Blow Out
There is a moment early in Brian DePalma’s fantastic thriller that won me over immediately as I saw the film for the first time last year. It comes after the pivotal moment when Jack Terry, John Travolta’s sound recordist, has left the hospital with Sally, a makeup artist, and checked them into a hotel. He is replaying the audio he recorded the night before up to the car accident where he rescued Sally from a sinking car. As he listens back, Jack is retracing his movements as he is listening, and editor Paul Hirsch is cutting in images from that night as the tape progresses. This is a masterful piece of cinema from DePalma, and it sets the tone for the suspense to come.
My experiences with Brian DePalma were hit-and-miss for quite a while, but I’m finally playing catch-up with some of his more definitive work. “Blow Out” is easily the best of DePalma’s films I’ve seen, and it’s a model for conspiratorial thrillers. In later films, it feels like DePalma went bigger and bolder with his style, but his storytelling got muddier. His reputation is of a Hitchcock imitator, but his best films feel fresh and original in their own right. As someone who loves Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” and the paranoid fervor that film moves at, this movie tapped into that beautifully when I saw it last year, but what really excited me was the way in to the thriller DePalma makes by having the film about filmmaking as much as it’s about murder. The first thing we see in the film is a sound mixing session Terry is involved in on a cheap slasher movie he’s making with a longtime collaborator. We see the scene on-screen unfold, but it comes to a halt at a particular moment where the actresses scream is not quite right. The director is also wanting some new wind sound effects, which is what Terry is out to record the night of the car accident.
What makes the car accident so significant is the person who died in it- Pennsylvania governor McRyan, who was in Philadelphia for the 100-year anniversary celebration of the Liberty Bell ringing, and a potential Presidential candidate. Sally, the girl Jack saved from the accident, is a model with an affinity for makeup, but she was in the car for less-savory reasons, as her and a sleazy photographer (Dennis Franz) were paid to set up McRyan as a philanderer so he would be forced out of a race. But one of the distinct things that Jack hears during the accident is a gunshot. Nobody believes him, though, not even Sally, at first, but through some resourcefulness, he makes it undeniable that it was, indeed, a shot before the blow out of the tire. His determination, however, puts he and Sally in the crosshairs of John Lithgow’s Burke, who was the one in the shadows who pulled the trigger that night.
DePalma tells a powerful story here. It’s not just the conspiracy at the center or the filmmaking, but the human aspect of it. This is about how the media tells a big story, and how not just the details can get omitted, but how people’s lives at the center of it get turned upside down, sometimes needlessly. The arc of Sally in the film is the primary source of this idea, and Nancy Allen is so sweet and sympathetic in the role. When we see her with Jack, and she’s talking about her ideas on makeup, or listening to him talk about his time working to weed out police corruption, and the mistake that led to him turning to film sound, or talking about New York at the end, Allen is more than just a potential love interest and foil for Travolta- she’s just as essential to the film as he is, making the ending’s impact land with a gut punch you don’t expect the first time watching it, but just wait in horror for watching it again.
“Blow Out” is a great film by every measure, from the writing and directing to the performances (with Travolta and Allen matched by Lithgow’s sinister intensity); the cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond; the editing by Hirsch; and the note-perfect score by Pino Donaggio that delivers every emotional beat with a wallop in its simple, understated theme for Jack and Sally, two people who find themselves at the center of a larger story, only to become footnotes, marginalized by forces not interested in the truth coming out. That ending is painful, but watching it again this year, it also feels like a middle finger to those forces by someone who knows the truth. That’s more my feeling on it than DePalma’s, though; the last image gets to the truth of that finale for the person raising said finger. Brian DePalma may deal with style over substance most times, but in “Blow Out,” the substance makes the style of the way he tells the story into a masterpiece Hitchcock would be proud of.
