By Paula Elguera
It was another Sunday night. I found myself in my apartment with no plans, a bowl of overly buttered popcorn, and nothing to watch. Suddenly, I remembered this movie my parents had told me to watch the weekend before. The movie was The Conversation, a 1974 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. I knew almost nothing about it –only that, according to my parents, it was good. I turned it on, not expecting the fifty-year-old movie to have me questioning everything.
The Conversation follows Harry Caul, a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman who is hired to secretly record a young couple talking in a crowded plaza in San Francisco. In the opening scene, Harry and his team are positioned throughout the area, using microphones and other recording equipment to capture different pieces of the couple's conversation. The sound shifts from clear dialogue to background noise to distorted audio. Harry later spends hours combing the recordings, removing background noise, and listening to the same words over and over again in an attempt to understand exactly what was said.
As I watched the surveillance operation unfold, I was amazed by just how much work they were doing. There were people positioned around the plaza and microphones pointed in different directions. The crew then spent hours piecing everything together. An entire team of professionals was needed just to listen to one conversation. Meanwhile, my phone was sitting next to me on the couch. That was when a movie from 1972 stopped feeling so old. The technology in The Conversation is obviously outdated, but the questions the movie raises about privacy and surveillance might be even more relevant today. Harry lives in a world where listening to someone requires an entire operation and extensive technology. But the anxiety underneath all of that does not feel dated at all. If anything, Harry's obsession with privacy feels even more relevant now, as surveillance has become much less noticeable.
I am not someone who spends every day worrying about being surveilled. In fact, I willingly give out information about myself constantly. I use Instagram and WhatsApp. I listen to Apple Music. I shop online. I use Waze and accept cookies every time the question pops up. I share my location with my friends and family. Most of these decisions do not feel like decisions about privacy. They are just normal parts of using technology today. Like almost everyone, I have experienced strangely specifically targeted ads. I will mention something completely random in a conversation, open my phone a few hours later, and suddenly there is an advertisement for exactly what I was talking about. Whenever this happens, my immediate reaction is always some version of telling myself that there's no way it's listening to me and continuing scrolling as if nothing happened.
Watching Harry Caul dedicate his whole life to secretly listening to people made me realize how strange that reaction actually is. I casually joke that a device I carry everywhere is listening to my private conversations, yet apparently I am not concerned enough to stop using it. Of course, an oddly specific ad does not necessarily mean my phone secretly recorded my conversation. There are plenty of other ways technology can learn about what I am interested in. In some ways, that possibility bothers me even more. Maybe my phone doesn't need to listen to me. Maybe everything else I do already gives it enough information. This is where Harry's process in the conversation started to feel surprisingly similar to the way I think about data today. Harry does not capture one perfect recording. He collects fragments. Some pieces are clear, others aren't, and some even seem meaningless until they are put in the context of everything else. He repeatedly plays the tape, isolates certain sounds, and slowly constructs a version of what he believes happened.
Our digital lives are also made up of fragments. One google search says almost nothing about me. Neither does one liked reel, one purchase, one location, or one song. But my searches, purchases, likes, reposts, activity, and online habits all together draw up a pretty clear picture of who I am. A company or algorithm does not need to “know” me in the way another person does in order to predict what I might click next. Instagram is a clear example. I’ve never sat down and given Instagram a list of my interests, yet somehow my explore page has figured them out. Cooking videos, Messi edits, and chubby babies fill my algorithm. The longer I use the app the more specific it becomes.
The uncomfortable part is that this is exactly what I want it to do. If Instagram suddenly stopped personalizing my content, I would probably use it less. That is the contradiction I kept thinking about after The Conversation: we are uncomfortable when technology knows too much about us, but we are also frustrated if it doesn't know us well enough. We want personalization without thinking too closely about what makes that personalization possible.
Harry has almost the opposite relationship with privacy. His career depends on invading other people's privacy, yet he is intensely protective of his own. He reveals very little about himself and becomes uncomfortable when other people seem to know information he did not explicitly give them. There is an obvious irony to watching a man who secretly records people become terrified by the possibility that someone could do the same thing to him. But because Harry understands surveillance better than almost anyone else, his fear also makes sense.
The film's use of sound amplifies his paranoia. The recorded conversation from the opening scene is played so many times that the audience begins listening like Harry. Each repetition makes certain words seem more important. The distorted audio slowly became clearer, and I found myself paying closer attention every time it played, trying to understand what the couple was saying. Coppola does not simply show us a man doing his job; he makes us participate in it. We know we are listening to a conversation that was meant to be private, but we still want to hear it more clearly.
That experience also feels super familiar today. Social media has normalized knowing an enormous amount about people that we haven’t even met. Without ever having a conversation with someone, I might know who they are dating, where they went on vacation, and even the most intimate details about their life. We don't normally call that surveillance, but it's not very far off. When The Conversation was released, secretly listening to two people required an entire surveillance operation. Today, most of us willingly carry a device that knows an incredible amount about us everywhere we go. That Sunday night, when the final credits rolled, I didn't delete my social media or throw away my phone. I actually picked it up immediately to see what other people thought of the movie. And in a way, that made the movie feel even more unsettling.
