Released just a year after the notorious psycho-sexual thriller Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981) is Brian De Palma’s masterpiece: an ode to movie-making and a cynical look at a degraded country. In eschewing some of the pulpy horror of his earlier work, De Palma produces something equally if not more dreadful.
John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a sound technician working on sleazy B-movies in Philadelphia, who is tasked with procuring more realistic screams and outdoor sounds for a slasher film called Co-Ed Frenzy. While recording the natural noise of a local park late one night, Jack inadvertently captures audio of a fatal car accident, and what sounds like a gunshot blowing out the car’s tire. The one surviving passenger is Sally (played with a sweet earnestness by Nancy Allen), an escort who admits to Jack that the driver of the car was a governor and Presidential hopeful, and that she was part of a blackmail scheme gone horribly wrong. The plot thickens considerably as Jack tries to piece together proof of what happened and prevent a coverup, while also protecting Sally, whose life is now on the line.
Blow Out is a Hitchcockian (in typical De Palma fashion) reinterpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, injected with the particularly American paranoia of the 1960s and ’70s. Events like the JFK assassination, the Chappaquiddick incident, and the Watergate scandal, which shocked the public and stoked conspiratorial obsession for decades to come, are alluded to throughout. Such obsession is captured in Jack’s meticulous hunt. It’s thrilling to watch Travolta painstakingly sync up his audio recording to a film of the crash that was shot in the park that night, the sound and the images combining to reveal the truth, the ultimate movie-making metaphor.
De Palma sidesteps creating a didactic lesson in American political corruption by keeping the emotional core of the film centered in Jack and Sally's relationship, and the tragedy of their shared mission. They’re both flawed but principled people trying to set things right, and attempting to make up for past mistakes; Sally for her involvement in the botched blackmail plot, and Jack for his former career as a government wiretapper, whose error got an undercover cop killed. Jack’s scrupulous technical craft and determination goes up against the machinations of the hired assassin (John Lithgow). He does, in the end, obtain the realistic scream he needed.
Blow Out screens this evening, May 27, and on June 4, on 35mm at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the series “See It Big.”
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