Old Yorker

Brian De Palma (1981)

It starts in a student house – squabbles among the girl residents, a bit of sex between a girl and a boy, a girl taking a shower.  Style and content are both increasingly tacky; by the time a comically creepy-looking man approaches the bathroom wielding a big knife, they’re ridiculous.  When the girl in the shower sees the man coming for her, the pathetic scream she gives out completes the effect.  Then the camera cuts to two men watching what we’ve been watching.  One asks the other to run the last sequence again, muting everything but the scream:  isolating this confirms how bad it is.  Sam (Peter Boyden), the director, reminds his sound technician Jack Terry (John Travolta) that ‘I didn’t hire that girl for her scream – I hired her for her tits’.  Sam tells Jack he wants a more realistic scream – also better wind effects.  Jack proceeds to find them.

In the opening minutes of Blow Out, Brian De Palma does several things.  Both inside and through the windows of the student house, the camera is like a peeping tom:  De Palma makes us aware of voyeurism.  There are reminders of his well-known allegiance to Hitchcock or, at least, Hitchcockiana:  he more or less parodies the most famous of all Hitchcock shock effects; the title of Sam and Jack’s latest collaboration, ‘Co-Ed Frenzy’, includes the name of a Hitchcock movie.  Through the voice and facial reactions of his lead actor, De Palma immediately implies that there’s more to Jack than his partnership with Sam might suggest.  By getting us to assume that the student house stuff is for real, before making clear what it actually is, he might be warning against clean, superior distinctions between movie trash and movie art.  That last possibility might particularly have appealed to Pauline Kael, a loyal supporter of De Palma and who considered Blow Out his masterpiece.  BFI was screening it in the Kael centenary season and used her New Yorker review from 1981 as the programme note.

The first half hour or so after the student house episode is the best part of Blow Out, as De Palma sets up the story, which takes place in Philadelphia, and shows Jack Terry at his work.  We watch him in his office, labelling and filing different kinds of sound effect, as a television news report describes the rapid rise in opinion polls of a prospective presidential hopeful:  Governor George McRyan is about to confirm his candidacy at a dinner taking place to kick off Philadelphia’s ‘Liberty Day’ celebrations.  The two elements fuse in the climax to the next part of the narrative.  Later that night, Jack is on a bridge in a local park, recording sounds for potential use in his film work.  He hears a loud noise and sees a car career off the road and into the river.  He dives in and rescues the young female passenger (Nancy Allen), and takes her to hospital.  While being interviewed there by police, Jack learns that the car driver, who died in the accident, was Governor McRyan.

The police immediately seem suspicious of Jack’s account and he’s pressurised by McRyan’s friend and colleague (John McMartin) not to reveal that the politician had a female companion in the car.  Jack nevertheless insists on speaking with the girl, whose name is Sally; and she, although sedated and shaky, insists on leaving the hospital.  The governor’s people are eager for Sally to be smuggled out, and Jack takes her to a motel.  It’s the start of an initially halting but gradually deepening relationship between them that is central to the film.  When Jack listens to his audio tape from the bridge, he distinctly hears a gunshot immediately before the noise of the car’s tyre puncture.  Local TV news reports that Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), a photographer, was also in the park at the time and filmed the accident.  Karp sells stills to a newspaper; Jack constructs a film sequence out of them and syncs this with his sound recording.  Karp’s photographs show McRyan alone in the car.  Jack becomes convinced his death was not an accident but an assassination.

Although De Palma’s title refers to the blow out of the tyre, it inevitably evokes Blow Up (1966).  The link is sealed by the discrepancy between what the protagonist is sure he witnessed and the dubious photographic record that emerges.  But De Palma isn’t really interested, as Antonioni appeared to be, in the subjectivity of perception, the instability of memory, and so on.  Blow Out seems rooted, rather, in Hollywood’s paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s and events that helped stimulate these.  The concealment-cum-airbrushing-out of McRyan’s passenger has a flavour of the Dealey Plaza ‘grassy knoll’ myth (or even the legend of JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe).  The car accident in effect reverses the one in 1969 which Edward Kennedy survived and Mary Jo Kopechne didn’t.  Even the name of the crash location in the film – Wissahickon Creek (a tributary of the Schuylkill river in Pennsylvania) – somewhat echoes Chappaquiddick.  Jack Terry is a sound expert, like the main character in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) – a picture whose release dramatically coincided with the climax to Watergate and which was more deeply informed than this one is by Blow Up.

Compared with the Antonioni and Coppola films (or even the real-life events mentioned above), Blow Out isn’t mysterious, in terms of either the plotting or the characters or their residue.   It isn’t long before De Palma reveals to the audience the details of the plot against McRyan, in which one of his political opponents was the prime mover.  The intention was to set up McRyan with a prostitute (Sally) and catch them together on Karp’s camera, so as to stop in their tracks McRyan’s presidential ambitions.  Burke (John Lithgow), hired to carry out the job, departed from the script by firing a gunshot at McRyan’s car, causing the subsequent accident.  Karp was on hand to record more than he bargained for, even though his published photographs show less than he saw.  Once he finds out that Jack is trying to show that McRyan was killed, Burke attempts to destroy the evidence of the damaged tyre and to eliminate Sally.  The latter involves a remarkably complicated and brutal strategy:  strangling other local women of similar age and hair colouring, and cutting the shape of the Philadelphia Liberty Bell into the corpse.  The other crimes of ‘the Liberty Bell Strangler’ will ensure that, when Burke murders Sally, it will seem to be the latest work of the serial killer.

Pauline Kael wrote that Blow Out ‘on paper … might seem to be just a political melodrama, but it has an intensity that makes it unlike any other political film’.  The ‘intensity’ Kael experienced derives from De Palma’s jettisoning the initially suggestive political aspects of his screenplay in favour of a psycho serial killer horror-thriller (his second one running, after the previous year’s Dressed to Kill).  A Philadelphia setting gives directors a head start if they want to give their story state-of-the-nation import – movies as otherwise dissimilar as the original Rocky (1976) and Philadelphia (1993) are obvious examples.  The ‘Liberty Day’ celebrations that run through Blow Out supply plenty of opportunities for stars-and-stripes, red, white and blue street displays.  Jack’s repeatedly frustrated attempts to get others to believe his evidence of what happened show him up against a brick-wall conspiracy of silence.   Even though the denouement confirms the success of the cover-up, the political implications don’t come through as a primary concern.

De Palma has an appetite and a flair for expressing sensuousness in tragedy:  in Jack’s underwater rescue of Sally from the car; in the gorgeous, elating firework displays against a night sky that form the background to Jack’s agony as he realises he’s arrived too late to save Sally from Burke.  Vilmos Zsigmond’s rich cinematography and the yearning sweep of Pino Donaggio’s score serve to beautify and elevate Blow Out.  Even so, the film’s trajectory can also be described as a progress from joke low-budget slasher movie to seriously meant, de luxe strangler-slasher movie.  The detailed description of Burke’s killing of a prostitute at a railway station, a prelude to his abduction and murder of Sally, is hard to explain unless the technical challenge of bravura staging of the murder – a challenge De Palma meets – is among his priorities.

Nancy Allen is very persuasive as Sally.  (Pauline Kael’s ability to describe actors and their performances is unrivalled; her summary of Allen’s presence and playing is the highlight of her review of Blow Out.)   Even so, you feel there’s too much of Allen and too little of John Travolta (they had also been partners in De Palma’s Carrie).  In long retrospect, John Lithgow is surprising casting as the crazed Burke and there’s much too much of him – though the conversion of the political dirty tricks operative into a lurid serial killer might not be so salient if the hero weren’t such an underwritten character.  Travolta plays Jack Terry with finely controlled soulfulness and is convincing as the skilled, conscientious professional he’s meant to be.  But Jack’s traumatic backstory – he once worked for the police; a wiretap operation that he supervised resulted in the death of an undercover officer – is just backstory, as well as a prediction that history will eventually repeat itself for Jack.  It doesn’t sufficiently influence what he does in the present tense in the way that, say, Scottie Ferguson’s acrophobic nightmare reverberates through Vertigo.  Near the end of Blow Out, De Palma shows Jack in a room littered with the debris of his sound effects tapes.  It may seem like a nod to The Conversation but it’s relatively weightless.  The image, unlike that of paranoid Harry Caul’s emptying out of his world, doesn’t fuse with Jack’s personality.

The climax to the plot arrives when Frank Donahue (Curt May), a local television talk-show host, invites Jack to appear, and show the tapes he’s made of the car crash, on Donahue’s show.  Multi-skilled Burke finds out about this through placing a tap on Jack’s phone and calls Sally, pretending to be Donahue and asking her to meet him at a central Philadelphia train station.  When Sally tells Jack about this, he’s instantly suspicious and it’s hard to understand why he puts Sally in the vulnerable position that he does.  If the idea is that Jack is so desperate he’ll do anything to bring to public attention the evidence he’s put together, that doesn’t come through in the way the scenes are played.  Jack puts a wire on Sally; once he hears that the man she’s meeting is an imposter, he embarks on a desperate pursuit.  He first chases the pair down to an underground station platform, then, after losing them there, drives at breakneck speed through the Liberty Day parade on the streets outside.  (Not the film’s fault but it’s difficult now to watch these scenes of a vehicle hurtling, albeit with no intention to harm, through crowds in a western city.)  Jack eventually reaches Burke and Sally on a rooftop where they’re struggling together.  Jack overpowers Burke and fatally stabs the killer with his own weapon, before discovering that Sally is dead.   Jack has a sound recording of everything that went on.

In the epilogue De Palma shows the hero in mourning for his lost love, blaming himself for her death, playing the tape of her ordeal at the hands of Burke to reinforce his pain and guilt.  These reactions make sense; De Palma’s parting shot doesn’t, except as a macabre, offensive flourish.  Jack uses Sally’s screams to supply the reality that eluded the actress hired ‘for her tits’ and the girls we’ve since heard at a screaming audition that Sam conducted.  ‘Now that’s a scream!’ Sam exclaims triumphantly.  He plays it repeatedly.  His sound technician can’t bear to listen.  John Travolta plays the moment powerfully; in doing so, he makes one all the more aware that nothing we’ve seen of Jack suggests that he’d be capable of exploiting – exploitation-ising – such terrible material.  Brian De Palma has no qualms about doing so.

13 June 2019