“A towering screen presence” is one of those phrases you hear off and on when you live a life immersed in film criticism, as I’ve done for the past quarter century or so. In Gene Hackman’s case, the phrase is fairly literal. Standing at 6 feet 2 inches, he somehow looked, or loomed, even larger in his films, where he used his imposing physicality to his great advantage.
In his Oscar-winning performances as the thuggish cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and the brutal, ironically named sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, his size, and the way his antagonistic spirit naturally came across as large enough to fully occupy his frame, was his strength. Even his turn as Lex Luthor, the mega-rich supervillain with plans of world domination, in the Superman films benefitted from his imposing figure, though he was of course no match for the Man of Steel. (Where are heroic refugees from Planet Krypton when you need them today, huh?)
Harry Caul is different. The private surveillance expert Hackman played in The Conversation — the first of director Francis Ford Coppola’s two 1974 masterpieces, the other being The Godfather Part II —benefitted from Hackman’s sheer size as well, but in the opposite direction. Bespectacled, buttoned-up, and balding (though that of course was true of Hackman in every role), Caul comes across as nebbishy not despite his height, but because of it. He’s an awkward fit even in his own world of spycraft and subeterfuge. He’s a big man who is, nevertheless, out of his depth.
Caul’s moral crisis, which began some time before the events of the film when his report on a previous case led to three deaths and a lifetime of guilt for the investigator, comes to a head when he hears the phrase for which The Conversation is best remembered: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Hired by a corporate bigwig referred to only as the Director (Robert Duvall) to spy on a young couple, Amy and Mark (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), he overhears the man say this to the woman in hushed tones.
Soon he learns that the woman is the Director’s wife, that she’s having an affair, and, he deduces, that they fear for their lives in the face of the Director’s wealth, power, and ruthlessness. He is torn whether to simply do his job, collect his paycheck, and move on, or warn the couple about the danger they’re in.
He does so in a dream. Watching Amy run through an unending fog, the dream Harry calls out to her, trying to tell her about himself to establish trust and rapport. Instead of saying anything relevant about his job or the man who hired him, though, he finds himself sharing painful stories about his child — the polio that partially paralyzed him and almost caused him to drown in one of the hot baths his mother would prepare for him, an incident in which he stomach-punched a friend of his father who would die a year later, a fact for which he clearly blames himself even though he was only five at the time.
After awkwardly stammering his way through these memories/confessions, he finally delivers the warning, which she stops and listens to from a distance at the crest of a hill: “He’ll kill you if he gets the chance.”
“I’m not afraid of death,” he tells her, with what sounds like obvious sincerity. Then comes the quiet, heartfelt, frightened follow-up, not shouted through the mist but spoken in plain tones: “I am afraid of murder.”
By this point, the woman has vanished.
This was the first scene that came to mind when I woke up this morning to the news that Gene Hackman had died, along with his wife and their dog in what appears to be a tragic accident. What was it that brought it to mind? Most likely it was simply the scene most directly relevant to the situation. It’s Gene Hackman saying “I’m not afraid of death.” One hopes this was true.
But it’s more than that. It’s the follow-up: “I am afraid of murder.” What frightens Caul isn’t the end of life, it’s the deliberate taking of life, by men who have calculated their own lives would be better without someone else in them. It’s cruelty that gives Harry this nightmare. He has already been an unwitting accomplice to one such case. He can’t bear the fact that he may already have been an accomplice to another.
Old age, accident, untreatable disease: These things, sadly, happen, and people die, and life moves on. But life is a sacred thing. Harry believes this because he is a practicing Catholic, but there are any number of paths one can take to this conclusion, perhaps the only conclusion worth drawing in this world. Life has value. Lives have value. To end lives on purpose is to unleash a shadow world of mist and fog in which good people cry out in vain as others simply vanish, never to be seen again.
And in the end (spoiler alert), Harry is, of course, wrong. He’d misheard that surveilled sentence, which was not a warning but a rationale: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Mark and Amy are the murderers, killing the Director to secure their relationship and rise up the corporate ladder. Harry — whose last name suggests an inability to see — is broken by his mistake and his failure. He devolves into manic paranoia that leads him to destroy his own apartment, in a fruitless search for devices intended to surveil him. It’s a symbolic act of self-destruction, a penitent scourging himself for his sins of omission and commission alike. Faced with this horrible side of human nature, he can hardly bear to be a part of humanity anymore.
“I’m not afraid of death…I am afraid of murder.” Watching this scene this morning, hearing those two sentences this morning, made me cry. Not because we’ve lost Gene Hackman, sad though that is, especially given the loss of his wife, musician Betsy Arakawa. I cried because I feel the same way, especially now.
We live in a time when people like the Director, Mark, and Amy — vicious, unscrupulous, driven by the will to power — are engineering death on a colossal scale. Ending vital healthcare programs at home and abroad. Tormenting trans people with the end goal of their erasure from public life, and life itself. Targeting immigrants, documented and undocumented, with deportation either to countries that will kill them or American concentration camps where no one knows what is happening. Pardoning traitors, insurrectionists, fascist militiamen, pedophiles. Ushering open Nazis into the highest levels of government. Aiding genocidal authoritarians around the globe with the goal of copying their playbook here at home.
I’m not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder. I am afraid of murderers. I am afraid of their minds, which aren’t minds as you and I know them at all, which are masses of gray sludge in which there is no joy or beauty to be found but in the suffering of others. I am afraid of their powers of surveillance and their willingness to use illegal and lethal methods to enforce the conclusions they draw from what they hear. They’d kill us if they got the chance.
Gene Hackman is the energy source for this feeling, the trigger for my tears when I heard the news and loaded up this scene immediately. He infuses Harry with an infectious empathy — a need to hear and be heard, to share painful stories of our common human foibles and fears, to believe the best in people like Amy, the woman in his dream. He shows what happens to a person like Harry when that belief is shattered.
He is a world away from Popeye Doyle, from Little Bill Daggett, from Lex Luthor, from any of the other heavies he played. For that matter, he’s also far removed from his various comedic turns, where he could play his size and bluster for laughs. He’s a little man in a big body here — a man who confesses in a dream to a woman he fears he has doomed that the one thing that frightens him in the world is the human capacity for evil. Worst of all, he fears his complicity in that evil. In Harry, through the fog, I see my own fears. I see myself.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.