There are three kinds of transportation that dominate cinema: the horse, the car, and the train. Each of these has its romance and its landscape. The horse represents total freedom. It can be ridden on any terrain; it can take its rider into the vast unknown. In the horse is the origin of the cinematic image; the motion of the horse is inherently beautiful, and a galloping horse conveys to the galloping horseman some fragment of its wonder. The car is perhaps the most prolific of the three; cars are the conveyance of choice for all kinds of characters; they serve as confessional booths; they create an inner chamber that can move a character between various outer chambers. In the days when films were reluctant to step outside, the car was a connective tissue. Later, the car could strive out into the countryside; it could speed, and chase, and swerve. But in the car is also a limitation. Where the horse can go anywhere, the car must abide by the road. Not in every case, but in most. The genre of car-centric cinema makes this its name — the road movie. Civilization closes in, if only a little: the characters might go anywhere within a prescriptive network of possible options. The train, then, is the ultimately restrictive form. It can only travel on the rails, and mostly travels on a schedule. The train possesses a kind of inevitability: an unstoppable motion that must ferry its characters in whichever direction they are pointed. Usually, they have no ability to change directions. I suspect it is more often that a train is destroyed than a train is stopped. Within the train, society is replicated: where a horseman is alone, and an automobile contains usually two people, the train can provoke the mixture of a great variety of diverse inhabitants. The thing then becomes a dramatic lock; there is a heightened romance in transfixing characters in this model of the world, hurtling through the wilderness. Each of these modes possesses its own style of romance; each has caused specific genres of film to grow up around them.
But I ask you to spare a moment for that other mode, sulking in the corner, the spine of so many cities: the circumspect bus. Often witnessed in backgrounds, and sometimes used to signify a bad time for miserable characters, the bus is given no romance by the cine-eye. Even the definitive bus-film — Speed — seems to make little use of that specific bus mood. I say this as a regular user of buses; I say this as someone who favors the bus. The Conversation contains the bus mood. Our protagonist, so obsessed with controlling every aspect of his life — and so incompetent at achieving that goal — is wholly beholden to the bus schedule. The bus becomes an extension of Harry Caul’s psyche; a sense of ramshackle, unreliable motion from one place to the next. For all his precision, Harry does not possess the freedom of the car (he is briefly a passenger in an impromptu drag race; Stan will drive loops around him on a scooter; he spots Ann in a car; Mr. C — supposedly — dies driving). Harry’s bus-reliance is then his greatest contradiction. We might assume he prefers the bus because it is anonymous (the most anonymous form of travel, next to subways), because buses are not so easily tracked or clocked. But then he chains himself to the unreliable schedules of the city; in becoming invisible, he must submit himself entirely to things he cannot decide. It is an abdication of responsibility, a clinging to routine.
And yet the bus also represents a form of the ideal, insofar as it represents a system that allows an infinity of driving around in circles, in such a way as to accord with the public good. There is a predictability that exists in the idealized bus circuit; a bus does not plumb new frontiers (as so often trains appear to); a bus is by its nature inconspicuous and workaday. It must take the longest possible route, and stop frequently. Perhaps the irony of the bus is the frequency with which it becomes unpredictable. When we see Harry run for the bus in The Conversation, do we suppose it to be his being late, or the bus being early? Can we perhaps allow for both at once? Because in Harry Caul there is also a bus-like system, a simple loop by which he might command every aspect of his life. He values above all privacy, and professionalism: these will be his watchwords. The great and pervasive irony of The Conversation is the degree to which this pro-snooper is totally incapable in guaranteeing either of these outcomes, whether in his romance, in his housing, in his industry, or in his work. His delicate efforts to maintain a complete independence from chance, and from pernicious outsiders, are made mockery of. His attempts to withhold the tapes from his client are flubbed; his secret confession to a floozy is instantly exposed; his apartment is freely entered despite his many security measures; his mail is read; his room is bugged; his employee is poached; and his lover seems to vanish in just the way he is incapable of doing. As a boy, he was half-paralyzed. He slipped into a bath. This experience, this slipping, is the mood of the film. An inability to clamber up the edges; his face dipping under the water. When he was five, he punched a friend of the family with all his strength. A year later, this friend died. Here we see the abstract lines of causality. The point by which the five-year-old bears the guilt of a death that seems both related and unrelated to his action. At once: Harry Caul cannot control his actions, or those around him. At once: Harry Caul seems capable of evil acts without intending evil acts. Here is the moral whirlpool: lacking control of the self, lacking control of the outcomes, and failing to properly connect cause to effect. The narrative of the film is a crystallization of this conflict, in which Harry Caul cannot decide whether it is action or inaction that will prevent an obscure and terrible event (the nature of this event, and the victim thereof, cannot be clearly ascertained). And if inaction is itself a form of action, then Harry must exist constantly in a state of questioning: that whether he does, or does not, he might be responsible for evil.
As such, we return to the bus. The bus strips from a person one layer of responsibility; the passenger on a bus must submit themselves to the schedule, to the route, and must trust whether or not they are late, or early — or arrive at all — to the mechanisms of faraway depots. It might be Harry’s fantasy that there existed a bus that was always on time, that always took him to his destination. He need only get on and get off. But that is the contradiction: Harry wants to control his life but he also wants no say in it; he wants to move detached through the world, to float without touching the railings. Harry who is absolutely secure in his custom-made reality; and Harry who can exist ghost-like, drifting through the lives and responsibilities of other people without leaving a mark. The two are then combusted by that most human impulse: the desire for connection. His hermitage cannot persist because he takes pride in his work; because he seeks the moral good; because he wants to love and be loved. This is the crucible of Harry Caul.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
