire’s concern with photojournalism, political awareness, and personal responsibility, it is crucial to the theme of surveillance in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Compared to his Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, its scale is modest—taking place entirely in San Francisco—but his exploration of cinematic form is even more sophisticated here. Film editor and sound designer Walter Murch—who offered insights about the inseparability of style and content in the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now—received an Oscar nomination for the sound of The Conversation, whose story is grounded in the act of recording. Arguably the greatest film ever made about surveillance, it demonstrates Coppola’s fascination with technology. This film is a powerful expression of the Watergate era, given that he was two-thirds through filming at the time of the break-in. Gene Hackman stars as skilled wiretapper Harry Caul, in a performance of impressive restraint and implosion. One of the sources for this psychological drama is a conversation Coppola had in 1966 with director Irvin Kershner, who mentioned a microphone with precise gunsights resembling a rifle. Another is Blow-Up, whose protagonist begins to realize that a murder was committed while he was snapping photos of a park. Only in enlarging and juxtaposing each image is he able to piece together the possibility of a fatal act.
The Conversation foregrounds sound and the role it plays in breaching privacy, inducing paranoia, or maintaining the illusion of control. In the film’s opening sequence, the viewer must focus attentively while details are gradually revealed. From a high angle, the camera slowly zooms in, reframing a number of vital elements during lunch hour in a San Francisco square. A mime who is imitating pedestrians in the square introduces two themes of The Conversation, privacy invasion and distorted reproduction. The visual doubling he creates is heightened by the shadows cast on the pavement. (Given the increasingly crucial role played by the microphone, the mime is the only one in the square who is impervious to this surveillance device.) The second shot presents a gunsight, followed by a subjective view of a young couple. Through whose eyes are we looking? Are we identifying with the gaze of an assassin, or is the camera merely aligned with the shotgun microphone that permits surveillance? The latter interpretation will be validated by subsequent shots of men with hidden microphones tailing the young couple. Coppola thus uses misdirection to elicit a visceral as well as philosophical reaction: resisting identification with a shooter, we realize how much more information we need in order to make sense of the scene. The opening does not so much situate the viewer as unsituate us. It seems appropriate that the same word is used for what a gun and a camera (or in this case, microphone) do: shoot. Even if a film shot is obviously less lethal, Coppola explores the guilt of those who turn people into objects captured electronically. The scene culminates in the van that serves as the wiretappers’ provisional headquarters, and its two-way mirror is another invasion of privacy.
FIGURE 7.4 The camera zooms in on Harry (Gene Hackman) in the opening of The Conversation (see clip)
The music grows louder, as do the sound effects, when the camera pans the crowd from eye level. The distorted sound of the couple’s conversation alerts us to the real focus of this opening: they are the targets of aural voyeurs (“auditeurs”?) who are paid to eavesdrop on them. Later in the film Hackman’s character goes to the office of the “director” (Robert Duvall). The latter is seen beside a miniature set, suggesting that he is a double for the filmmaker. His assistant (played by a young Harrison Ford) has a telescope. In retrospect, the first shot could be from the perspective of the director’s office. When Harry visits this office, we see the extent to which he, too, is obsessed with control. And there might be a personal resonance for Coppola if we ponder the degree of control that a film director might have. The camera of The Conversation is omniscient and manipulative. It is noticeably static in Harry’s apartment, but when he rents a motel room adjoining the one where he fears a murder will take place—enabled by his audiotapes—the camera circles the space. At the end, it circles Harry’s apartment with similar determination, suggesting that an unseen party is watching.
FIGURE 7.5 The microphone/gun from The Conversation
One of the questions Coppola raises in the film is, what can we trust? Not the tape Harry has made, which is distorted at the end. (The line, “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” has a different meaning in the opening scene and at the end, depending on which word is emphasized: “He’d kill us” or “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”)9 Unlike traditional motion pictures, this one offers the unsettling reply that nothing can be trusted, not even the images and sounds created by filmmakers. The Conversation proposes a vigilant skepticism, as do other key films of the same year, including Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Bob Fosse’s Lenny, and The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula (who also made All the President’s Men).
Coppola shares with another San Francisco–based filmmaker the cinematic interrogation of what to trust as movie viewers. Philip Kaufman elaborated on this theme in his version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978. Whether he presents a gradual revelation or a twist in perspective, there is an inherently political component to his narrative strategy of disorientation. Because his films—including The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Quills—often lead us to look more closely and critically at the images surrounding us, we see how easy it is to be duped and how vigilant a viewer—or a citizen—must remain. Likewise, his Rising Sun (1993) acknowledges the potential duplicity of recorded images.10 If the focus of Michael Crichton’s 1992 bestseller was a Japanese corporate takeover in the United States, Kaufman’s film deftly juggles at least four strands: a murder mystery, a satire on American business confronted by Japanese investment, a mentoring relationship in which a feisty detective is paired with a mysterious sage, and an exploration of whether we can believe what we see.
In the sleek boardroom of a Los Angeles skyscraper owned by a Japanese firm, a young American woman is found dead after kinky sex with an unidentified man. Two LAPD special liaison detectives are brought in to investigate Cheryl’s murder: the elegant, Japanese-speaking John Connor (Sean Connery) and Web Smith (Wesley Snipes), a volatile, divorced African-American father. The two seem to have little in common, but together they unravel the murder mystery, which is both revealed and obscured by technology. John is given a laser disc that recorded the sexual escapade and strangling in the boardroom. The killer’s face is not visible, until John and Web notice a reflection that turns out to be Eddie (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), Cheryl’s rich boyfriend. Case closed? Not quite. Jingo, a Japanese-American computer video expert (with a deformed hand), shows them how the disc has been doctored: Eddie’s face was inserted.
Beginning with the sound of Japanese taiko drums as the camera zooms into red on a black screen, the opening sequence of Rising Sun unsettles the viewer. Kaufman said in an e-mail, “That red in the opening is the sun, not exactly meant as symbol, more as representation: glare, intense heat, the place where our eyes are not supposed to look for fear of being blinded.” A jarring human yell accompanies images of ants roasting in the sun before being crushed by horses’ hooves, a dog carrying a hand, then a woman tied up on horseback. The shocking accumulation of stylized images seems to be from a western, but the camera recedes from a screen in a Karaoke club. This film within a film turns out to be the background fo
r the song “Don’t Fence Me In,” sung by Eddie and four Asian-American men doing backup. The film reminds us that there is always something we are not seeing beyond the immediate frame. This opening sequence also introduces the theme of untrustworthy video images. The displacement of Cole Porter’s music performed by a “yakuza” barbershop quartet offers a witty preparation for the juxtaposition of cultures that the film will explore. The hands of the woman on horseback are bound—foreshadowing the bondage we will later see in Cheryl’s bed—and are then untied, appropriately enough, when we hear the lyrics “Set me loose.” Moreover, the severed hand in the dog’s mouth might prepare us for the deformed hand of Jingo.
FIGURE 7.6 Eddie (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) in the opening of Rising Sun (see clip)
As the camera moves further back, we realize just how partial our perception has been: in what seemed like a nighttime scene in an Asian city, Cheryl—fed up with Eddie’s singing—gets up from the bar and goes out into a brightly lit Los Angeles. As Kaufman told me in July 1993, “If Crichton said he was issuing a wake-up call to America (the economic sector) … the film is a wake-up call to what Americans need in film-viewing habits.” A camera tilt from Cheryl’s red sports car to the top of a skyscraper tower includes the title “February 9, 6:13 A.M.”: as in Psycho, the printed detail of time and place accompanies a voyeuristic self-awareness. If Hitchcock’s film of 1960 takes us through half-closed blinds into a dark hotel room where a partly undressed woman is in bed with a man, Kaufman shifts the voyeurism from the erotic to the technological, foregrounding the surveillance aspect we saw in The Conversation. As I wrote in my book about Kaufman: “When his characters engage in pleasurable erotic activity, the camera invites our own voyeurism; but when they are captured by surveillance monitors, a discomfiting identification with control expresses his anti-authoritarian stance. In Kaufman’s films, what voyeurism is to pleasure, surveillance is to control. Unlike voyeurism, surveillance denies privacy or intimacy. If the erotic gaze is strongest when shared by the subject and object, surveillance depends upon an imbalance of power between the one who controls the gaze, and its unwitting object.”11 When I asked Kaufman about the allusion to Psycho, he said it had not been conscious: “I wish I had intended it,” he replied. “I love the idea that both films deal with voyeurism while being a murder mystery.”
Alfred Hitchcock was the master not only of suspense but also of the self-conscious voyeuristic gaze, and the opening of Psycho constitutes a textbook case of heightened peeping. The credit sequence designed by Saul Bass provides an organic frame, introducing titles that are jagged and fragmented. Given what we later learn of Norman Bates, the titles are a graphic depiction of split personality. The verticals become the buildings of the first shot, and the horizontals become the blinds. The famous sequence establishes the camera as an active narrative presence and the audience as a group of Peeping Toms (see clip). The titles of time and place suggest the authenticity of what we now call a procedural, tracking details as if facts were verifiable. The camera moves stealthily from an establishing shot of Phoenix into a closer view, and finally through a half-closed window into darkness. This voyeuristic penetration of closed blinds reveals, appropriately enough, a couple engaged in illicit sexual activity. Like the camera, we are merely curious observers at this stage. But Hitchcock will soon lead us out of detachment and into compelling identification with ambiguous characters. (The misdirection of Hitchcock’s opening includes the camera finding the film’s star, Janet Leigh. He will wreak havoc with audience expectations by having her killed in the first third of the film.)
Through the gradually increasing use of subjective camera, we are first involved with Marion, a thief (Leigh), and then with Norman, a Peeping Tom (Anthony Perkins). In a probing article entitled “Hitchcock, Truffaut, and the Irresponsible Audience,” Leo Braudy explains how Hitchcock is able to manipulate our sympathy for a character who will turn out to be a deranged murderer: “We follow Norman into the next room and watch as he moves aside a picture to reveal a peephole into Marion’s cabin. He watches her undress and, in some important way, we feel the temptress is more guilty than the Peeping Tom.… Whether we realize it or not, we have had a Norman-like perspective from the beginning of the movie … this time, like the first time, we know we won’t be caught. We tend to blame Marion and not Norman because we are fellow-voyeurs with him, and we do not want to blame ourselves.”12 Hitchcock’s meticulous camera placement and movement are expressive throughout. For example, a two-shot of Norman under a stuffed bird suggests a link between the two. This is developed in a low-angle close-up of Norman’s chin as he chews. He is depicted as a bird of prey, related to the slashing beaks of Hitchcock’s next film, The Birds. By contrast, extreme high-angle shots in the old house are not only for practical reasons—we cannot see Mother’s face—but also provide a bird’s-eye perspective, the illusion of a privileged perch above the terror. As Lila (Vera Miles) approaches the house toward the end of the film, the forward tracking shots characteristic of Psycho carry her and us deeper into a literal and figurative darkness. When she enters the cellar, the moment of truth is therefore expressed by the lighting. She hits a naked bulb whose swinging intermittent light casts dizzying patterns in the dark and animates the empty sockets of Mother’s eyes. On a formal level, this completes the pattern of imagery of hollow eyes, from the end of the shower sequence—where Marion’s inanimate eye rhymes visually with a drain—to the stuffed birds, to Norman’s tirade against institutions because of “the cruel eyes studying you.”
FIGURE 7.7 Norman (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho
The gaze of the film’s audience is presumably more benign, the portal of a voyeurism less cruel than curious. A fascinating (and prescient) cinematic riff in this regard is The Truman Show (1998), directed by Peter Weir from an original screenplay by Andrew Niccol. This dramatic comedy invites speculation on how free a human being can be in a society where manipulation by an unseen force is the norm. In an ongoing TV broadcast, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is unaware that he is always on camera. He lives in an idyllic house with a perky wife (Laura Linney), drives to his insurance job in picture-postcard Seahaven, and smiles broadly. The multilayered opening sequence turns out to be as self-consciously fabricated as those of great Hollywood predecessors like Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942): in the opening scenes of these two older films, the reality we think we are seeing turns out to be a movie excerpt in the former and a play being rehearsed in the latter (see clip). Christof (Ed Harris) says to the camera, “We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.” We then see Truman as the camera zooms out: he, too, directly addresses a camera, but unwittingly, as this is a private moment of doubt in his bathroom mirror: “I’m not gonna make it.” An attentive viewer might notice pixilated horizontal lines as well as a green LIVE sign on the bottom right corner: in retrospect, these alert us to an external recording device. We are seeing him on a TV monitor, like the audience within the film. The credits are for the “real” Truman Show (and it is appropriately ironic that his name is a combination of true and man), “starring Truman Burbank as himself,” and “created by Christof.”
Interviews with the actors offer a double performance. Laura Linney plays actress Hannah Gill, who plays Meryl, the wife, and calls her role a blessed life. Noah Emmerich, as the actor Louis who plays Truman’s friend Marlon, says, “Nothing here is fake. It’s merely controlled.” The inner frame begins with a title card, “Day 10,909,” before we follow the gregarious persona that Truman projects to everyone around him. The staged reality of The Truman Show—which uses a genial man’s daily experience as hugely popular entertainment for bored viewers—constitutes an uneasy h
ybrid. Truman’s fans avidly watch his life broadcast around the clock. Presaging the surveillance now prevalent in streets and buildings, Weir masterfully portrays a brave new world where five thousand hidden cameras record Truman’s every move. (No commercials are needed because the product placement is within the show’s decor and dialogue.)
FIGURE 7.8 Truman (Jim Carrey) in The Truman Show
Truman believes he is the subject of his own life but is really the object of the director Christof. Once we are aware of his exploitation of Truman, do we identify with the protagonist or the puppet master? Christof’s name may suggest a religious dimension, but Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski seems more relevant: his films—notably The Decalogue (1989)—question whether the script of our lives is already written. In Blind Chance (1987) Kieślowski dramatizes the extent to which human beings are free or subject to the whims of either destiny or a capricious divinity. (The music of Wojciech Kilar, who composed the score of Blind Chance, is part of the soundtrack of The Truman Show.) Truman grows suspicious and ultimately realizes that he exists for the eyes of others. He tries to escape the island, finally making it to the edge of the set: our hero exits the frame, his freedom contingent on the audience (internal and external) letting him go. When the film critic David Thomson was invited by the Guardian in 2011 to discuss his favorite movie, he selected The Truman Show, lauding how “Truman finds the courage and the means to escape and that leads to one of the great moments in movie history (for me) when he and his small boat come to the point where the enormous dome protects and imprisons Seahaven—as well as his life so far and The Truman Show, the mundane epic he has been playing all his life. The dome drops down to the sea like a screen—both a movie screen and the kind of screen that prevents us from looking or going beyond a certain place. But Truman is going to go beyond it.”13 After the misdirection of the film’s introduction, we too—while being entertained—have moved into a more vigorous skepticism and lucidity about viewing screen images critically.
Cinematic Overtures Page 13