Interpreting Information

One aspect of The Conversation that I thought we didn't mention in class was the main character's flawed interpretation of the information he found. This reminded me very much of Lisa Parks's article about "Crisis in Darfur", the Google Earth initiative.

The key point of this article, which Parks reiterates numerous times in her conclusion, is that such "information interventions" need to be analyzed with care and proper perspective. She criticizes the "congratulatory discourse" surrounding Google Earth, saying there has been too little "scrutiny and discussion of the implications of its visual capital" (11). Parks writes in-depth about the necessity of a different mode of perception in relation to such information; she argues that merely "letting the facts speak for themselves" does nothing, an assertion that hearkens back to Keenan's Sarajevo article in which the assumption that images catalyze action is proven horribly, horribly wrong. Without recognizing the challenge, she argues, mere data and pictures are useless; without the proper viewpoint, no improvement can be expected.

This crucial understanding of the limitations of information is what is played upon in The Conversation. The main character takes only what he knows from the conversation and assumes, along with the viewer, that the lives of the "lovers" are in danger if their secret is exposed. The seemingly innocent, unthreatening tryst allows the movie's namesake to paint the rich husband as a violent and inhuman boss, instead of what he actually is: a scared, depressed, paranoid man fearing for his own life, facing murder at the hands of those who he trusts most. All of the facts are given to the main character, but for whatever reason, he picks an interpretation from his uninformed point of view - and it is the wrong interpretation. The information is there, but it is, quite simply, not enough on its own. Keenan and Parks, then, would almost certainly be in agreement with the movie's core message: information is nothing without perspective.