Blow Out is here to trick you. It pretends it has something deep and profound to say about America. Set on the weekend of the fictional Liberty Day Parade in Philadelphia, Blow Out revolves around a political assassination and cover-up, and concludes with a murder committed under fireworks and in front of an enormous American Flag. It’s the story of Jack Terry (John Travolta), a soundman for cheap B-movies, who accidentally records audio of a car crash that kills a presidential candidate and becomes determined to prove a conspiracy. There are echoes of the JFK assassination and Chappaquiddick, and Jack’s paranoid mind reflects the collective suspicions of an entire generation still processing the failures and tragedies of the ’60s nearly two decades later.
But director Brian De Palma is not a political artist, and that’s for the best. He’s a filmmaker who is most fascinated with the art of cinema—or you could say, the act of looking. Blow Out might not be about conspiracies at all. Maybe it’s about getting off. It opens on a point-of-view shot of a serial killer peeping into various windows of a sorority, where he sees buxom young women in various states of undress. He then enters the building and begins slashing away. De Palma expressed similar ideas in Body Double, Dressed to Kill, and most of his other films, aligning us with killers and perverts. He turns our need to watch—a prerequisite to buying a ticket for a movie—into a vulnerability, turning the lens on his audience and making us question just how much we’re willing to watch.
It turns out the sorority killings are a scene in a movie. Jack is instructed by his director to get some fresh nature sounds for the scene, so he heads to a park late at night, where he witnesses a car drive off the road and into a reservoir. He saves Sally (Nancy Allen) from the passenger seat; the man behind the wheel, whom he later learns was a politician, is dead. But it’s later, while listening to his recording after the fact that Jack becomes convinced he’s heard a gunshot, and that the car’s tires were intentionally shot out. The police brush off his theory, so he sets about proving it on his own, befriending Sally and scrutinizing his recording, second by second, to suss out the truth.
If there’s an animating force behind Blow Out, it’s De Palma’s love of filmmaking. His fondness for split diopter shots—when two objects at disparate distances are seen in focus at once—serves him well here, making the viewer’s eyes dart back and forth to grasp the juxtaposition, replicating the inner workings of Jack’s mind. De Palma’s use of pink and red lighting lends the proceedings a lurid overtone, while the pounding score by Pino Donaggio accentuates the filmmaker’s maximalist style.
More importantly, De Palma is mostly here to watch Jack piece together the mystery by using the building blocks of filmmaking. The newspaper obtains video of the accident, and Jack cuts out the photos, putting together a crude flipbook. It’s almost as if he is creating cinema all over again. De Palma lingers on these scenes, his camera seduced by Travolta’s dexterous fingers and his famously determined chin. This sequence—and the film as a whole—is a loose remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up about a fashion photographer who scrutinizes his own photographs to solve the mystery of a missing woman. But De Palma is more upfront about his voyeuristic tendencies. We can feel his yearning in the painstaking detail with which he shoots these scenes, but his passion extends beyond mere affection. The scenes of Travolta mastering the editing equipment, splicing together sound and film, are as sensual as any of the director’s famous sex scenes.
Blow Out is a strange, perverse film, and unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a hit when it was released in 1981. Made for $18 million (a lot at the time), Blow Out flopped upon its initial release and was only reclaimed by the next generation of cinephiles. Quentin Tarantino praises it to the heavens, and it’s easy to see how De Palma’s brash, lurid style was a clear influence on the young director, who, somewhat less elegantly, also challenges viewers with their voyeurism and implicates them in his on-screen violence. In that way, Blow Out does have something to say about the country that produced it, a place where we consistently pretend to care about the victims but we really can’t tear our eyes away from the screen.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone.
Brian De Palma’s 1981 cult classic Blow Out screens at 7:15 p.m. on July 3 at Alamo Drafthouse in D.C. and at 7:30 p.m. at the Drafthouse’s Crystal City location. drafthouse.com. $11.