Overhearing (in) <i>Touch of Evil</i> and <i>The Conversation</i>: from “real time” surveillance to its recording

Across the twentieth century cinema transitions from the depiction of surveillance as a “real time” event toward its representation as what leaves an artifact or record. This essay concerns the heightened intensity of paranoid listening, or “overhearing”, that accompanies this technological change. <i>Touch of Evil</i> (1958) serves as a “transitional object”, insofar as its denouement features “real time” pursuit yet points toward a different outcome, one that would involve analysis of the recording produced during its final scene of surveillance. By emphasising both the return to audio via recording as well as the unique point-of-audition of its protagonist, <i>The Conversation</i> (1974) radicalises the potential for overhearing already to be found in <i>Touch of Evil</i>. In <i>The Conversation</i>, “simple” listening becomes overhearing: a hyperbolic and paranoid form of interpreting what has been gleaned through eavesdropping. Somewhat unexpectedly, it can be shown that <i>Touch of Evil</i> carries within itself, in embryo, all of the ambiguity and dissonance of the later film: that it, too, is fascinated by the possibility of auditory surveillance that might become an overhearing, or hearing awry, driven by the psychic need of the listener.