We are arguably living in the most surveillant time in history: artificial intelligence is an everyday domestic commodity, algorithms track our interests and spam us with ads for things we might like, and facial recognition is ubiquitous despite verifiable concerns of racial discrimination. Almost every avenue of modern communication has become a normalized form of voyeurism, particularly for the Terminally Online. We are both the watched and the watchers, closely observing strangers, idealizing their personalities, and scrutinizing their opinions from the relative comfort of our screens.
In some instances, though, surveillance can serve a moral good if used to identify corruption in institutions and individuals with significant social and material capital. Francis Ford Coppola’s quiet masterpiece The Conversation (1974), Brian de Palma’s stunning conspiracy thriller Blow Out (1981), and Steven Soderbergh’s lean genre exercise Kimi (2022) each unspool this very paradox, in which surveillance can both be weaponized to invade one’s privacy and to help someone in need. The more the protagonists in these films assemble the pieces of the crimes carried out by their adversaries, the greater they risk their anonymity and the safety of the people they’re trying to rescue. It makes for a dramatically tantalizing, thematically fascinating narrative that also reveals a stark truth: technology diminishes our capacity to empathize when we wield it as a tool for control and power over the most vulnerable.
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That sentiment is especially pertinent in The Conversation, where the cagey wiretapper Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) endeavors to maintain an illusion of privacy as his line of work threatens to unravel it. He lives by himself with a burglar alarm and multiple locks attached to his apartment door. He finds solace in playing the saxophone, claims to not have a home phone, and details very little about his personal life, much to his girlfriend’s chagrin. The paradoxical nature of surveillance is even present in his last name Caul (a homophone for “call”) when Caul himself is afraid to communicate with others.
Despite Harry’s apparent desire for isolation, he does seem to yearn for something outside of his reclusive lifestyle, as evidenced by his latest assignment. While reviewing the tape of a discreet chat between a couple in Union Square, he catches an elusive phrase — “He’d kill us if he had the chance” — and subsequently spends nearly every waking moment filtering the audio, replaying it over and over again until the message is clear. Equally entranced and mystified by the phrase’s ambiguous meaning, Caul refuses to hand over the tape to his client’s assistant Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), provoking an atmosphere of paranoia that forces Harry to reckon with the consequences of getting involved in someone else’s business.
His arc from a withdrawn loner to a desperate hero speaks to our own individual urges to listen and watch things unfold from a distance, namely on the internet, until such moments become so impossible to ignore that they demand our personal investment. No matter how frivolous these situations may seem on the surface, often what forces us to pay attention to them is an overwhelming sense of guilt. If we don’t say something or heed the call to act, our silence is deemed as complicity. Case in point: Harry’s personal guilt from a previous botched job and his devotion to Catholicism inform his motivation to save the couple from a potential hit by his embittered client (Robert Duvall). But in the same way the online world blurs the line between reality and our interpretation of it, Harry possesses bits and pieces of the story, neglecting to consider the implications of pursuing this case on his own without knowing the full picture.
Throughout The Conversation, Coppola draws a remarkable amount of suspense and mystery from this tension between perception and reality. He keeps us dialed into Harry’s psychology through deliberately fuzzy sound design, David Shire’s somber piano score, and Bill Butler’s precise cinematic compositions, which frequently position Harry’s imposing frame in tight, enclosed spaces. Almost every aesthetic element in the film — from Harry’s plain sartorial choices to the one-way windows of his espionage van, the goofy mime who hangs around Union Square to the violent imagery and foggy dreams that torment Harry’s subconscious — evokes the communication barrier that Harry is determined to overcome, even if it means losing the protection of his identity.
After the tape is stolen, a frantic Harry trails the couple to a hotel and witnesses what he believes is the client murdering the couple. He learns, rather too late, that the couple were actually the perpetrators, not potential victims, and killed Harry’s client. Stett spins the murder to make it seem like his client died in an accident, but taking into account Harry’s knowledge of what really happened, he bugs Harry’s home, telling him that he’ll be listening closely. During the film’s awe-inspiring last scene, Coppola quite literally swipes the rug from under the floor, having Harry rip apart his apartment to locate Stett’s wiretap. Coming up empty, he plays the saxophone, the single intact object with which he can console himself in his torn-up home. According to surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser, who served as a technical consultant on the film, the bug was in fact inside the instrument. It signifies the real tragedy of this cautionary tale, how quickly and ruthlessly surveillance technology can corrupt the things that bring us joy and peace.
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Seven years after The Conversation, Brian De Palma achieved a similar conclusion with Blow Out, but depicted surveillance as mere serendipity rather than a professional venture. One night while recording sound effects for a slasher flick, audio engineer Jack Terry (John Travolta) captures evidence of a car crash involving promising presidential candidate Governor McRyan (John Hoffmeister) and his mistress Sally (Nancy Allen). Like Harry, Jack carries an obsessive drive to investigate and reconstruct the event on his own, troubled by a past trauma from a wiretap operation gone wrong. Unlike Harry, Jack is charismatic and not quite as fixated on his privacy. His insecurity is less rooted in cultivating connections and more in the pure, primal search for the truth.
In contrast to The Conversation’s simple, elliptical structure, Blow Out adds more emotionally complex layers to its interrogation of surveillance as a sinister, metastatic agent of chaos. Editing together the tape of the crash, Jack hears a distinct gunshot and splices together the audio with crude stills of the accident to further confirm his suspicion. Through a multitude of riveting scenes that illustrate this meticulous process, De Palma argues that the truth can be totally and completely understood if it’s both heard and seen. The very medium of cinema itself, an artificial replication of reality through the merging of sound and image, holds the key to making sense of that truth.
Even when there is clear evidence, though, the truth can be framed as fake and far-fetched by individuals and systems with influence. McGovern’s associates warn Jack to stay quiet about the exact details of what happened for the sake of McGovern’s family. When Jack brings the tape to the police, they dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. News anchor Frank Donahue (Curt May), the one person with power interested in the tape, persuades Jack to do an interview about it, but Burke (John Lithgow), the menacing assassin responsible for the blow out, sabotages them. Authority figures ultimately determine what is true, as do people who are unable to reconcile contradictory evidence with their own confirmation bias — but having firsthand knowledge of the truth is its own form of power. Sally’s shared experience with Jack and subsequent willingness to assist him in his operation proves that just because someone doesn’t believe you doesn’t mean your truth isn’t valid.
As the personal stakes of Jack’s mission to expose this cover-up continue to escalate, the political undertones of his undertaking begin to take shape as well. In the same way the specter of the Watergate scandal haunted The Conversation, McGovern’s murder and the sudden fallout of his campaign recall the Kennedy assassinations and the Chappaquiddick incident. Additionally, Blow Out’s release during the early stages of the Reagan administration reflects a major turning point in American culture, in which the social turbulence of the ‘60s and ‘70s seemed to have left the public in an exhausted, cynical void that curdled into the seedy commercialism of the ‘80s. Burke personifies this seediness, mirroring the Peeping Tom killers in Jack’s films by lurking around Philadelphia and suffocating Sally lookalikes to death. Newscasters aptly label him the “Liberty Bell Strangler,” showing that the media can articulate the truth just as easily as it can flatten it into sensationalism.
By filtering that era’s wounded collective psychology through a manipulative, relentlessly evil hitman, Blow Out demonstrates how surveillance enables power-hungry people to conceal their mistakes in order to serve their own self-interests, regardless of the collateral damage they cause. Those repercussions come into full force during the film’s chilling, immaculate final sequence, where Jack puts a wire on Sally and discovers that Burke has duped her into thinking he’s Donahue. Jack chases after them through a Fourth of July celebration, a pointed backdrop that echoes the American yearning for escapism and pervasive apathy toward tragedy that still reverberates in today’s world. In a twist of beautifully tragic devastation, Jack is too late to rescue a strangled Sally but manages to use the recording of her death rattle as a dubbed scream for his next movie. It’s an astonishing but deeply heartbreaking final scene, suggesting that the only utility surveillance serves is an aesthetic one, a lens that creates emotional distance between consumer and producer by transforming violence into spectacle, making it easier to swallow for those unaffected but harder to digest for those personally invested.
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Although they emerged in a pre-online age, The Conversation and Blow Out function as damning, eerily prescient portraits of today’s hostile, spiritually ill interconnected landscape. The unprecedented access of the internet has turned a once exciting innovation full of creative and intellectual possibility into a noxious ouroboros of digital noise, content overload, and suffocating feedback loops. A person’s words can circulate and be distorted to such a degree that it ruins their reputation. Accountability is rare and typically messy when people are put to task for their words and actions. Nuance is obliterated into fragments, and only a patient and intelligent few have the bandwidth to sew the seams back together. Even then, most people will either continue to question the truth, will feel too worn out to engage with it, or won’t care at all.
Bleak as that may seem, The Conversation and Blow Out honor the importance of acknowledging empirical truth, a notion that informs the emotional and narrative throughline of Soderbergh’s Kimi. Though not nearly as savvy and satisfying as The Conversation and Blow Out, Kimi is entertaining and admirable in its satirical aims at big tech thanks to Zoë Kravitz’s gritty lead performance and Soderbergh’s stylish, reliably confident direction. David Koepp’s slight but ambitious script both borrows The Conversation and Blow Out’s thematic preoccupation on surveillance and remixes it into something refreshingly contemporary.
Set in Seattle in the thick of the pandemic, Kimi follows Angela (Kravitz), a data analyst whose life is defined by emotional and physical constraints. She works out of her spacious industrial loft, correcting software errors for Kimi, a popular smart speaker created by tech conglomerate Amygdala. She struggles to forge an intimate bond with Terry (Byron Bowers), the neighbor she occasionally sleeps with. She actively avoids attending virtual sessions with her therapist Dr. Burns (Emily Kuroda) and ignores the advice of her condescending dentist (David Wain). When she comes across one Kimi transmission of a possible assault and murder, she is compelled to investigate further, inevitably pushing to confront her own inability to connect and stimulating her rebellion against authority.
In her attempts to trace the audio stream and verify her suspicions, Angela acts as another accidental amateur detective, synthesizing Harry’s reserved but curious demeanor with Jack’s stubborn, relentless determination. Her agoraphobia from a previous sexual assault complicates her objective, preventing her from going outside while urging her to listen to her instincts. Once she does report the crime, she is met with a storm of outrage, disbelief, bureaucracy, and gaslighting. Angela’s condescending superior (Andy Daly) plays the devil’s advocate and tells her what she heard might not be what she thinks it is. The calculated Amygdala executive Natalie Chowdhury (Rita Wilson) shares Angela’s concern at first but becomes reluctant to contact the FBI when she recalls Angela’s brief mental health leave from the company following her assault. Even Dr. Burns intimates that Angela is projecting onto the situation.
As Soderbergh’s sharp filmmaking keeps Angela’s undertaking airtight and nimble, Koepp’s critical eye amplifies the exhaustion of her stonewalled efforts by grounding them in the midst of COVID-19. Anytime Angela or someone says Kimi’s name by accident, a Kimi device is activated, a funny and vaguely harrowing gesture to how matter-of-fact and yet still somehow intrusive smart technology has become in our domestic and professional environments. The frustrating cognitive dissonance of working in an office during a global health crisis comes into play when Angela visits Amygdala and sees that all the employees are unmasked and strangely unbothered by it. At one point, the assailant’s henchmen nearly kidnap Angela, but a group of nearby protestors manage to save her, conjuring the righteous indignation against the police state lingering from the 2020 George Floyd rallies.
Each of Angela’s encounters with surveillance reflects an overarching sense of dread around the tech industry’s chokehold over it. The isolation of COVID-19 intensifies that angst tenfold, reinforcing a taxing cycle of professional, emotional, and physical stress that has left our populace inextricably tethered to our devices and consequently feeling less, well, human. Labeling smart devices with human names — Kimi, Siri, Alexa — seems to have contributed to this loss of humanity, creating a false sense of familiarity in our interactions with technology. Soderbergh and Koepp complicate that notion in a clever twist by having Angela reclaim surveillance as a helpful mechanism for survival. After the henchmen invade Angela’s home and threaten her with murder, Angela uses Kimi for self-defense, distracting the intruders by turning off the lights and blasting Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” giving her enough time to find a weapon.
Angela’s ending is significantly happier and more cathartic than Harry and Jack’s: she kills the henchmen, reunites with Terry, and gets the assailant arrested. Unfortunately, given how very little is being done about big tech’s ever-growing omnipotence, it’s a bit of a glib way to finish things. Even so, Kimi’s wish-fulfillment finale does invite a hopeful glimpse into a world where speaking truth to power actually pays off for once, with surveillance being used to liberate someone’s truth rather than suppress it.
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Of course, the most obvious solutions to these kinds of predicaments are to just log off or scrub your digital footprint. Considering how much we rely on technology to navigate the modern world, however, it makes more sense to simply reevaluate our relationship to it. What are some ways can we reclaim some control over it? How much psychic energy should be spent on things that don’t personally concern us? How do we moderate between participating and staying silent? If Harry and Jack are avatars for the cultural failure to correct our misuse of modern technology, Angela represents a flawed but promising beacon of redemption. Saying something, naming and detailing an injustice, might not change anyone’s mind, but at least now we know that anyone could be listening.
