Blow Out: The Explosion That No One Wanted to Hear

 

Blow Out, Brian De Palma’s great masterpiece. A film about making films that, in the end, is about how a narrative is constructed and how the very thing we seek can end up being our undoing. The critics got this film wrong, but time is always the best film critic. With Blow Out, De Palma delivered a genuine homage to the visual and sonic language of cinema, and gave a master class in how to tell a story.

A movie about a political conspiracy investigated by a sound technician. It sounds like something that would make a lot of people run out of the theater. John Travolta put himself in De Palma’s hands and delivered one of the best performances of his career. Tarantino rescued him from obscurity to use him in Pulp Fiction after seeing him in Blow Out. The title is a homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. De Palma, whom many considered Alfred Hitchcock’s foremost student, delivers a film that defies the narrative limitations of its era. A movie that works as drama, as thriller, as a tribute to cinema, and as a visual wink to Italian giallo. Pure metacinema. The work of a genius.

Travolta is Jack Terry. He creates sound effects for cheap movies. He used to work for the police, but something went very wrong. Looking for the perfect scream for a horror film, he accidentally records the sound of an accident that, when analyzed carefully, might not be an accident at all. Thus Terry goes from cold, technical sound genius to conspiracy theorist, building an increasingly paranoid seeming narrative by adding images to the sound. The images De Palma creates inside Terry’s studio are brutal proof of the director’s frame by frame cinematic talent. The handling of color and violence is a masterful nod to the cinema of Dario Argento. Nancy Allen and John Lithgow also deliver outstanding performances. We come to realize that no one and nothing is what it seemed to be.

It is said that part of the critics’ aversion to Blow Out stems from its catastrophic ending, in which things once again go very badly for Terry. In the end Terry never overcomes his trauma and lives it all over again. He records the sound of a crime once more and ends up using it to finish the movie. His punishment for finding the perfect scream is to hear a death over and over while watching his last film completed. De Palma is brutal with his protagonist and with the audience. In 1981 the public turned its back on Brian De Palma’s best film and John Travolta’s finest performance. Time proved the director and the actor right.