Few cinematic sequences signify the dawn of postmodernism and all its attendant schizoid unknowability beneath its constructed surface veneer better than the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. In that scene, the audio tapping specialist Harry, portrayed with quiet and contemplative everyman rage by the great Gene Hackman, rips his apartment up with impotent furor trying to locate the wiretap that he knows is there. Note my word choice here: “knows.” Harry isn’t being paranoid, and even if he was, well: “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what is going on,” wrote William S. Burroughs. As a wiretapping expert, Harry has too deep an understanding to believe that he isn’t being surveilled. He knows he’s being watched, and seeing the film through Harry, we also know that he’s being watched, and we also know that we are being watched. But at the same time, we will never have any material proof that we are being watched.
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