In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 cult movie The Conversation, Gene Hackman’s character Harry Caul becomes obsessed analyzing the precise meaning of fragments of a conversation he has scrupulously recorded from a variety of sources. By splicing together disconnected words and phrases, removing irritating background noise, and forensically poring over even the slightest inflection for precise meaning, the protagonist of the film ends up tragically misinterpreting what he has heard.
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