De Palma Watch: Blow Out (1981)

Watched:  11/21/2024

Format:  Criterion 4K

Viewing:  third

Director:  Brian De Palma

De Palma is a fascinating subject himself in so many ways.  He bows at the alter of Hitchcock, he works within frameworks that are uniquely his own - and *boy howdy* are they on display here.  He seems to think the only way to get people to show up for the movie on time is a surplus of nudity before the action begins.  I'm not sure he writes great characters, but he does keep you engaged with plot and ideas.

Here in 2024, I don't know if I like watching his movies because I like a thriller, or if I like watching De Palma do his thing and try to puzzle it out.  Why not both, I guess?

I've started getting 4K discs, and... holy cats, was this a good movie for that.  Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (check out this IMDB page), and with a healthy dash of De Palma's weirdo split focus (via bioptic lenses) and split screen stuff...  but, the depth of field, the gorgeous lighting, wild camera angles...  

I am not shocked I loved this movie in film school when pal CB showed it to me.   It's a film about sound and images and the record of reality we make, and fact and fiction.  Can you ever really prove what is real?  Audio can be faked.  It can be thrown away.  Your word matters not if someone doesn't want it to matter.

How does that intersect with the world of high-stakes politics?  With creating reality?

Blow Out (1981) follows a movie sound specialist (John Travolta) working in hacky horror and exploitation films.  He's out collecting audio samples when he bears witness to a car accident where a promising presidential candidate goes in the water.   Travolta pulls out a woman (Nancy Allen) who was not the candidate's wife, but the candidate dies.  He realizes he's captured audio of the incident.

Immediately, Travolta is asked to help cover up what happened, in particular in regards to the candidate's lady-friend - to protect the dead man's reputation.  Further, the cops are skeptical of his audio - immediately.  He has to answer: does the truth matter?  Or is it just an inconvenience that will get people hurt?

Further, if the truth lives on a reel of audio, does it matter?  Can't that truth be faked, too?  

De Palma takes us through the process of how audio and film are captured and put back together in the analog era.*  He shows how you take frame-by-frame images and pair them with audio in the world's sneakiest media studies lesson.  And uses that to challenge what we know about what we see on screen, whether it's news or a thriller.

In some ways, this entire movie is about finding the right sound effect scream to bring reality to a schlocky horror movie we see Travolta working on at the beginning - and, boy, does he nail it by film's end!

Film nerds love this movie for being about film making, and I get it.  Sure, I like a good reference to another movie, I suppose, and it has those.  But comparison is the thief of joy, and so I don't want to get into this versus The Conversation (which is also absolutely baller).  And I do need to finally watch Blow Up.

SPOILERS

I guess the code to crack watching this movie is - in 1981 when this movie was released, what was De Palma up to?  

Yes, it's a movie about how truth works, especially via media manipulation.  But we're also just a few years off of Watergate.   You can't not make a Chappaquiddick comparison.  There's hints of the JFK assassination in a gun shot taking someone out from an unseen location and a Zapruder-type film surfacing.  

For God's sake, the movie ends with Lithgow's psychopathic "fixer" murdering Nancy Allen in front of the American flag as no one sees her die.  As cynical as we are now, that's something of a product of coming up raised on the media of a generation who lived through assassinations, cover-ups that got blown up, and a whole lot of other things that tore the lid off the ideas planted by an Eisenhower-era version of America.

Nancy Allen's character is clearly not smart, and she's oddly innocent and very complicit in how she helps frame people for a shady PI working divorce cases.  She won't engage with the news, because it's depressing, and that leads to her murder.  So...  yeah, I kinda suspect De Palma was trying to say something here.  Yes, she seems... dumb.  And I assume that's intentional.  Just as Travolta's pursuit of truth and justice seems to lead to bad things, over and over.  And, Lithgow's assassin almost echoes the over-reach of Nixon's operatives that led to disaster for him in the Watergate investigation.

And, of course, Travolta makes it appear that Nancy Allen killed Lithgow, removing himself from the equation - bending reality all the more.  Especially after Lithgow just casually tosses the only copy of the evidence into the water.

So, yeah, I mean - maybe I'm wrong!  De Palma can show up and tell me.  You can, too!  But this is kind of what I see when I look at the movie, and I don't think it's a mistake it's set in Philadelphia and not, say, Modesto.  

*On a personal note - I went through film school during the most transformative period in media since sound.  I entered college in 1993 after Jurassic Park had hit that summer, ushering in CGI.  I saw Toy Story during a late-night break from a marathon editing session of 16mm film.

In this same period, film editing went from the classic industrial ways of cutting film on Moviolas, Steenbecks and on reels with syncgangs to digital transfer and cut lists. Video went from tape decks to digitizing tape - we'd ditch tape some time later.  

By the time I left college, I was working in non-linear editing, which you can do for free now on your phone, but which was insanely expensive at the time - in the 10's of $1000's when it first happened. 

Anyway, it was lovely to see all that same equipment we used in 1995 that was irrelevant by 1998.