Spoilers abound in this piece
The way Brian De Palma tacitly Became one of my favourite directors was quite surprising. It was a seduction that occurred with a quiet subtlety. Many years ago, I watched his 1981 film Blow Out as a chance to cross off a blind spot in my long list of movies I’ve not seen. Then over the years since then, I own or at least have seen a huge chunk of his filmography. They’re not all brilliant. Many of De Palma’s works in the latter half of his career don’t shine as brightly as his iconic films of the 70s and 80s. However, De Palma’s filmmaking is so distinctive that even many of his failures have been somewhat interesting. In an age of cinema by committee where filmmaking takes less risks now more than ever, watching something by a director like Brian De Palma still elicits a thrill. You are watching something directed. Not middle-managed.
Now over 40 years old, the themes of Blow Out still cause provocation. One element is the likes of social media allowing people to lounge within some of the more sinister sides of their interiors. The ending of Blow Out is disturbing for a few reasons. One of them being a woman’s blood-curdling last moments becoming the ADR backdrop for a glib sequence of gaudy horror. In an era where almost everyone’s phones allow one to “broadcast themselves”, it’s of no shock that many people can turn their trauma into “content”. Although De Palma’s film suggests there is a personal toll for doing this, even despite the flashy filmmaking.
With further inspection, Blow Out is De Palma having a ball with the Conspiracy Theory thriller. A sub-genre that had its heyday in the 70s. Once the rise of Donald Trump solidified the premise of “fake news”, that and the all-encompassing force of social media helped ensure that almost all current affairs can be believed to be underhanded. Trump himself had an assassination attempt not even months ago at the time of writing this. Yet the fracturing of media now has made the idea that the man was ever shot a difficult one. The same manipulation of the medium expressed in Blow Out now feels commonplace for a larger group of people. Misinformation is now a part of the furniture.
Blow Out starts with a quintessential De Palma fake-out; opening with an unknown assailant leering outside a rambunctious sorority house. The killer breathes heavily while they peer through the windows of female dorm rooms. Mimicking the likes of Halloween (1979), the shot is taken from the killer's perspective. By seeing what he sees the viewer becomes a participant in what may be about to take place. Soon the killer is inside; stalking the halls of the co-ed’s living quarters. He scans the bedrooms of the young, scantily clad women. Nearly all of them seem to be indulging in some sexual activity. He spies upon a solitary blonde in a shower. She is unaware of the killer advancing upon her until the last moment. Her eyes widen and she lets out…a rather ridiculous scream. The film cuts away and we discover that this is a film. It's a scene of a movie playing within a movie. This gratuitous slasher flick is being checked out by sound engineer Jack Terry (a career-best John Travolta) who is then instructed to find more ambient sound for the movie. He’s also charged with finding a better scream for the soon-to-be murder victim in the film.
The innocuous task of finding some movie sounds kick starts a chain of events which alter Jack’s life in a way he could never imagine. While capturing sounds of wind, owls, and toads, Jack hears a tire burst and sees a car fly into the nearby lake where he’s capturing sounds. In a moment of heroism, he rescues Sally (Nancy Allen) who was trapped in the vehicle but finds out later in the hospital that the other person in the vehicle, a famous senator, drowned in the car. Questions arise about why that young girl was with a politician on the brink of an election win. She isn’t his wife. She’s substantially younger than the man she was in the car with. But a more taxing riddle is burning on Jack’s mind. He thinks he heard a gunshot before the wheel blew out. If it had merely blown out, then it’s an unfortunate accident. If there was a gunshot, then this was an assassination attempt.
Ostensibly a political conspiracy thriller which relates more to the decade just gone, Blow Out is also an incredible movie about filmmaking and how our media distorts the truth. So much of the film is De Palma using his bag of tricks to illustrate the illusiveness of fact, and how easily an audience can be toyed with. That opening sequence starts from the killer’s perspective. We’re then told that the movie we were watching, which was at first through another person’s eyes, is not the film we will be watching. The third scene that plays while the opening credits appear utilises more De Palma favoured techniques. The scene has Travolta’s Jack working on his film while a television relays the evening news. Using the split dioptre and split screens, the film not only builds Jack’s character on one side of the screen, but it also constructs the narrative bones of much of the movie on the other. It also provides fictional information. I’m sure many people know that “Liberty Day” doesn’t exist as a holiday in America but, Blow Out shows you this information like Philadelphia has been celebrating the day for years.
The way the camera is used to inform people of the story is beguiling. The cinematography is used in a manner that heaps layers of meaning upon each image. Midway through the film, Jack is searching for a piece of audio evidence that has gone missing. As he frantically searches the room, the camera rotates in a slow 360 pan. The move not only highlights the slowly increasing paranoid energy of the protagonist, but it also mocks Jack’s occupation as a soundman, spooling around like a reel of tape. Split screens are used to highlight victims and murder weapons at the same time.
Meanwhile, legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and the design team build multitudes of shots with Red, White and Blue to capture the film's mood. Desaturating the colour where they can. Using the colours of the American flag as the palette of the film only seems to heighten the cynicism of the film’s central conspiracy. Zsigmond in an interview on the Arrow Blu-ray, spoke about how much he dislikes movies in which the dialogue tells the story over the visuals. One wonders how he would cope with the cinematic landscape now, where some movies are mere fodder for internet meme culture.
Brian De Palma has fared less well in his later decades. His recent efforts have faltered below the level of his earlier works, perhaps due to the changing attitudes and approaches to cinema and filmmaking. This is a shame because, with films like Blow Out, the filmmaker has things to say in abundance. First off, the film’s title and plot are a riff on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) and more than a small nod to the world cinema that De Palma devoured during his early career. The film also feels like a response to The Conversation (1974), directed by De Palma’s friend Francis Ford Coppola. The references to Alfred Hitchcock's movies undoubtedly make an appearance as expected. However, the most notable aspect of Blow Out is how much De Palma wants to communicate the filmmaking process. Blow Out is so fun because intermingled with all the paranoid thrills of it all, De Palma is gleefully inducting us into how the sausage is made. The fun with so many of Brian De Palma’s thrillers is how they both deconstruct their absurdity while sweeping you up within it. There are many films which love to tout the “power of cinema” yet De Palma, at this point in his career, was so adept at filmmaking, that he managed to do so by having John Travolta illustrate the potency of the moving image with a flicker book. It’s not like people haven’t done things like this before. It’s just that they haven’t done it like De Palma. Almost every scene highlights the artifice of cinema, while the same visual language is used to enthral the viewer.
In addition to this De Palma has never been afraid of pushing buttons and having his films revel in their baser urges. When combined with his technical skill Blow Out, along with the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984), allows the filmmaker to make films that are operatic yet trashy. Lusciously crafted, but lurid in theme. While Body Double and Dressed to Kill are possibly more direct with their explicit nature, Blow Out still indulges in provocations. The death of the Governor is founded upon his fondness for escorts. The thuggish Burke, played frighteningly by John Lithgow, is killing women who look like Sally. One of them is also a sex worker (Deborah Everton). The interplay between Lithgow and Everton before her violent demise is comical, but also based on the idea of hooking up in a public station for a sex act.
The final moments of Dennis Franz’s Manny are wryly shot with the character lying as if crucified, while the camera hovers over him a la God’s eye view. The scene's main purpose is to provide more detail into the film’s inciting incident. And it ends with Manny losing a headbutt battle with a bottle of whiskey. His last moments are a desperate attempt to get his end away with an unwilling Sally. Bathed in red light, the death of this low-rent Jake Gittes wannabe is shown with a beauty the character doesn’t deserve. Of course, that’s the fun of it. The film loves to jump over the line between sex and death. De Palma loves to do this with panache.
My love for Brian De Palma, particularly his more personal genre pieces, is that he knows that the audience likes to watch. While a polarizing filmmaker, he’s also a seductive one, using the power of his technical to lull a viewer into corruption. His films wouldn’t be challenged so much if they weren’t so cinematically proficient. At his peak, the films of De Palma became fascinating because of how well they manufactured distance between a viewer while coaxing them into the heightened drama. Blow Out starts with a cheesy wannabe Halloween-style opening. Something that feels manufactured, but once Lithgow’s Burke begins to execute murders of women who share a familiarity with Sally, suddenly the film's tactics, still self-contentedly winking at the audience, operate on a different level. The cheese has gone. It is now replaced with anxiety.
De Palma’s command of film language comes from the filmmaker he cribs from the most, Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma's filmmaking journey stems from the impression Hitchcock’s Vertigo made in 1958. The portly Brit’s ability to utilise cinematic language burrowed deep into the psyche of a then-young De Palma. In a 2020 interview with the Associated Press, De Palma details:
“As I’ve gotten older and made a lot of films, I can see there’s always lessons to be learned from Hitchcock the way he sets up certain sequences. And “Vertigo” is the whole idea of creating an illusion and getting the audience to fall in love with it and then tossing it off the tower twice. Very, very good idea.”
It's such a good idea that De Palma borrows from Hitchcock liberally for many of his films. Sometimes it was the theme, like Body Double, where the voyeurism of Rear Window (1954) plays a huge part of the narrative. Dressed to Kill is an updated reinterpretation of Psycho. In Blow Out, however, while De Palma makes his riffs to Hitch, what punctuates the matter is De Palma’s setting the film up as an example of Hitchcock’s “Bomb Analogy”:
“Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it…In these conditions, this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the secret.”
Blow Up is possibly De Palma performing this exercise in its purest form. From the split screen news report early on that layers and primes the audience to information the lead character seems only half aware of, to the introduction of Burke, whose underhanded tasks throughout the film, which like the cheesy slasher film from the start hands the audience the perspective of the killer. De Palma goads the audience with the information. He seems to say: “Are you watching this? You’ve been given this information. Don’t you think it might hurt somebody?” De Palma constantly provides the audience with knowledge the characters are unaware of. The viewer becomes a participant.
De Palma, despite his love of Hitchcock, isn’t fond of the idea that he imitates the master of suspense. On an episode of Dick Cavett's 1978 talk show, De Palma told Cavett that he had evolved the cinematic grammar that Hitchcock had put in place. This is true. De Palma uses Hitchcock as the basis, but there’s always as much of De Palma in his films as there is Hitchcock. Quentin Tarantino sums this up well in an interview where he gives his opinion on why he vibes with Brian De Palma over Hitchcock. In an interview, he notes that De Palma not only being able to explore the artistic minutiae of the violence in his set pieces due to the changing attitudes of the eras that each filmmaker operated in but also mentions that De Palma is a stronger social satirist throughout his body of work. It’s fascinating to hear Tarantino mention this, as I suddenly felt the director try and provide similar within his work, to mixed results.
Both De Palma and Tarantino are similar to hip-hop producers, who have repurposed the language of the medium that they love in surprising ways. Injecting what has come before with their personality infused. It’s hardly any surprise that both directors often make commentaries about filmmaking itself within their movies. They are also directors who at the peak, were looking to see what buttons they could push from a societal standpoint. This is perhaps why Blow Out endures. In a recent interview for Vulture, De Palma claims his films have lasted out because they are cinematic in a way that modern films do not approach. It’s hard to disagree. A Guardian retrospective on the film notes how the film is broken down into visual and audio, in a way that you don’t see in modern filmmaking, despite the improvement of tech.
But the best films of De Palma are also dream vessels for the themes they inhabit. Body Double is now revised as one of De Palma’s crowning achievements from film fans. It’s easier to see this now. Because the world we live in has become inhabited by the allure of voyeurism. We are now constantly snooping around the publicly private lives of everyone else. Blow Out is a blow-for-blow account of how the moving image helps play with objective truth and how easily we lose ourselves because of it. De Palma guides the viewer through this; the fake-outs, the split screens, the homages to cinema language. The audience is being directed every step of the way. Blow Out’s tragic ending becomes an exclamation point on how truth is lost. The screams Sally emits before her actual death are taken, repurposed and reshaped into the shoddy horror film that Jack’s been making. Real pain into a fake entertainment. Jack finds his killer scream to finish his movie. It’s a good scream. His producer loves it. But the sound is driving him mad. And you know where it came from too. Yet if he told anyone where those cries came from no one would believe him.
Blow Out is on YouTube and Prime Video at the time of writing. There are also two exceptional Blu-ray packages floating around.
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