Previously on Spectre Collie, I finally watched Phantom of the Paradise and although I still don’t really like it, I was forced to admit that I might have been wrong about Brian De Palma all these years.
My friend Jake recommended that if I’m coming around on De Palma, I might be interested in Blow Out, the conspiracy thriller from 1981 that reworks Blow-Up from a 1960s mod fashion photographer into a Reagan-era movie sound designer.
Based on its premise — John Travolta’s sound designer character is recording effects for a slasher movie one night when he hears a gunshot that proves a fatal car crash wasn’t an accident — and my familiarity of De Palma movies in the late 70s and early 80s, I’d expected it to be a more lurid and shallower version of The Conversation. This was backed up by the Criterion Collection’s cover for their version, which is technically accurate, but in my opinion so completely misrepresents the overall tone and look of the movie that it verges on false advertising.
That assumption was one of the vestiges of my former life as an Arrogant Failed Film Student. “Failed” is key there, since it’s a snobbery inspired by resentment, the feeling of I could’ve done better than these hacks, if I’d only gotten the chance! I’m still in the process of putting that past version of myself to rest, where “to rest” means laying him down comfortably in bed, whispering You can rest now, your struggles are past, and smothering him quietly with a pillow. Preferably with a Quentin Tarantino movie blasting in the background.
In actuality, Blow Out didn’t feel like a re-imagining, a retread, or a rip-off of either of its most obvious influences. It felt more like another case of De Palma making overt reference to his inspirations, borrowing the set-up of Blow-Up and the mood of The Conversation, and letting them form the structure of the very specific style of movie he wanted to make. I feel like I could’ve skipped the opening credits and still realized within a minute or two that this was a Brian De Palma movie.
All the best examples of that are front-loaded: the expository scene that uses a split screen to show a news broadcast on one half and Travolta working with close-ups of his analog sound equipment in the other half. The scene where he’s recording the accident on a bridge, picking up details from considerable distance away. A later scene where he’s listening to his recording of the accident, and we see him in close-up set against a backdrop of extreme close-ups of the owl, the frog, the tire of the speeding car. There are so many shots in Blow Out that look straight-up fantastic, and it feels like a filmmaker riffing on all the different ways you can accomplish the same visual idea.
It feels like De Palma took his signature move — split screens — and worked to find as many alternates as possible. There is a good old-fashioned split screen here and there, but it’s often combined with or replaced by dramatic split diopter shots, where we simultaneously get an extreme close-up and a distant point of interest, both shown with a hyper-real focus and lighting.
For several examples, I’m simply not sure how it was actually done, since it seems far too extreme to be done with a trick lens. I’m assuming that a lot of the best moments were either done with compositing, or filming the actors in front of a rear projection. (Again, “failed film student” is key here, since I know just enough to borrow terminology, but not enough to actually do any of it or know exactly how any of it works).
It’s all just objectively, unreservedly cool, completely unconcerned with hiding the gimmickry but also never feeling like a gratuitous gimmick. It’s always used to encourage the viewer to focus on two things at once. That’s up until the climax of the movie, when it’s become pure melodrama, and it’s all about style. Showing the leads against the backdrop of a huge American flag or a night sky filled with fireworks, while they’re lit in giallo-garish primary colors.
While I sincerely love the visual style of the movie, it’s also one of my nagging complaints: this is a movie ostensibly about a sound designer and the power of sound, but almost everything that makes it special is in the visuals. There are several scenes that make reference to the primacy of sound, including a sequence where Travolta’s character is discovering that all of his tapes have been erased, building anxiety with layer after layer of white noise, drones, and a persistent phone ringing. But it doesn’t really factor into the story in a meaningful way, and in fact Travolta’s character says explicitly and repeatedly that his recording is useless to anyone without the accompanying film.
There’s a whole sequence where he’s trying to prove that he heard a gunshot, by breaking into an animation lab and combining still photos of the accident into a film that he can set his audio to. It’s a neat idea, as long as you don’t think too hard about it. Like a print magazine publishing dozens of stills from a film strip, all chosen at a uniform frame rate, instead of choosing to print the kinds of large, attention-grabbing individual photos that magazines usually print. Or the way it accurately shows the process of assembling individual frames to be shot one-by-one under a Bolex camera, but makes no visible attempt to make sure that everything is registered correctly. I was hoping we’d see the finished film, and the car would be comically jerking all over the frame.
But this just isn’t that kind of movie. It does celebrate the art of filmmaking, but not so much with its shots of mixing boards and analog recording equipment and animation tables, but with the movie itself.
I was eager to throw out all of my past assumptions about movies, auteur theory, Brian De Palma specifically, and most significantly, the assumption that movies are about narrative first and foremost. I wanted to go in as open-minded as possible, to forget about my expectations, and enjoy what the movie was trying to show me: a stylish thriller from someone who loves movies for their own sake.
Which was made really difficult for me, by one sequence in particular. No, it’s not the climax, where Travolta suggests having Nancy Allen’s character wear a wire, a repeat of the thing he’d already established as his one biggest regret in his entire career, and it doesn’t really accomplish anything — I was so hoping that he’d use his sound designer skills to hear the crucial clue that led him directly to the killer, but that “clue” was just Allen’s character repeatedly saying the name of the platform she was on. And it’s surprisingly not the sequence where Travolta then goes absolutely apeshit with his Jeep and recklessly endangers hundreds more people than the serial killer ever did, ultimately crashing and again accomplishing nothing. I’d already decided to treat this as a stylistic exercise and stop trying to poke holes in the plot or theme that had nothing to do with the mood.
So the sequence that killed that for me was the opening. It’s a really clever way to set expectations for the movie, introduce us to what the main character does, and set up the semi-comedic sub-“plot” that runs throughout, about casting a suitable actress for the scream voice-over. It contrasts the cheesy, amateurish, T&A-filled slasher movie-within-a-movie with everything that’s about to follow.
There’s no question that it was intended to be bad. I saw an interview with the camera operator, who talked about how jarring it was to go from working on The Shining to starting on Blow Out and being asked to do deliberately bad steadicam work. But there are still a couple of ways to interpret it.
The uncharitable interpretation is that it’s condescending. Surely you, the viewer, can recognize the obvious chasm in quality between these awful B-movies and the mature, artistic statement that is Blow Out?
The more charitable interpretation is that it’s De Palma taking the piss out of himself and mocking the whole question of how to interpret it. These are the movies he started with, and this is essentially what he’s making now, but with the benefit of a high budget, years of experience, and a team of professionals committed to exploring what film is capable of showing.
I would guess that the reality is somewhere in the middle, and I prefer the charitable interpretation. Even if it is more subtle than anything I’ve ever seen from Brian De Palma. I like the idea of Blow Out as a celebration of the craft of filmmaking, insisting that the biggest difference between a low-budget slasher and his own thrillers is a difference in skill and ambition, not any inherent Artistic Vision. For somebody who loves movies for their own sake, even bad movies are still fun, not failures.
I’ve avoided finding out too much about De Palma himself — I didn’t even know that he and Nancy Allen were married at the time Blow Out and Dressed to Kill were made — in favor of letting his work speak for itself. One thing that becomes quickly evident is that he builds up a stable of actors who keep wanting to work with him: Travolta, Allen, Dennis Franz, Gerrit Graham, and John Lithgow. Even though I’ve never worked in movies, that’s something I appreciate more as I get older and have made my own (fortunately short) list of people I’ve sworn I’ll never work with again.
More than that, though, I like this new image I’m getting of De Palma as the guy who kept bridging the gap between fun movies and art movies, at a time when the most respected filmmakers in the industry were most in danger of crawling completely up their own asses.
I’ve seen The Conversation, and I thought it was well made, but I also left it feeling like it was a one-and-done. Paranoia and a sense of futility trying to fight against a system so corrupt that it treats basic morality as irrelevant. I get it. I’d forgotten that Harrison Ford was in it, and if I’m being honest, he was probably at least 50% of why I wanted to watch it in the first place. I don’t think Blow Out is anywhere near as deep or insightful or mature as The Conversation, but there is absolutely no doubt that I enjoyed watching it a lot more.