There arguably isn’t another director who has built as prolific a filmography off the back of simply his love for cinema as Brian De Palma has. His reverence for Alfred Hitchcock is well documented and observed through Blow Out, but the plethora of pastiches in the film include nods to Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hawks, and Sergei Eisenstein amongst many others. It’s been argued extensively that De Palma’s style of chopping up what he loves and reforming it to present something new, almost as if it’s a theatrical equivalent to a hot dog, is something that works at the expense of his true personality coming through in his films. I contend that’s not really true. The approach itself is as much a reflection of his personality as any other director’s could be said to be and through Blow Out we can see just how much the arts of cinema and filmmaking mean to De Palma. It’s quite literally a matter of life and death.
Blow Out is a film that wears its influences proudly. Jack, played by John Travolta, is a sound guy who works for a studio producing schlocky horror movies on what looks like a perpetually repopulated assembly line. It starts with a POV shot that, despite its satirical nature, could have easily been stolen from John Carpenter’s editing suite. In fact, it’s so close to the opening of Halloween that it retroactively makes it funny. The point of view camera shot, the detached suburban house stalked through its windows, and the eventual reveal of the killer are all essentially satirical interpretations of it. Beyond that, though, its narrative structure has often been compared to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, while its pacing and the ways it builds tension are clearly drawn from Hitchcock’s work. Where it differs from them all and becomes its own, independent, piece of art is in what importance it gives to one particular element of it all.
The central theme between the three is that the man in the middle of them all is a loner with a specialty. He’s so enamoured with his work that he regularly finds himself isolated and pushing others away as a result of it. In Blow-Up, he’s a photographer, whereas in The Conversation he’s a surveillance expert. In Blow Out, he’s deeply embedded in the film industry.
When the opening POV shot ends and we realize it was a film within a film all along, Coed Frenzy, we find ourselves in a studio where Jack, our protagonist, sits beside his director. Following an underwhelming scream in what appears to be Coed Frenzy’s defining shot, the director spirals into a rant of sorts because Jack needs to find a new scream to dub in for this film to fly. Not just that, but he also needs new wind. The stock foley is something that this director has just heard so much that it’s begun to grate on him, so he orders Jack to go and record some new wind sounds to replace it. It plays out as a bit of a joke, there’s a suggestion that what we’re seeing is a bit silly, but if it’s supposed to be a joke then it’s a self-deprecating one.
In a long-form interview with Noah Baumbach, De Palma talks about how inspiration struck for Blow Out while working on Dressed to Kill. The situation wasn’t too different, he was in the editing suite with sound designer Dan Sable and he was tired of hearing the same wind sound that he’d heard for their last few films together. After what’s described as a very similar back and forth to what we see between Jack and his director, Sable then went into his garden and began recording some new sound effects. Where it all starts in the film is exactly where the idea started for De Palma.
The other piece of the puzzle comes from an earlier De Palma film, Greetings, which is probably a closer reworking of Blow-Up than Blow Out could be said to be. Once again the protagonist is a man who pushes people away due to his obsession with a craft, this time his name’s Lloyd (Gerrit Graham). Lloyd is a conspiracy theorist rather than a professional, though. He’s completely enamoured with the idea that he should be the person to unearth the truth about the JFK assassination, and the way he’s trying to achieve that is by studying blown-up stills from the Zapruder film depicting the assassination itself.
In a way, it’s something of an injustice to Blow Out that it’s so often mentioned as if it’s part of a trilogy with Blow-Up and The Conversation when really it’s an evolution of the idea that those two, as well as Greetings, is based on. That isn’t to say that the others are inferior films, just that there’s an added layer to Blow Out that elevates it beyond being just a clever crime thriller. It’s also a subtle entry into the “love letter to cinema” canon, a style of film that’s become very popular over the last couple of years.
When Jack goes out to record the new wind sound as ordered, we get a fantastic sequence of him out in the open where De Palma teases us with how much he’s able to pick up. With stunning detail, we hear a couple in the distance who is suspicious of his intentions, an owl going about its usual business, and most importantly the blowout itself. As a car crosses a bridge nearby something happens which leads to it ending up in the river below, but we’re not quite sure what it was yet. The only evidence of what’s happened that we know about is the audio recorded on Jack’s tape and the memory in his mind. Being the good guy that he apparently is, his first thought is to jump straight in and do what he can to help the people inside the car.
The coverup starts right away. Jack’s helpful nature has landed him in the hospital where the weight of the situation becomes clear. He’s pulled away from a flirty conversation with the lone surviving female, Sally, played by De Palma’s then-wife Nancy Allen, and he learns that it wasn’t just anyone in the car, it was a United States Governor who goes by the name of George McRyan (John Hoffmeister). A few guys in suits who we can presume are quite important immediately do their best to persuade Jack to smuggle Sally out of the hospital and to pretend that none of this ever happened and that he didn’t see a thing. But that’s not the truth, and Jack only has more to discover.
Upon listening to the audio track he recorded, he hears what sounds like a gunshot. This might not have been an accident after all, and Jack begins to suspect it’s actually an assassination. What’s so interesting is how he puts together a source of truth. When he learns from a news report that, seemingly coincidentally, someone else, Manny Karp, was also in the park that night with a camera, and that he’s sold stills of the accident that he’d captured to a local tabloid, he has all he needs.
Few films show the post-production process with the same appreciation for detail that Blow Out does. The only ones that immediately spring to mind on a similar level are all flat-out love letters to cinema which aren’t attempting to be anything else — The Fabelmans, Cinema Paradiso, Ed Wood etc.
We see Jack frantically trying to match his audio to the limited visuals that he has access to, just a few still frames. He has no reference for where the sound should match, so he has to search through the track multiple times to find something to sync it to. But it works. His persistence pays off and he’s able to make the simplest of films containing a single-digit number of frames rather than the traditional 24 per second, but even in its limitations, it does something that neither audio nor visual can achieve alone in isolation. If we didn’t know any better, a decent argument could probably be made for how it’s a shot towards the limitations of Blow-Up and The Conversation rather than evidence that it’s trying to fit in with them, but it’s not that simplistic.
The only reliable way to present the truth for Jack is to make a film. By combining sound and image, he’s able to confirm that the gunshot sound preceded the car’s tyre blowing out and that there must have been another person at the scene.
In the documentary that shares his surname, De Palma, the Blow Out director talks about what could be considered, if you like, his own origin story. His father, a surgeon who didn’t have much of a relationship with his son, is described by De Palma as being part of a family of “egotists who didn’t care what damage they were doing,” as well as being an adulterer. In his first venture into a signature of his career as a filmmaker, voyeurism, De Palma would capture film evidence of his father’s indiscretions. Jack is doing exactly what De Palma would do in his youth, he’s creating a film for the sake of revealing the truth in an environment where his voice doesn’t hold much credence.
Once the truth is revealed by the act of filmmaking, the challenge is to find anyone who’ll take it seriously. Nobody believes him and a widespread conspiracy silences him at every step. When a local talk show host, Frank Donahue (Curt May), gets in touch to discuss getting Jack on his show and releasing his tapes, the possibility of the truth being told finally looks in sight. The problem is that Jack’s phone has been tapped by Burke (John Lithgow), the architect of the plan that saw Sally and McRyan in the same car in the first place, but also the smoking gun himself. When he hears the phone call between Jack and Donahue, he needs to get his hands on them before the truth is exposed. He calls Sally pretending to be Donahue and asks to meet at a train station with the tapes as part of a new cover-up operation.
When Sally tells Jack about the phone call he becomes suspicious, but his obsession drives him to a point where he puts Sally in danger. With nothing but a wiretap, so he can surveil her actions from a distance while recording, she’s sent to meet Burke. In De Palma’s own words, “he manipulated her to prove that he is right. He didn’t think that his experiment was maybe going to cost the life of the girl he loves; no, for him, the truth must be divulged, whatever the price.” That’s ultimately where Sally’s story ends, isolated from Jack with nothing but a one-way audio connection as she’s strangled to death. All he can do is listen to her screams.
In the final scene of the film, we’re back where we started. Jack is beside his director in the editing suite, but the mood is much lighter. At least on the director’s side. The scene leading up to Coed Frenzy’s defining scream plays and this time, as Jack says with tears forming in his eyes, “It’s a good scream.” It’s Sally’s.
The ending was controversial among critics, audiences, and the studio alike. De Palma recalls “When I showed it to the executives, they were like — ’cause the ending’s so shocking — they were like, ‘Oh, my God, what a downer this is!’ ” “I’ll never forget when the distributor saw it, they almost had a coronary.” He managed to stand strong against lobbying from the studio and even Nancy Allen herself to change his ending to something happier, but it is attributed as a major reason for its commercial failure. In fact, even the novelization of Blow Out includes a new ending where Jack saves Sally just in time. But that takes away what might be the most personal part of any of De Palma’s work.
In using Sally’s deathly scream as the focal point in a sleazy B-movie, Jack is doing what De Palma has done throughout his whole career. Despite everything that’s happened in between and all of the pain and heartache that’s led him there, he has achieved the thing that he set out to do at the beginning, before the conspiracy that got him there, he’s got new wind and he’s found a better scream. It isn’t that Sally’s death is inconsequential to Jack’s mission as a filmmaker, not at all, but it coming as a result of it is a cruel irony that De Palma himself wouldn’t have been aware of until much later. He and Nancy Allen were married while collaborating on a stretch of films together in the early 80s, but divorced as their working lives started to veer in opposing directions. As such, De Palma’s own obsession with filmmaking came at the expense of his marriage. What led to Sally’s death in Blow Out is exactly what led to its director divorcing the actress who played her.
Though Blow Out is regularly spoken about as a Hitchcockian cousin of Blow-Up and The Conversation, it’s so much more. It’s a personal story of obsession and the lengths that a man can go to, but it’s also a love letter to the craft of filmmaking and the search for the truth through it as a medium. Through its lens, we can see, and learn more about De Palma the man than we can through any other film of his in isolation. It’s such a personal story that he even predicts his own future with its ending.
