The Criterion Collection: Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

The Film

Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is a singular American film, one of the best of its kind. I say this without pause, having seen it again after many years. Sometimes movies can slip out of our consciousness until they get the proper home-video treatment. The fact that Blow Out has been released on Blu-ray only enriches each and every little detail, making it that much more satisfying. The power of some films are their ability to speak to multiple generations and transcend the barriers of their time, but Blow Out exists in a specific time and thrives on the fact that it’s dated. It’s a snapshot of America in the early 80′s, when the air was filled with conspiracy. It is also a snapshot of Brian De Palma’s career, more specifically when his technical wizardry matched his storytelling abilities almost perfectly, remaining his best film by far.

John Travolta was one of the biggest Hollywood stars in 1981. After starring in the comparatively successful Saturday Night Fever and Grease, his icon status was cemented. He was a matinee idol of sorts, and Blow Out gave him the opportunity to show his range as a dramatic actor. It’s the first “grown-up” role for Travolta, and frankly, he’s marvelous. He plays Jack Terry, a sound man for a low-budget porno/slasher film studio in Philadelphia. He was once a police aide, but a tragedy involving faulty wiring for an undercover operation forced Jack to abandon that line of work and enter his current one.

One night, Jack is out recording nature audio near a bridge. He uses his extended microphone like a conductor, pointing at rustling leaves, an owl hooting, a frog clicking his throat. The squeal of tires break the serenity of nature as a car comes barreling down the bridge. There’s a loud pop as the car loses control, plummeting into the river below. Jack dives in and pulls a young woman from the car; the male driver clearly not surviving the ordeal.

At the hospital, Jack discovers the man in the car was the presidential frontrunner and nobody is ready to acknowledge the girl was ever there. Jack is convinced from the get-go that there were two bangs, not one. It wasn’t simply a blow out, but a gunshot accompanied by a tire pop. He is implored to forget this idea, to forget the girl was there, and forget about any gunshot. How would any of this look to the public and to the family of the candidate, after all? Jack reluctantly agrees at first, but his curiosity begins to consume him. There was a camera man at the bridge that night as well, Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), and his rapid-fire camera caught the entire crash. Jack takes the photos and syncs it up with his audio to validate his original theory. Soon enough, the situations surrounding the shooting and the cameraman swell into a conspiracy much larger than Jack can fathom.

Jack then seeks out the girl, Sally: a call girl who may have had ulterior motives as well. Nancy Allen portrays said individual, and her evolution as a character is fascinating. She begins a bit dopey, aloof, but her wit and intelligence shines through as the plot thickens. John Lithgow shows up as Burke, a crafty killer in charge of cleaning up the mess and burying any conspiracy. Lithgow plays the part as a psychotic robot, cold and calculating as he begins murdering girls to create a false lead for the police. This is a clever subplot in the picture, one that’s unclear at first but comes into focus soon enough.

Brian De Palma is a master technician and an inventive auteur who has been accused of borrowing a bit too heavily from Hitchcock and others before him. That may be the case sometimes, and in Blow Out there are clear allusions to Hitchcock films as well as obvious parallels to Antonioni’s Blow Up, but De Palma makes these moments his own by selecting the perfect shot again and again. He employs his famous split-screen technique in all the right places; his camera spins 360 degrees to emphasize the drama instead of drawing attention to the flourish itself. One such example is when Jack is feverishly searching his endless supply of tapes because the audio he had has been erased. As he pulls tapes from shelves, others fall, and he floats in and out of the frame while the camera never stops turning. The effect is brilliant, the best shot of the picture.

Blow Out was met with middling reviews and disappointing box office results, and is often overlooked by casual viewers and cinephiles alike. It seems that thirty years later however, time is rendering a different verdict. The conspiracy at the heart of Blow Out combines so many headlines from the generation leading up to 1981. References to Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick accident are evident, as are references to the Zapruder film and Watergate. It plays upon society’s unrest at the time and weaves together to create a taut and seamless thriller. Philadelphia is a perfect setting, with a fictional Liberty Day Celebration functioning well as the backdrop for the climax. It allows De Palma to bathe the film in hues of red, white and blue. Something else Blow Out does, something I feel would never pass the studio eyes of today more concerned with the bottom line that is narrative authenticity, is it doesn’t give into happiness and tie everything up with a bow. It has conviction and the courage to not go Spielberg on us in the final moments. That among other reasons is why Blow Out is, for lack of a better word, a perfect film.