“Hachi: A Dog's Tale” - Lasse Hallström (2009)

Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009) is a film about a dog and its close bond to its master, and it is based on a true story.  The original dog, Hachiko, lived in Japan from 1923 to 1935, and it became nationally famous there for its extraordinary loyalty to its master, even after the master had died [1].  The story of Hachiko’s life was subsequently made into a popular Japanese film, Hachiko Monogatari (1987) by Kaneto Shindô, and the present film that is under discussion, Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, is an Americanized retelling of this same story.  The account told in this film, which was well-received on its release in 2009 [2,3], concerns a lost puppy dog that is found and adopted by a kindly man and the ensuing loving relationship that develops between the two.

This film was directed by Lasse Hallström and scripted by Stephen P. Lindsey, with cinematography Ron Fortunato, film editing by Kristina Boden, and music by Jan A. P. Kaczmarek.  The film’s producer, who also had the lead human acting role in the film, was Richard Gere.  Gere has had a long personal involvement in Buddhism and general spiritual matters, and I believe in this connection that this background helped fuel his engagement in the telling of such a story that transcends ordinary materialistic and utilitarian considerations.  

On the production side of things, it is interesting to note that Hallström adopted the somewhat unusual narrative style of attempting to present part of this tale visually from the dog’s perspective, and this is not so easy to do in film form.  Presenting an animal’s perspective is probably more easily accomplished via textual presentation (think of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903)), whereas a film presentation in this manner needs to show visually what the dog is seeing and experiencing, rather than just describe it in words.  Hallström chose to do this by showing, in an otherwise color-film, Hachiko’s point-of-view shots in black-and-white.  Now it is known that the color spectrum for dogs is somewhat different than that for humans, but dogs can see colors [4].  So the black-and-white POV shots are misleading and just something of a distraction for the viewer.  These shots don’t really invoke the viewer’s empathy, as far as I can see.

The story of the film is encased as a long flashback, and the film opens in Rhode Island with a grade-school boy Ronnie (played by Kevin DeCoste) telling his classroom about his ultimate hero – his grandfather’s dog named “Hachiko”.  Then we move into the proper flashback, beginning more than a decade earlier when Ronnie’s grandfather, Professor Parker Wilson (Richard Gere), was returning from a trip and encountered a wandering puppy dog in the train station.

Parker soon discovers that the puppy is a Japanese Akita breed and was sent from Japan to Rhode Island, but its damaged cage’s destination tag has been partially torn off and lost, so its rightful owner is unknown.  All he can guess is that the dog’s name is “Hachiko” (or “Hachi”, for short).  Not wanting to leave the dog at the local dog pound, where it will face likely extermination, Parker takes it home and continues his search for the rightful owner or, failing that, a willing adopter.

But Parker’s efforts to find a proper owner prove unsuccessful, and his wife Cate (Joan Allen), seeing how much her husband likes the little dog, reluctantly agrees that they can add a new member to their household.  

 

Parker soon enthusiastically gets down on all fours in an effort to show his new pet, Hachi, how to fetch, but he gets nowhere in his efforts.  Later, Ken (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a Japanese colleague at Parker’s college, tells him all about Akita dogs and that they can’t be taught to fetch.  I don’t believe it.  As a dog-lover, myself, I think any dog can be taught to fetch if one follows the right procedure [5].  This is something that Parker clearly doesn’t do properly in this film.

Anyway, time passes, and the next time we see Hachi, he has grown up to be an adult dog.  But  he and Parker are still affectionate companions.  Parker commutes to work by train, and every day he walks to the train station in the morning.  One day though, Hachi, not wanting to be without his master, follows Parker on his walk to the station.  Hachi is duly escorted home and confined in his yard, but he soon manages to escape and return to the train station, where he waits outside all day for Parker’s return at 5pm.  Parker tries to stifle this behavior, but he eventually gives in to Hachi’s determined loyalty.  It then becomes a regular practice for Hachi to walk with Parker every day to the station in the morning and then wait loyally outside for Parker’s return at 5pm.  

There are further colorful depictions of life in the Wilson household, including Hachi’s enthusiastic participation.  On one occasion, Hachi and Parker have a rude encounter with a wild skunk, and they both get “skunked” as a result.  We then see both Parker and Hachi together in the bathtub trying to cleanse themselves from the stink.  

One morning Hachi brings his rubber ball with him to the station and shows Parker that he knows how to fetch.  That same day, Parker dies of a stroke while lecturing to his class.  Hachi waits faithfully at the station all day and night for his beloved master, who is now gone forever.

After Parker’s funeral, Cate moves out of the family house, and Hachi is adopted by their  married daughter Andy (Sarah Roemer) and her husband Michael (Robbie Sublett), who take the dog to their house.  Hachi’s new home is not so close to the train station, but he still manages to escape from the yard and intelligently follow the train tracks to his familiar train station.  There Hachi assumes his usual position in front of the station to wait for Parker’s return.

Although Andy and Michael find Hachi there and bring him back to their home, Andy eventually recognizes Hachi’s fervent passion for his master, and she lets the dog out so he can rush back to the station.  From this point on, Hachi lives at the train station, sleeping under a boxcar on a rail siding and waiting all day for Parker outside the station.  Hachi gets food every day from the local train station master (Jason Alexander), a fast-food street vendor (Erick Avari), a local butcher, and others, so he is able to maintain his daily vigil indefinitely.

Eventually, Hachi’s faithful waiting for his master becomes famous, especially after a newspaper article is written about the dog.  The years go by, and Hachi becomes an old dog, but still he waits for Parker every day outside the train station.  About a decade after Parker’s death, Hachi has a vision of Parker returning to greet him, and the faithful canine passes away.

So ends Ronnie’s film-length saga about his hero, the loyal Hachi.  If you’re not into dogs, this tale might not offer much to you; but if you are a dog-lover, you are likely to have an appreciation for the almost ethereal devotion that dogs can have for their human masters.  Dogs are often more than just loving; they sometimes seem often to devote their very lives to their masters, whom they almost revere as gods.  For them, their love can be more important than life itself.  

And that is the point of this film.  Animals are typically characterized as just wild, ruthless beasts, and yet, in stark contrast to such an image, a dog can manifest a love so deep that it can serve as a model for all of us humans. This extraordinary feature of dogs has long been recognized.  Consider 13th-century Persian poet Jelaluddin Rumi’s poem “Love Dogs” (also quoted in Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat’s review of this film [2]), which pays tribute to the limitless love that a dog can feel [6]:

“Love Dogs” by Jelaluddin Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)

        One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
        His lips grew sweet with praising,
        until a cynic said, “So!
        I’ve heard you calling our, but have you ever
        gotten any response?”
        
        The man had no answer to that.
        He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
        He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
        in a thick, green foliage.
        
        “Why did you stop praising?” “Because
        I’ve never heard anything back.”
       
        “This longing you express
        is the return message.”
        
        The grief you cry out from
        draws you toward union.
        
        Your pure sadness
        that wants help
        is the secret cup.
        
        Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
        That whining is the connection.
       
        There are love dogs
        no one knows the names of.
      
        Give your life
        to be one of them.

If you see Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, you will probably be moved to recollect your own experiences with a loving dog.

★★★

 

Notes:

1. “Hachiko”, Wikipedia, (11 December 2020).   
   
2. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “Hachi: A Dog's Tale”, Spirituality & Practice, (n.d.). 
   
3. Stefan S, “Hachiko: A Dog's Story”, (A Nutshell) Review, (24 January 2010).  
   
4. Harriet Meyers, “Are Dogs Color Blind? Side-by-Side Views”, American Kennel Club, (29 August 2019).   
   
5. Sassafras Lowrey, “How to Teach Your Dog to Fetch”, American Kennel Club, (11 August 2020).   
   
6. Sunada Takagi, “‘Love Dogs’ by Rumi”, Mindful Purpose Coaching, (7 March 2011).    
   

“Frankenstein” - James Whale (1931)

Film genres often have classic works that serve as exemplars of the class.  Perhaps the epitome of works of this nature is Frankenstein (1931), the classic exemplar of the horror film genre.  There have been other, subsequent films that may have been better, but Frankenstein definitely set the standard and still stands as the classic horror film.  It tells the story of a scientist who constructs out of constituent parts a living, autonomous being in human form.  Unfortunately, this creation turns out to be a monster.  

The story of this monster is loosely based on Mary Shelley's famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), the 1927 stage-play adaptation of which by Peggy Webling served as a more explicit precursor for the film.  When the film Frankenstein was produced in 1931, Universal Studios had already profited from their release of Dracula (1931) earlier in the year, and they were bent on producing more horror films to excite the movie-going public.  They had pretty much free rein at that time, because the Hays Code, which served to restrict the film industry’s licence to shock the viewer, was not imposed until 1934.  What they produced on this occasion was something of a masterpiece, and it was an immediate hit [1,2].  

The film was directed by James Whale, who was a craftsman in expressionistic mise en scene.  And the film’s cinematography was by Arthur Edeson, whose high- and low-angle camera shots, as well as some then-uncommon (in the early sound era) moving-camera shots, added to the moodiness of the proceedings.  I also found Bernhard Kaun’s music to be a useful contribution.  These elements, despite some overacting and some occasional jump-cuts, worked together to produce a truly involving work of expressionistic cinema.   

But an overall key to this presentation is the continued back-and-forth movement of narrative tone between the normal (signified by ‘N’) and the dark (‘D’).  The normal is the everyday world and is here characterized by light surroundings and ordinary, reasonable, warm-hearted people.  The dark scenes depict the threatening unknown and a depicted in shadows, or at night, or during thunderstorms.  It is this alternating shift between N and D in the film that offers a compelling narrative rhythm and keeps the viewer unconsciously ensnared in the story [3,4].  As Variety reviewer Alfred Greason remarked [2],

“. . . the feeling of horror is not once let go past the point at which it inspires disbelief, where out of excess it would create a feeling of makebelieve.”

The story begins on a dark evening somewhere in Bavaria showing scientist Henry Frankenstein (played by Colin Clive) and his weird hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) secretly watching a funeral burial (D).  We soon learn that they are engaged in stealing freshly buried corpses from which Henry can harvest body parts that he can use in his secret scientific project – to construct an artificial ‘person’ from body parts and make it come to life.  

But there is one body component that they still haven’s found in a suitable state of freshness – a human brain.  So Fritz is tasked with going to the class (N) of Henry’s old medical college mentor, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan), and stealing a preserved brain.  This assignment Fritz sets out to accomplish, but he bumbles and steals a former criminal’s brain instead of a normal brain (D).

The scene now shifts to one (N) showing Henry’s fiancé, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), and their mutual friend Victor Moritz (John Boles), worrying about Henry’s seclusion in a dark laboratory where he is allegedly conducting his scientific experiments.  

Then it shifts to a scene showing Henry and Fritz working in Henry’s laboratory in an abandoned watchtower (D).  They are waiting for a coming electrical storm, a lightening strike from which can be used to bring Henry’s fabricated body (which I will refer to as “the Monster”) to life.  However, just when the thunderstorm hits, Elizabeth, Victor, and Dr. Waldman show up at the watchtower laboratory and express their concerns over Henry’s sanity.  So to show off his genius, Henry invites them to witness his electrical vitalization effort.  In a memorable scene, we see that after the lightening bolt hits the apparatus, the attached and prone Monster twitches, and Henry exults in triumph, shouting out, “it’s alive!”.  Now he knows what it feels like to be God, he tells them all.

Elizabeth and Victor return to town, where in a brief interlude (N) they are shown chatting with Henry’s pompous father, Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr).  Meanwhile Dr. Waldman stays with Henry, and they talk about the experiments.  Only at this point, almost halfway through the film, do we finally see the Monster (played by Boris Karloff) upright and walking (D).  Although the Monster has disturbingly exaggerated features, there is an air of innocence about him – almost like a curious animal.  When he sees sunlight for the first time, he reaches up for it, almost as if to embrace it.

However, the Monster becomes hysterically frightened by Fritz’s lighted torch, and they have to lock the Monster in the basement.  Fritz, though, enjoys tormenting the Monster with his torch, so he lingers alone in the basement to continue torturing him.  The Monster, however, soon kills Fritz, off-camera, and when Henry and Dr. Waldman discover this, Henry reluctantly agrees that the Monster must be exterminated.  So they engage in an exhausting physical struggle with the Monster, during which Waldman manages to inject the Monster with a powerful serum that puts him to sleep.

Henry is so exhausted from the struggle with the Monster that he collapses, and Elizabeth and Baron Frankenstein come to take him home (N).  Waldman assures Henry that he will finish exterminating the Monster, himself.  However, after Henry departs and Dr. Waldman is engaged in the final act of extermination, the Monster wakes up and kills Waldman.  Then the Monster wanders outside in the countryside.  Now with the recuperating Henry and Elizabeth at home planning for their upcoming marriage, which is to take place immediately (N), the Monster is outside and dangerous (D).

The Monster comes across a young girl who is playing alone by her father’s lakeside cottage, and soon the two of them become innocently engaged in a game of tossing daisy blossoms into the water and watching them float.  When the beguiled Monster tosses the little girl into the water to see if she will float, too, she drowns immediately; and he runs off in horror.  
 

Meanwhile at the Frankenstein mansion, the wedding is about to commence (N) when Victor rushes in and reports that the Monster has killed Dr. Waldman and is now on the loose and dangerous.  Then the Monster does show up and sneak into the mansion and into Elizabeth’s room, where he threatens her (D).  But her screams cause him to run away without being caught.

The stage is now set for the final sequences.  The whole village is riled up with vengeful anger over the murder of the little girl, and, armed with torches, they are organized into squads to search everywhere for the Monster.  Eventually, the Monster is found in the middle of the night and followed to an abandoned mill where the dramatic finale takes place.  

There are two aspects to Frankenstein that make the film extraordinarily gripping.  One, as I have already mentioned, is the relentless back-and-forth movement between the normal (N) and the dark (D) aspects of the story.  The other interesting aspect of the film concerns the characterization of the Monster portrayed by Boris Karloff.  Although the monster cannot communicate in spoken language, the viewer can empathize with and guess what the Monster might be thinking along much of the way.  Indeed, the Monster is like an animal, and just as we  might sometimes imagine what a dog may be thinking, so, too, we might have a similar feeling about what the Monster might be thinking and feeling.  Thus the Monster is not some diabolical incarnation of evil, but is instead more innocent, like a wild beast.  In fact, the Monster seems more innocent, and perhaps even more humane, than Henry’s assistant, Fritz.

So as the film winds down, the viewer’s complex involvement in the narrative is likely to draw him or her more concernedly into what transpires onscreen.  And this is what makes Frankenstein a memorable work.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Mordaunt Hall, “A Man-Made Monster in Grand Guignol Film Story”, The New York Times, (5 December 1931).   
   
2. Alfred Rushford Greason, "Frankenstein", Variety, (8 December 1931).   
   
3. James Berardinelli, “Frankenstein (United States, 1931)”, Reelviews, (n.d.).   
   
4. Damian Arlyn, “It's Still Alive”, Edward Copeland’s Tangents, (21 November 2011).    
   

James Whale

Films of James Whale:

•  Frankenstein - James Whale (1931)
  

“Yogis of Tibet” - Jeffrey Pill (2002)

Yogis of Tibet (2002) is a little-seen documentary film that certainly deserves more attention.  The film, which is currently available on YouTube, offers a unique portrayal of Tibetan Buddhist Yoga as presented directly to the camera by a number of revered Buddhist lamas and yogis in their own words [1,2].  What makes this testimony special is that until now, certain esoteric yogic practises, such as some of the arcane aspects of Tibetan Yoga, have for centuries been carefully secreted from the general public and have only been made available to dedicated monks and novitiates.  The concern had always been that if attempts are made to share the deep wisdom of yoga in only a casual or limited manner (such as only expressing concepts and overlooking the wisdom and spiritual awareness that comes from dedicated practice), this will only result in bastardized forms of the true discipline.  Indeed, undertaking some of the advanced yogic practises without proper training can be dangerous.  

So it was always forbidden for Tibetan Yogis to speak openly about the nature of their religious practises.  Instead, the holy practises were carefully passed down only by authenticated monks to dedicated trainees, in master-to-pupil fashion.  But recently things have changed.  The Tibetan Holocaust, which was begun in 1950 and was perpetrated on Tibetan society by the Chinese government, resulted in the decimation of the population and the destruction of almost all the Buddhist monasteries and sacred documents in the country [3].  (Note that a form of this kind of ethnic holocaust appears to be being tragically recommitted today in connection with the suppression of the Muslim Uyghur community in Northwest China [4].)  So now a number of Tibetan Yogis are fearful that their sacred traditions will disappear and be lost forever, unless they are made available to a wider audience.  It was in response to these concerns that the film Yogis of Tibet was made.

The film was directed by Jeffrey Pill, written and edited by Barbara King, narrated by Jeffrey Gibson, and it was produced by Phil and Jo Borack.  And it features a distinguished cast of Tibetan yogis who give accounts of their spiritual practices.  Among these dedicated practitioners are:

• The Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama)
• His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche
• His Eminence Drubwang Konchok Norbu Rinpoche 
• His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche
• Venerable Nupa Rinpoche
• His Eminence Choje Togden Rinpoche   
• Ani Konchok Khandro (a yogini)
• Chenga Rinpoche 
• Drupon Sonam Rinpoche 
• Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 
• Drupon Samten Rinpoche 
• Dorje Lobun Tenzin  
• Venerable Nupa Rinpoche
• Geshe Yeshi Chophel
  

The film does not start with much background on yoga or Buddhism, both of which have such varied and complex histories that it would take too long to cover much of that material.  Instead, it begins by taking a look at Tibet’s incredibly harsh and forbidding mountainous environment, in which survival is difficult and life is fragile.  These relentlessly difficult circumstances have likely been an important factor in helping turn the people who live there inwards, towards spiritual succour.  

An important development in Tibetan history was the arrival in the eighth century CE of Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhist teachings to Tibet.  These teachings were then combined with aspects of the native Bon religion of Tibet in order to produce the unique hybrid form of  Buddhism that came to characterize Tibetan Buddhism.  One of those special aspects of Tibetan Buddhism is that, rather than restricting itself to austere rituals divorced from other aspects of culture, it has embraced both science and the arts.  In fact for Tibetan Buddhists, their religion is a natural science; but it is a science with a wider compass than Western natural science, because their discipline includes consciousness and the human soul.  Tibetan yogis also differ from Hindu yogis in many respects – for example, Tibetan yogis believe in the reincarnation of their lamas.

And so as a result, this Tibetan religion became so enmeshed in the common culture of the people that customarily about one out of six young Tibetan men would enter into Buddhist monkhood and receive sustenance support by alms from the general public.  However, as I mentioned, in 1950 this seemingly idyllic spiritual society came to a crashing end when the Chinese Communist government invaded Tibet to take over the country.  With the intent of plundering the country and eliminating its religion, the Chinese perpetrated a human and cultural genocide of horrific proportions.  Over the ensuing years, which included the disruptions associated with the Cultural Revolution, about one million Tibetans were killed or died of starvation, which was about one-sixth of the entire Tibetan population [3].  Moreover, many other Tibetans were subjected to torture and long periods of confinement.  As for the cultural genocide, almost all of the 6,000 Tibetan monasteries were destroyed by the Chinese, and almost all of the Tibetan Buddhist sacred documents were burned.

Some Tibetans did manage to escape from the carnage, including Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche [5,6], who found refuge in Bhutan, and The Dalai Lama, who escaped to Dharamshala, India, where he helped set up a center for Tibetan refugees.  And most of these Tibetan escapees were other  Buddhists of various persuasions.  But the focus of this particular film under discussion is primarily on practitioners of the Drikung Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.  The overall Kagyu school is one of the major Tibetan Buddhism schools, and one of their key historical figures is Milarepa [7].  The particular Drikung Kagyu line of yogis are known to have an especially high degree of rigour to their regimen, and we must be thankful that they saw fit to reveal and show explicitly some of their long-guarded practises to the producers of Yogis of Tibet.

One special treat in the film is the rare chance to see Milarepa’s original meditation cave near the remote Lapchi Gang valley, which that famous yogi used during the 11th century and which took some arduous efforts on the part of a cameraman to access.  There in the cave, two yogis on retreat, Nupa Rinpoche and Geshe Yeshi Chophel, are shown and interviewed.

Another feature is the extended interview of the revered elderly yogi His Eminence Drubwang Konchok Norbu Rinpoche, who says that he has spent so many years in isolated meditation that he is now able to see his past life incarnations.  In this connection, he discusses some aspects of the Tibetan Buddhist concept of bardo, which refers to the transition “gaps” between one life experience and another [8].  As an elderly yogi, Drubwang Konchok Norbu Rinpoche was starting to make preparations for his departure from incarnate life when the Dalai Lama interceded and asked him to live longer in order to pass on his valuable teachings to others.  So Drubwang Rinpoche assented to this request.

There are also more detailed depictions of some other Tibetan yogic practises.  One concerns the Tantric meditation practise of Tummo, which is used for the remarkable generation of one’s bodily heat without using any external heat-generating instruments.

Another interesting practise demonstrated is the Trul Khor practise.  This amazingly strenuous  yogic exercise, which is intended to awaken the kundalini power within the body, is given a full five-and-a-half-minute demonstration for the camera by Chenga Rinpoche.

There are further claims of paranormal yogic powers, such as alleged control on the part of an advanced yogi over the form of his coming reincarnation, but, of course, these cannot be demonstrated.  More compelling is the commentary by several yogis concerning their unremitting commitment to compassion.  Even those who endured the most severe atrocities of the Tibetan Genocide have maintained complete compassion for the perpetrators of these atrocities and have no feelings of hatred or revenge.  These yogis feel that the bad things that have happened to them are the result of their own bad karma that they, themselves, generated in past incarnations by committing sinful acts.  For now, they feel that their salvation – and in fact the salvation of all living beings – lies in the direction of meditation.  And this should be a meditation that focusses on loving compassion for all beings.  

At the end of the film, the narrator comments that the Chinese Communist effort to obliterate Tibetan Buddhism certainly backfired.  Rather than snuff out the ancient Buddhist practises, these supposed acts of annihilation have helped spread them to a wider world at large.  In 1949 the Dalai Lama was not so well-known internationally; but today, after his escape from the Tibetan massacre, he is one of the most famous and admired figures in the world.  And his teachings and those of other associated Buddhist monks are now reaching a worldwide audience.  In addition, thanks to such efforts as the making of Yogis of Tibet, even the more arcane yogic practises of Tibetan Buddhism are coming to a wider light.

All in all, Yogis of Tibet is a interesting watch, and I recommend it to you.  However, there is a heavy emphasis in this film, and in most other accounts of Tibetan yogis, on the rigours associated with a practitioner's austere withdrawal from the world.  In this regard, I feel sure they are recommending a withdrawal from the mundane and self-dominated circumstances of our everyday experience.  But I don’t think the yoga masters demand a total withdrawal from all aspects of the world.  In fact, I believe their recommendation of withdrawal from the everyday world is made with the ultimate intention of achieving a blissful and compassion-filled union with the entire, incredibly rich world of which we, and all other beings, are essential cooperating parts [8,9].  Indeed, this suggests to me that the goal of achieving the feeling of compassion and love for all beings is a crucial aspect of the Tibetan yogic way of life.  Although this is briefly mentioned in the film, I would have liked to have seen more coverage of and testimony on this vital topic from the enlightened yogis who are shown in this fascinating film.
★★★½ 

Notes:

1. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “The Yogis of Tibet: A Film for Posterity”, Spirituality and Practice, (n.d.).  
   
2. Georg Feuerstein, “Yogis of Tibet (video)”, Traditional Yoga Studies, (6 July 2011).   
   
3. Maura Moynihan, “Genocide in Tibet”, The Washington Post, (25 January 1998).   
   
4. Peter Apps, “China’s Uyghur detention camps may be the largest mass incarceration since the Holocaust”, The New Statesman, (21 March 2019).   
   
5. The Film Sufi, “'Brilliant Moon: Glimpses of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche' - Neten Chokling (2010)", The Film Sufi, (6 October 2018).   
   
6. The Film Sufi, “'Journey to Enlightenment' - Matthieu Ricard (1995)", The Film Sufi, (7 July 2019).  
   
7. The Film Sufi, “'Milarepa' - Neten Chokling (2006)”, The Film Sufi, (28 June 2018).   
   
8. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying, Bluebird, (2019).
9. Paramahansa Yogananda, Wine of the Mystic : The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,  Self-Realization Fellowship, (1996). 
   

Jeffrey Pill

Films of Jeffrey Pill:

• Yogis of Tibet - Jeffrey Pill (2002)
  

“The Departed” - Martin Scorsese (2006)

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) was another one of his dazzling crime thrillers (such as Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019)), which featured atmospheric and emotive coverage of a gangster underworld.  On this occasion, Scorsese had a $90 million production budget and a star-studded cast, featuring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin, to help ensure that The Departed would be another blockbuster at the box office.  And sure enough, the film won great favor with the public and the critics [1,2,3,4].  It also garnered four Oscars, including the one for Best Picture.  One of the other Oscars that the film gained was the one for Best Director – the only time that Scorsese has ever won that particular award (he has been nominated for such an Oscar eight other times over the course of his illustrious career).  Nevertheless, The Departed has not won universal acclaim from all critics, and I am among those who have found some shortcomings with the film [5,6,7,8].

One of the main things that fascinates viewers of The Departed is its convoluted spy-versus-spy story structure.  It has a plot based closely on that of the popular Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) that was directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and written by  Mak and Felix Chong.  William Monahan’s adaptation of this same story for The Departed won him an Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

The story for The Departed is set in South Boston and involves a struggle between a mobster’s gang in that area and the Massachusetts State Police (MSP).  The leader of that underworld gang is Frank Costello (played by Jack Nicholson), but he has so far been too cagey to ever get arrested by the police.  We see an early example of that caginess when the film shows how Costello has groomed a young man from his neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), to be a mole for his gang inside the police force.  Sullivan advances quickly inside the MSP and is soon accepted to join the Special Investigation Unit (SIU), which is headed by Captain George Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) and whose current main goal is to pin a rap on Costello.  So a spot in the SIU is exactly where Costello has wanted Sullivan to be.

Meanwhile a student about to graduate from the MSP academy, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is recruited by Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to become a spy for the police inside Costello’s gang.  Queenan and Dignam then appropriately doctor Costigan’s already sullied background to be suitable for him to join Costello’s outfit.

Much of the rest of the film follows the parallel, and mostly separate, narrative threads concerning the activities of the two moles.  Since their identities and activities must be kept secret, the secret identities of Costigan and Sullivan are unknown to each other, as well as unknown to their colleagues on each side of the fence.  When both Costello and the SIU eventually figure out that each of the contesting groups has an unknown rat informant in their ranks, it is not too surprising that both Costigan and Sullivan are then tasked with the jobs of uncovering the hidden mole (i.e. themselves) in their respective groups.

Things get even more entangled when both Sullivan and Costigan wind up talking separately to a young female police psychiatrist, Dr. Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga).  And, of course, what should never happen in such circumstance, does indeed come about – Dr. Madden soon has sexual relations with both Sullivan and Costigan.  This unlikely plot contrivance provides a particularly striking narrative opportunity for dwelling on one of the film’s major themes – establishing one’s true identity.  

Throughout the film, we see interactions among people with hidden identities.  And these veiled interactions set up opportunities for the endless double-crosses that take place in the story.  One mind-blowing additional identity obfuscation is revealed when, well into the story, Costigan learns that gang leader Costello is actually an FBI informant and therefore protected.  

But there are two aspects of identity – external and internal.  The external is what is presented to other people, and that can be falsified for opportunistic gain.  But one’s internal identity is how one sees him-or-herself, and this was a matter of deep concern for Sullivan and Costigan.  In particular, Sullivan was concerned about his manhood and sexual identity.  His implied impotence even leads him to unconsciously question his own sexual gender preference.  Costigan, on the other hand, had a guilty conscience and was concerned about his authenticity and the control of his volatile temper.  

Another theme in the film, and one that is common in Scorsese films, concerns masculinity.  Of course this is probably always an issue in the criminal underworld, but it is heavily emphasized in this film.  Sullivan is particularly concerned about his masculinity, and his self-doubts are starkly contrasted with the hyper-confidence of his idol, Costello, whose motto is

    “I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me!"

Anyway, the various encounters involving masculinity confrontations and identity misunderstandings only accelerate and fuel further double-crosses as the story proceeds.  And these lead in the closing scenes to a string of murders undertaken for revenge and self-protection.  There is no morality or sense of human justice in this gangland underworld.  Eventually, most of our principal characters wind up getting killed – Sullivan, Costigan, Costello, Capt. Queenan, and Costello’s right-hand man French (Ray Winstone).  But is there a narrative purpose or resolution to all these killings?  What is the story being told here?  It seems that many viewers have problems on this score.  In particular Sean Dignam’s murder of Sullivan at the very end of the film has left many people wondering why (although some plausible explanations have been put forward [9]).

So, overall, what do we walk away with at the close of The Departed?  Although, as I mentioned, the film did win many awards and success at the box office, I would still say that there are a number of weaknesses that detract from the viewing experience.  I have already mentioned the aimlessness of the narrative, but there are other major problems with this production, too.

• Film Production
  Unfortunately, the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus and film editing of Thelma Schoonmakeris is pointlessly agitated, and these only serve to distract the viewer.
      
  
• Acting
  The over-the-top acting, particularly on the part of Jack Nicholson (as Frank Costello) and Mark Wahlberg (as Sean Dignam), is also distracting for the viewer.  Wahlberg is constantly exploding into epithet-filled diatribes that almost lead us to believe his character is incapable of normal discourse.  Even worse is Nicholson’s ham acting as Costello, a key figure in this story.  It is reminiscent of his satanic characterizations from earlier films, but it is way too exaggerated here.  On this score, critics Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez have commented on how Nicholson’s performance helps bring the whole film down [6]:
  

  “Quoting James Joyce, cursing with racist glee, enjoying cocaine-drenched interracial threesomes, and licking squashed bugs off the palm of his hand, his [Nicholson’s] is a routine of typically outsized Jack-ness that’s chillingly fearsome and daunting in spurts (i.e. when his gaze remains stern and his arching eyebrows remain lowered) but flamboyantly cartoonish in its entirety—a description that too often also accurately applies to the alternately scintillating, silly, and distended The Departed.”

• Realism
  In an expressionistic film such as this, we may expect some exaggerations beyond authentic realism, but many of the goings-on in this film are highly implausible, from both physical and psychological perspectives.  I won’t itemize them here, but many situations, such as Madolyn Madden’s involvements with both Sullivan and Costigan, seem very much contrived.
  
  
• Profanity
  Although profanity has been alluded to in the above points, its loud, incessant presence in this film almost suggests that it is also a significant theme on its own.  And it’s not just the gangsters.  I would think that criminals and law-enforcement people would be tougher than this and would not be constantly succumbing to adolescent temper tantrums throughout the day.

So although The Departed has some characteristic Scorsese virtues, it has enough deficiencies to bring it down a few notches.  And this means that the film, despite its flamboyant production values, does not quite measure up to its inspiration, Infernal Affairs.
★★½

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Good and evil, in each other's masks”, RogerEbert.com, (5 July 2007). 
   
2. Manohla Dargis, “Scorsese’s Hall of Mirrors, Littered With Bloody Deceit”, The New York Times, (6 October 2006).  
   
3. “The Departed”, (A Nutshell) Review, (12 October 2006).   
   
4. Colin McCormick, “10 Greatest Quotes From The Departed”, Screen Rant, (30 January 2020).   
   
5. J. Hoberman, “Bait and Switch”, The Village Voice, (26 September 2006).    
   
6. Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez, “DVD Review: The Departed”, Slant Magazine, (7 February 2007).   
   
7. Brian Koller, “filmsgraded.com: The Departed (2006) Grade: 55/100", filmsgraded.com (4 April 2014).   
   
8. Dennis Schwartz, “Departed, The”, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews, (n.d.).   
   
9. Shane O'Neill, “The ending of The Departed explained”, Looper, (22 June 2020).   
   

“Freaks” - Tod Browning (1932)

In an imagined pantheon of classic horror films, Freaks (1932) would certainly deserve a hallowed position.  And yet when the film was first released in 1932, it was widely criticized and had a limited distribution, making it a financial disaster [1].  Many of the early viewers in those days seem to have been put off by what was perceived as the exploitative subject matter of the film, which concerns deformed people who are exhibited as freaks as part of a traveling circus.  And even today, some viewers dismiss the film Freaks as merely a cheap exploitation exhibition showing those unfortunate people who are seriously deformed by birth defects, as was indeed the practice of traveling circus freak shows of an earlier era [2].  

The producers, however, had harbored high hopes for the success of this film.  The director of Freaks was veteran Tod Browning [3], whose previous outing, Dracula (1931),  starring Bela Lugosi, had been a huge box-office hit and is also considered to be a classic horror film.  Browning had been interested in crafting a more personal work, and he had urged his producers in the mid-1920s to secure the rights to Tod Robbins’s story "Spurs" (1923) for this purpose.  Eventually a script was developed by Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon that was loosely based on Robbins’s story, and veteran Merritt B. Gerstad was secured for the cinematography.  When a 90-minute film was completed in early 1932, routine test screenings were conducted.  However, these screenings proved to be so disastrous that about one-third of the original-cut material was removed from the film, and today all we have left of the film is the 64-minute version that was given a limited commercial release [9].

Although the film proved to be a financial disaster at the time, nevertheless, more recent viewers have generally been much more sympathetic towards the film – and they have regarded the “freaks” in this film as having been presented in a humane way [3,4,5,6,7,8].  Indeed in this story, the “freaks” are the real protagonists with whom the viewers will empathize.  In fact I would agree with Andrew Sarris’s comment on this score that

“‘Freaks’ may be one of the most compassionate movies ever made.” [10]

The story of Freaks plays out over roughly three phases.  The first one introduces to the viewer the many and various figures in this tale.  The second phase covers events surrounding the memorable wedding banquet that then takes place.  And the final phase shows the dramatic consequences that ensue.

 

1.  A Traveling Circus and Its Performers

The opening scene shows a carnival barker summoning customers to see his freak on display.  Although the film viewer cannot see this freak, the onlookers shown in the film are clearly horrified at what they see.  We are only given the suggestion that this apparently horribly deformed figure was once a beautiful woman.  The ensuing one-hour of film is then apparently a flashback narrative covering background material on this story.

The scene now shifts to the backstage areas of a traveling circus, where the various performers are shown in random scenes of convivial social interaction.  Many of the figures shown are freaks – deformed people whose physical grotesqueness or dwarfishness is supposed to attract curious spectators.  Among the dozen or so freaks who have significant roles here are

• Hans (played by Harry Earles), a dwarf
• Frieda (Daisy Earles), a dwarf who loves Hans
• the Siamese Twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton), two young ladies who are conjoined at the hip
• Schlitzie (Schlitzie), a congenial pinhead
• Half-Woman-Half-Man (Josephine Joseph), a hermaphroditic person whose body is male on  one side and female on the other side
• Half-Boy (Johnny Eck) – only the upper-half exists
• the Bearded Lady (Olga Roderick)
• the Human Skeleton (Peter Robinson)
  

And there are also four other performers with normal physiques who figure prominently in this story:

• Cleopatra (played by Olga Baclanova) is a beautiful trapeze artist.
• Hercules (Henry Victor) is the circus strongman.
• Venus (Leila Hyams) is a comely woman who evidently performs with trained seals.
• Phroso (Wallace Ford) is a circus clown.
  

But there are clear-cut differences among these four “normal” characters concerning how they treat the freaks.  Cleopatra and Hercules, like many of the other circus workers, are scornfully dismissive of the freaks.  In contrast, Venus and Phroso treat the freaks cordially as ordinary friends and colleagues – they all belong to the same team.  This contrasting treatment is a major thematic element of the story.

In this first section of the film, dwarfs Hans and Frieda are shown to be in love and becoming engaged to be married.  But Cleopatra then mockingly flirts with Hans and seduces the unsuspecting dwarf to fall in love with her, instead.  We also see Venus breaking up with the arrogant Hercules and turning her attention to Phroso.  Afterwards, Cleopatra begins flirting with Hercules.

Another interesting sequence shows the pretty Siamese Twins, Violet and Daisy, each becoming enthralled with and finally engaged to marry different men, who will somehow have to learn to deal with the conjoined situation of their spouses.

 

2.  The Wedding Banquet

Frieda, concerned that Cleopatra’s flirtations with Hans are only intended to make a fool of her own beloved, goes to the woman and urges her to desist from this mockery.  But while speaking to Cleopatra, Frieda inadvertently reveals that Hans is due to inherit a vast fortune in the near future.  This news gets Cleopatra’s mind working, and she afterwards reveals to her real lover, Hercules, about her murderous plans to marry Hans and get his money.

The wedding is arranged, and there follows the memorably expressionistic wedding feast for Hans and Cleopatra, with all the freaks in celebratory attendance.  During the festivities, everyone gets drunk, and while noone is looking, Cleopatra secretly pours poison into Hans’s wine drink.

Meanwhile the party revellers become increasingly exuberant, and they begin chanting a phrase welcoming Cleopatra into their community:

“Google, goggle, one of us, one of us. . .

  Google, goggle, one of us, one of us”

Cleopatra, in reaction, is horrified at the suggestion that she could ever be one of “them”.  After all, to her, they are all just odious freaks, and she angrily orders everyone to leave the party.

3.  Afterwards

Cleopatra tends to the now-seriously-ill Hans, and when he regains consciousness the next day, she apologizes for her behavior the previous night, telling him she was drunk.  But she continues to add poison to the medicine that the doctor has prescribed for Hans.  

However, Hans and the other freaks, who have been spying on Cleopatra and have witnessed her adding something to Hans’s medicine, are now suspicious.  So Hans only pretends to swallow the medicine she gives him, and he conspires with the other freaks about what they need to do.

This sets the stage for the final sequences on a dark and stormy night with the circus wagons on the move.  Hans and his freak colleagues catch Cleopatra red-handed giving the poison to Hans and confront her.  Meanwhile, Hercules, who knows that Venus is aware of his and Cleopatra’s murderous scheme, goes to Venus’s wagon with the intent to kill her.  But Phroso and other freaks rush to Venus’s defense.  Can justice be served?  Can the defenseless be saved?

Of course, the freaks are very limited in terms of any physical prowess, especially when compared to Hercules.  But we are shown that they can work together as a team, and as I mentioned, their inclusive sense of belonging (to be “one of us”) is a major theme of this story and plays an important role here.  What transpires at this point is highly dramatic as the fiercely loyal freaks get the upper-hand.

The story now shifts back to “the present”, with the carnival barker still touting his special freak on display.  Only on this occasion, the camera shows the barker’s freak to the viewer, revealing it to be a grotesquely deformed Cleopatra.  She now looks like a strange, oversized duck and has become “one of them”.

The final scene is something of a coda, and it shows Hans having inherited his fortune and living solemnly alone in a luxurious mansion.  He gets a surprise visit from friends Venus, Phroso, and Frieda, and this serves to bring about a reconciliation between Hans and Frieda, which enables the film to end on a more happy note.

Now from this overall account of the film you might wonder what is it that makes Freaks a horror film.  True, there are attempted murders and acts of revenge, but does the film truly evoke in the empathetic viewer a horrifying fear of the unknown?  Yes, definitely.  Something ultimately unfathomable to us has imposed freakish forms on these innocent circus freaks, which has led the rest of the world to reject their humanity.  So ordinary people are customarily driven to see these freaks as monsters with likely disturbing characteristics.  But as the story unfolds, the viewer gradually sees that it is the freaks who are psychologically “normal” and humane.  In fact many of them can be seen to be childlike and spontaneously loving towards others.  On the other hand, Cleopatra and Hercules, who are physically attractive and thereby socially confident, are not normal on the inside; they are (psychologically) monstrous.

Note that for most of the film, our freaks are the relentlessly oppressed ones; but towards the end, the freaks rally together to take revenge on their oppressors.  And yet the 64-minute version we have today does not, thankfully, stand as a typical revenge film.  That is because, perhaps accidentally due to the negative reactions from pre-screening audiences and threats of censorship, much of the material ultimately excised from the original 90-minute cut was concerned with vivid acts of vengeance taken on Cleopatra and Hercules [11].  What remained was a film whose overall tone was more humane and more sympathetic towards the freaks.

So what makes this film a masterpiece?  It arises from the fact that the viewer watching the film will empathize with some characters at different times and in different ways, and thereby see them from multiple, contrasting perspectives.  They will see the freaks, for example, sometimes from the perspectives of their own freak colleagues and sometimes from the perspectives of the freaks’ antagonists, Cleopatra and Hercules.  From each side – whether from Cleopatra’s or that of the freaks – the “other” comes to be seen, with horror, as something of a macabre menace.  And the viewer, too, sees both of these horrifying perspectives, sometimes at the same time.  This multiplex view of threatening agency is what makes the film a compelling work of art.  

 ★★★★

Notes:

1. Edward Brophy and Mat Mchugh, “Freaks”, Variety, (12 July 1932).   
   
2. “Freak show”, Wikipedia, (19 September 2020).  
   
3. Alfred Eaker, “TOD BROWNING: DIRECTOR RETROSPECTIVE”, Alfred Eaker, (26 January 2016).   
   
4. Gary Morris and Mark A. Vieira, “Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932): Production Notes and Analysis”, Bright Lights Film Journal, (1 April 2001).   
   
5. Brian Koller, “filmsgraded.com: Freaks (1932) Grade: 79/100", FilmsGraded”, (18 February 2018).   
   
6. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Freaks (1932)”, Combustible Celluloid, (n.d.).   
   
7. Ed Gonzalez, “Review: Tod Browning’s Freaks”, Slant Magazine, (29 October 2003).   
   
8. Gary Giddins, “Still a Pulp Tour de Force”, The New York Sun, (31 August  2004).   
   
9. “Freaks (1932 film)”, Release, Wikipedia, (2 October 2020).    
   
10. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, E. P. Dutton & Co. (1968), p. 229. 
11. “Freaks (1932 film)”, Censorship, “Wikipedia”, (2 October 2020).   

Tod Browning

Films of Tod Browning:

• Freaks - Tod Browning (1932)
  

“The Conversation” - Francis Ford Coppola (1974)

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) is a more contemplative work than his great blockbusters, The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979), but it is

in no way inferior.  Written, directed, and produced by Coppola, The Conversation takes a thoughtful look at how the nature of narrative profoundly structures and governs our very conscious existence [1,2].  It tells the story of a man who has surreptitiously recorded an intimate conversation, and who is then troubled by the mysterious narrative implications of what he has recorded.  In this respect the film bears close comparison to two other films with similar themes – Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) [3] and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981).  Indeed, Coppola acknowledged from the outset that Antonioni's Blow-Up was a key inspiration and influence on his development of The Conversation.  

However, there are some fundamental differences between how narrative affects the main characters in the two films.  In Blow-Up, the protagonist Thomas, who is a photographer, is affected by the narrative implications of visual images, while the protagonist in The Conversation, Harry Caul, is occupied by the narrative suggestions in sound recordings.  Moreover, Thomas, in Blow-Up, finds himself constantly distracted and seduced by the suggestive narrative possibilities he encounters; whereas Harry Caul, in The Conversation, steadfastly avoids getting himself involved in any external narratives, as if all narratives involving other people are threats to his autonomy and identity.

Despite these contrasts, both films are great, and The Conversation received many plaudits from top critics [4,5,6,7,8,9,10].  In addition, the film won the Best Film award (the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film) at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and it was also named Best Film by the National Board of Review.  Moreover, The Conversation was also nominated for 3 U.S. Oscars, including one for Best Film (losing out on that one only to Coppola’s own The Godfather Part II, which was released in the same year).  

With respect to the general topic of how narrative underlies our understanding of reality, it may be useful to quote some of my own earlier commentary on the topic [3]:

Narrative form is fundamental to how we understand the temporality of the world [1,2].  We tell stories about what we see, and we learn more about the world around us from others’ stories that we hear or read.  We even understand ourselves in terms of the stories that we tell and remember about ourselves. Although we may store lots of information about the world in various structured formats, at a primordial level this information was originally gathered in terms of innumerable narratives that serve to structure the lives of all of us. These stories are co-created by the participants, so apart from purely fictive creations, the stories are not under the exclusive control of the person who tells the story.  This is what make narrative construction fascinating: we are constructing a plausible story – one that “makes sense” – out of the material that we have experienced.  In the stories are various environmental conditions along with (perhaps numerous) goal-oriented causal agents, which often include ourselves among the players.

In The Conversation, the story’s protagonist, Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman), is a private surveillance expert who secretly records conversations of people who are of interest to his clients.  Caul is not interested in the potentially damning narratives that could be constructed from what he records – that is something he leaves to his clients.  Caul is only interested in the technical quality of his recordings, which because they are often obtained from a safe distance and under noisy conditions, he must ensure have content that  is comprehensible to his suspicious clients.  Indeed, in Caul’s profession, it behooves one to keep his lips sealed about what is under surveillance.  So Caul just prides himself on being an expert technician, and he is reputed to be one of the best in the business.

The story of the film passes through three general phases that represent rough stages in both Caul’s understanding of a surveillance case he is working on and also stages in the progressive revelation to the viewer of just who Caul is.

1.  A Sophisticated Surveillance Job
The film opens with a spectacular 3-minute, overhead moving-camera shot showing Caul’s crew spying on a young couple walking around San Francisco’s crowded Union Square.  Caul has a remote camera and three separate recording devices tracking the couple, Ann (played by Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest), as they chat to themselves while walking in the square.  

Later when Caul goes home and opens the triple-locked door to his own flat, we get to see how secretive and a loner Caul is.  Because he evidently treasures his own privacy, he is alarmed to discover that his landlady has a key to his flat, and she even knows that today is his birthday.  At home, Caul just likes to sit alone in his room playing his saxophone – not on his own, but to accompany a phonograph record.  

When he goes to visit his mistress Amy (Teri Garr), he sneaks in to her apartment, and she becomes so frustrated with his withdrawn, paranoid reticence that she announces she is breaking with him.  Caul then just glumly departs without a word.

Then Caul goes to the large corporate office of his wealthy client who has commissioned his latest surveillance operation.  The man is just known as the “Director” and is not in at the moment, but the Director’s assistant, Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), tells him that the contracted tapes can be handed over to him.  Caul, however, refuses and insists he will only give the tapes personally to the Director.  As Caul is leaving the building, he separately sees Mark and Ann in the corridors, so now he knows that his two surveillance targets are employees of the Director’s company.

Later we see Caul working with his assistant Stan (John Cazale) in his sound editing lab, which is located in a caged area of an upper floor in an abandoned warehouse.  Stan is raucously curious about the tapes they are editing (they are attempting to combine the three recordings into one refined tape), but Caul tells him to shut up and just work.  Caul tells Stan he should not be interested in content, only in sound quality.  But after Stan leaves in a huff, Caul manages to refine one previously obscured piece of the surveilled conversation so that he can make out what was said – “he’d kill us if he got the chance.”

So little by little, and against Caul’s inclinations, some pieces of the narrative puzzle of the surveilled targets are starting to fall into place.  In addition we also learn at the end of this section that Caul is a devout Catholic, and he still has guilt feelings from the memory of one of his past jobs that ultimately ended up later with the murders of the three people he had spied on.  Since as a religious man, Caul believes that God is always watching, he doesn’t want to do anything now that will add further to his guilt.

2.  The Surveillance Convention
Now a commercial convention for professional surveillance practitioners opens in the city, and this introduces some opportunities for the reclusive Caul to open up and have some social interactions.  Caul attends it, and as he wanders among the display booths on offer, he is quietly pleased to be recognized by some people as a famous surveillance operative.  One admirer is an envious surveillance rival of Caul’s, Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield), from Chicago, who sings Caul’s praises to anyone in listening distance.  But Caul is somewhat unsettled to see Martin Stett in attendance and also to learn that his employee Stan has left him and is now working for Moran.

Nevertheless, Caul is sufficiently buoyed by the activities at the convention to invite his admirers and colleagues to a private get-together at his lab that evening.  There he meets and flirts with another woman, Meredith (Elizabeth MacRae), who has been working for Moran.  When Caul has a tender moment alone with her he confides to her some of his personal concerns.  But he is quickly alarmed to discover that the prankish Moran had planted a small recording device on him and had recorded Caul’s conversation with Meredith, which is then played back to everyone else’s mirthful delight.  So Moran has made a mockery of Caul’s precious privacy.  Angrily, Caul orders everyone to leave, although Meredith lingers.

That night Caul beds down with Meredith, but when he wakes up in the morning, he sees she is gone, and he realizes that she slept with him only so she could steal his secret tape he has worked on.  However, Caul soon gets a call from Stett telling him that the Director now has possession of the tape, and that Caul can come over and collect his fee.

During this section of the film, Caul has been tentatively opening up to people, and even though he was burned in that respect, he is starting to have concerns about some other people besides himself, such as Amy and Ann.  With respect to Ann in particular, he remembers the part of the recorded tape that said, “he’d kill us if he got the chance”, and another recorded part mentioning an intended secret meeting of Mark and Ann in room 773 of a particular hotel on the weekend.  So Caul worries that once the Director hears the tape, he may arrange to have the couple killed in that room.  Caul even has a dream of his meeting Ann and confiding to her some private details of his severely health-troubled childhood.  

Caul at this point is now worrying seriously about Ann, and the narrative he is constructing about her is very disturbing to him.

3.  Unraveling the Narrative

Caul goes to the corporate office and finally meets the Director (Robert Duvall), who sullenly turns over to him his fee, $15,000 in cash. While in the office, Caul also notices a domestic picture of his surveillance target Ann, revealing to him that she is the Director’s wife.

So now Caul needs to take action.  He goes to the given hotel on the day of the meeting and gets a room next to 773.  There he does some professional sound eavesdropping on the room next door.  Soon he is extemely disturbed to hear the sounds of an argument and then of physical violence.  When he later manages to pull himself together, he goes and cracks the doorlock to room 773 and enters.  Everything now looks tidy in the room, showing no signs of it previous occupation.  But when he flushes the bathroom toilet and blood comes out, he freaks out.  Something horrible must have happened to Ann, and they’re trying to cover it up.

Caul rushes to the Director’s office, but he is barred from entry.  Out on the street, he sees Ann perfectly okay sitting in a parked limo.  He then soon reads a newspaper headline reporting that the Director has died in an auto accident.  Thus the narrative about Ann that Caul had constructed in his imagination was all wrong.  Something horrible had happened in room 773, but not what he had imagined.  Evidently Caul had misinterpreted or not noticed the verbal stress in the phrase “he’d kill us if he got the chance.”

In the end Caul gets a call warning him that “they” will always be watching him, and he is left to live in a dystopian world of total paranoia.  His knowledge of surveillance techniques makes him even more suspicious of snooping devices potentially lurking everywhere in his apartment, and this makes him more paranoid than ever, as he tears up his apartment in search of bugs.  With noone he can trust and now no possible privacy whatsoever, he can only curl up alone in his shell with his saxophone.

Of course all this was filmed more than forty-five years ago, and we now live in a world where ubiquitous surveillance technology is making privacy more and more of a hopeless dream.  In fact, it seems to be the goal of the Chinese government to record what all their citizens are doing at all times [11].  So the issues of privacy and identity are now more pressing than they have ever been.

We must remember that all personal identities in this samsara world are based on the narratives that have been constructed out of evidence from observations [12].  But we intuitively feel that these narrative constructions can never really capture the true essence of who a person is.  In fact, we feel that we actually have different identities depending on the differing social and physical environments we find ourselves in.  That is why we feel the need to preserve our own privacy and have some control over what we reveal about ourselves to others, depending on the circumstances.  

Harry Caul, working, himself, in the surveillance business, seems to have had an instinctive awareness of how observational evidence could be misconstrued to form a false narrative about someone.  That is presumably why he didn’t want to reveal anything about himself and was generally paranoid.  Thus it is ironic that in this film, Caul was guilty of the same false-narrative construction error that he feared from others.  

So even though Harry Caul was a paranoid misfit, we can basically understand his fears and feel for him.  And that is because today,  forty-six years after The Conversation was made, we have an even greater apprehension that soon we, too, may be facing Caul’s dystopian surveillance world that is so fascinatingly depicted in this film.

 ★★★★

Notes:

1. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, volumes 1, 2, and 3, (1984, 1985, 1988), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
2. Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality" (1991). Critical Inquiry, 18:1, 1-21
3. The Film Sufi, “‘Blow-Up’ - Michelangelo Antonioni (1966)”, The Film Sufi, (14 August 2014).   
   
4. Roger Ebert, “The Conversation”, RogerEbert.com, (1 January 1974).   
   
5. Roger Ebert, “The Conversation”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com, (4 February 2001).   
   
6. Andrew Sarris, “Postscript from Cannes”, Films in Focus, The Village Voice, (6 June 1974).    
   
7. Andrew Sarris, “Who Wants Privacy?”, Films in Focus, The Village Voice, (13 June 1974).   
   
8. Andrew Sarris, “Sexophobes and Saxophones”, Films in Focus, The Village Voice, (20 June 1974).   
   
9. Judith Crist, “All That Money Can’t Buy”, New York Magazine, (8 April 1974).   
   
10. Brenda Austin-Smith, “The Conversation”, Senses of Cinema, (April 2001).   
    
11. “Mass surveillance in China”, Wikipedia, (27 September 2020).   
    
12. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying, Bluebird, (2019).