If you enjoy paradoxes, you’ll like Harry Caul. The man, played by the superb Gene Hackman in his best role, is a walking conundrum. Harry is a saxophone-playing surveillance expert who spends most of the movie deciphering a line of dialogue between two lovers. He claims that he has no interest in the conversations he eavesdrops on, yet he cannot let go of the fear that his interference might cause irreparable damage. Don’t believe his claim that all he is looking for is “a nice, fat recording;” Harry is searching for a clear conscience. He’s no robot; on the contrary, Harry is a deeply conflicted man, who seeks absolution in a church. After a past job implanted doubt in his head about the extent of his involvement and responsibility, Harry yearns for solace; he tries to come to terms with the possibility that he indirectly caused two deaths. Maybe that’s why Harry projects such a different outward image—he is loath for people to find out that inside, he’s a ball of nerves. On the outside, he’s a calm follower of procedure and a lover of detail. To his colleagues and competitors, Harry boasts knowledge of the latest technology and claims expertise in the field. He doesn’t see himself on the same level as the other professionals at the wire tappers’ trade show; Harry feels he’s in a league of his own and behaves as though he’s on top of his game, an immature and showy mistake that ends up causing him great embarrassment later on in the evening.
Harry is so cautious (afraid to taste a cookie!) that some people raise eyebrows at his overly vigilant ways. He has a unique method for opening doors, doesn’t own a phone, doesn’t tell his girl where he works, won’t share any trade secrets with his employee, won’t hand over the tapes to a client’s assistant (a young Harrison Ford, anyone?) . . . the list goes on. Yet, despite all these precautions, his neighbor somehow manages to find out that it’s his birthday and leave some presents in Harry’s apartment in his absence (how does she get in?!). Unbeknownst to Harry, his assistant gets a job with a competitor; Harry learns of the betrayal when the two bump into each other at the trade show. Harry’s most prized possession gets stolen from his apartment after he invites a bunch of semi-strangers, who manage to prank him by bugging the bugger, thus exposing his incompetence.
But we already knew that Harry’s more talk than action, didn’t we? Coppola offers plentiful clues to inform us that the expert in the outdated suits sporting an unflattering mustache does not possess any awesome powers, despite all of his gadgets. By the end of the movie, we see through the plastic translucent raincoat, which reveals a scared child, not the Big Brother. Interestingly, Harry’s last name, Caul, means “the amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus.” Since Coppola intended the last name to be Call (he ended up liking and keeping his secretary’s typo), I wonder if he later selected the raincoat as Harry’s choice of outerwear to play on his name. I’m possibly overanalyzing here, and Harry might just be a plain man in an ugly coat, not a representation of an infantile man cloaked in protective coating (the church? – the next time I see Magritte, I will ask him since Coppola will surely never tell), but who knows? Gertrude Stein might argue that a coat is a coat is a coat, so if we were to trust her, we’d see only the see-through plastic, not the piece of membrane, but we don’t. Well, not in this case at least.
Just as it takes us a while to recognize Harry’s true nature, it takes Harry a long time to understand exactly what he hears on the tapes he recorded in Union Square. Despite continually replaying the dialogue, Harry doesn’t pick up on the nuance in one of the sentences (hint: it has to do with the word the speaker emphasizes over others). The haunting yet subtle piano music highlights Harry’s confusion and anxiety, as well as his repetitive, obsessive listening to the tapes. The cinematography also deserves a special mention. In the beginning of the movie, the beautiful shot of the San Francisco park takes our breath away. As the lovers walk around, they notice a homeless man on a bench, whom Harry mirrors in a later scene as he’s lying down during one of his listening sessions. Another double scene is of his girlfriend singing the same song as the woman on whom he was spying earlier sang. Or is Harry imagining it?
Coppola plays with various symbols, such as the pen that houses the bug, which exposes not only Harry’s intimate conversation, but also his incompetence as a so-called (cauled?) expert. The pen seems to be a direct counterpoint to the Virgin Mary figurine, which he finally reluctantly breaks as he’s searching for a bug, only to be confronted with emptiness. We wonder if Harry became religious after his recovery from a serious illness he suffered from as a boy. His faith must have something to do with the fact that he’s not afraid of death but scared of murder. As Harry listens to a murder being committed in a hotel room next to his, he turns on the TV to block out the gruesome noises, only to be faced with a commentary on Nixon’s scandal, which itself was put into motion due to a bugging.
Eventually, we learn what really transpired and understand the true meaning of the lovers’ conversation. Even though the circumstances are clear (there’s a confirmation in the form of a threatening phone call), the ambiguous and shocking scene in which Harry learns of a wrongdoing could easily be one of his visions. But his paranoia is not always unfounded. Sadly, he doesn’t get to yell out “Eureka!” as he destroys his apartment in search of well-planted bugs. The eavesdropper cannot escape the eavesdroppers. This time, religion does not come to the rescue.
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