The Realest Scream: ‘Blow Out’ (1981)
Supreme visual stylist that he is, it’s a little surprising that Brian De Palma, when he came to make his prevailing homage to filmmaking, would have as his hero the sound guy. But that’s De Palma for you — always pulling surprises. And come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise after all: just imagine all he’d have to expose about his own art and craft — and how much revelation and ridicule would result — if he properly made a film whose focus is the director.
We get an idea from the opening moments of Blow Out, as our story begins on the set of an opus called Coed Frenzy, where the exploitation-filmmakers of Independence Pictures are trying to get the perfect scream out of a creamy young dorm resident cornered in the shower by a knife-wielding intruder. It’s not the only De Palma film to open with such a gambit; three years later, with Body Double, De Palma would use a similar device to imply that schlock films give us ersatz horror but that he, Brian De Palma, is here to give us the real.
And with Body Double he certainly did, maybe for the first time in his career. So much of what came before it looks, at best, like nothing more than high-style versions of what could have been made at Independence Pictures. The best of these movies, most agree, is Carrie (1976), whose success is what insured De Palma such an inordinately large budget for a filmmaker of avante garde leanings. To put Blow Out’s $18 million price tag in perspective, just keep in mind that Raiders of the Lost Ark, released that same summer, cost exactly as much. That movie was the number-one hit of the year, while Blow Out…was not.
People will always blame the film’s financial failure on its decidedly unhappy ending, but that’s only part of the story of what went wrong there. The studio mistakenly believed it had a popcorn thriller on its hands, and so the movie was released in the summer rather than the fall, when moody dramas are typically trotted out in advance of the Oscars. That was the first mistake. The second was the poster seen above: black-and-white to represent this most color-conscious of movies, and furthermore signaling to the public that here is a movie all about a madman who opens his mouth really big when he screams.
What it really is is a psychological thriller about someone ultimately doomed to live the rest of his days haunted by the scream of somebody else.
The Criterion re-release of several years ago comes with a cover that does a superior job of capturing the film’s essence. With its subdued hues, its prominently featured taping technology, its quietly troubled sound technician, it subtly resembles the poster for an earlier film about electronic eavesdropping gone murderously wrong.
The Conversation (1974) was a much more successful film than Blow Out. So was Michael Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), the other film that served as primary inspiration for De Palma when he made Blow Out. Blowup does with photography something similar to what the other films do with sound recording, finding murder mysteriously hidden in the details of a single artifact. Although De Palma admired both films, confessing that his own was made in the spirit of homage, De Palma always did have one major problem with The Conversation, which he considered “very much a cheat, because [the actors] re-read the line [that is supposed to have been clarified by the equipment]: they don’t really use all those filters to pick the line out. Ultimately, they re-read what she said: it’s a different reading. It’s a very terrible cheat.” (Coppola, in a 1974 interview with De Palma in his journalist days, had also used the word “cheat” to describe what he’d done — although, it must be noted, he hadn’t used the word “terrible.”)
Blow Out is much less solemn in its mood, much less inert in its action, than either film. Appreciation for the film is coming around, a slow process that began a couple decades ago when cineastes learned that it was one of Quentin Tarantino’s three favorite films of all time. In fact, Tarantino’s insistence on casting John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (1994) was based almost entirely on his performance here. (“I think he’s just absolutely shattering in that movie,” Tarantino once told De Palma.) His chemistry with Nancy Allen has a sweetness that really brings out the flavor of the rest of the action. In fact, Travolta insisted she be the one cast to play opposite him. She was reluctant, having played a prostitute in her husband’s previous film, Dressed to Kill (1980), but ultimately the part was just too compelling to not do.
She and Travolta had previously shared a screen in Carrie, but here there’s something really special between them: Travolta, as Jack, simultaneously exuding man-of-the-world cool and aw-shucks-ing tenderness, while Allen, as Sally, does a loveable ditzy-blonde hooker to perfection. The whole thing between them starts when Jack is out late one night recording some wilderness sounds for his effects files, when a car goes flying off a nearby bridge. Jack dives in after it, rescuing a woman from the passenger side. This is Sally, and the two have a chance to meet properly later at the hospital, where they’re both recovering from the ordeal.
The man in the driver’s seat wasn’t saved. He was the local governor, primed for presidential glory, and at the hospital his staff, along with the police, strongly encourage Jack to help them make sure Sally’s presence in the car is kept secret from the public — active legislation, you know, and please think of the embarrassment it would cause his family. Back in his studio, alone with the recording he made that night, Jack begins to suspect that the sound he heard — the blowout of the movie’s title — was in fact a gunshot, and that the incident at the bridge was not entirely accidental.
De Palma had good reason for using his hometown of Philadelphia as the setting for Blow Out. It provided all the right locations to evoke what he needed to evoke, and De Palma knew just where in the city to find them: the Wissahickon Memorial Bridge for the scene of the “accident,” the Reading Terminal train station for Jack to convince Sally to stay in town just a little longer, the Reading Street Market for the killer Burke (John Lithgow) to stalk his prey, and the 30th Street Station and Penn’s Landing for so much of the climactic action.
The use of Philadelphia served a thematic purpose, too, providing the perfect backdrop against which De Palma could, in his words, “play this sort of contemporary political story against the old conceptions of liberty and independence and truth. We invented that whole Liberty Day theme, that parade and big finale — fireworks, costumes, everything — to give that kind of patriotic air.”
The production company that employs Jack, remember, is called Independence Pictures, and on the side of their building is a giant (and pretty damn cool) mural of Benjamin Franklin — who, among other things, invented the bifocal. De Palma’s beloved split diopter focusing technique functions somewhat similarly to the bifocal, with two different strengths in the same lens. Is this a coincidence? Maybe it is. But maybe it isn’t.
The film is suffused with a striking red-and-blue color palette. The moodier, more personal moments, such as in Jack’s studio, tend to be awash in subdued blue, while moments of danger are cut through with sharp reds: Nancy in the hotel room with Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), or, most consequentially of all, the grand fireworks finale in which her murder occurs, amidst the nighttime pageantry of the Liberty Day Jubilee. This scene was far from easy to light and shoot. “[W]e had to light practically the whole seaport of Philadelphia,” remembered cinematographer extraordinaire Vilmos Zsigmond, “with the July 4 fireworks behind Nancy Allen and John Travolta.”
Murderous political intrigue intrudes on the personal lives of the innocent and semi-innocent who become involved. By letting it all play out amidst a celebration of the country’s high-minded political ideals of liberty and justice, De Palma is able to subtly suggest that America itself is equal parts public horror and private melancholy.
Blow Out is loaded with random delights. By far its most fetishistically filmic moment is when Jack gets hold of the magazine that’s published Manny’s frame-by-frame photography of the supposed blowout. He splices together the frames until they form a kind of film of the incident, then syncs the film with his sound recording. In this way he’s able to determine that a flash in the dark occurred precisely in the moment the pop is heard. The sequence is plotted, paced, and played with all the tender fervor you’d expect, and is able to evoke at once both Chappaquiddick and the Zapruder film, as well as the fetishistic zeal of filmmaking itself.
De Palma had once been slated to direct Prince of the City (1981), before Sidney Lumet was ever involved. That didn’t work out — for complex reasons that would give the plot of Blow Out a run for its money (“I feel Sidney had basically stolen [the] movie from me” is De Palma’s simplified version) — but De Palma was able to mine a piece of the original nonfiction source material, unused in Lumet’s film, for what became a bravura set-piece flashback in Blow Out: Jack recalling the time he’d helped wire a policeman for a sting operation that went tragically wrong — a story with strong thematic and psychological implications for what occurs later in Blow Out.
Jack rescuing Sally from the car after the incident on the bridge is really John Travolta, and it’s really Nancy Allen he’s rescuing. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that Allen is a certified claustrophobe. I can find no account of why a stunt double wasn’t used, but I think I can guess at one of the reasons, very specific to this film: John Lithgow as Burke, the Liberty Bell Strangler, spends a good part of the film killing people who look like Sally, precisely because they look like Sally (it’s a ploy to disguise his motives for when the real Sally is killed). With this kind of resemblance-confusion already existing within the film’s universe, the filmmakers couldn’t very well introduce the potential for real-life resemblance-confusion, of the kind that could result from use of a stunt double. Anyway, Allen survived, and De Palma, who’s called it “the scariest moment of my life,” can be grateful for that.
There was at least one potential disaster facing the film that did come to pass. Some cans of film were stolen out of the truck carrying them back to Los Angeles. In the cans was the Liberty Day parade sequence, $750,000 worth of moviemaking, or 4 percent of the film’s total budget. Filmmakers keep insurance for incidents like this, but it still meant redoing the most elaborate and difficult-too-control aspect of the shoot.
The movie features an array of wonderful supporting performances, something that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough. Curt May as the unctious, scheming newscaster Frank Donahue is such a dead ringer — eyes closed — for The Simpsons’ Kent Brockman and Troy McClure, you can’t believe it’s not possible he wasn’t voiced, in a syllable-by-syllable collaboration, by Harry Shearer and Phil Hartman. Dennis Franz, meanwhile, really comes into his own here as the quintessentially sleazy, foul-mouthed operative Manny Karp.
And then there’s John Lithgow, whose perfection in such villainous roles we’ve long taken for granged. He was never even offered such roles until De Palma, in his genius for casting, took notice. The two had known each other as students, through Ivy League theater channels, and De Palma in many ways “godfathered” — Lithgow’s words — his entry into not just villainy but filmmaking itself. When Marc Maron on his podcast asked Lithgow why De Palma had thought to begin casting him in such roles, Lithgow, clearly amused by the question, said, “I think it’s because he loves the idea of somebody apparently innocent being diabolical, and I’m your man for that.” That all started, in a small way, with Obsession (1976), but really began in earnest here.
De Palma for his entire career has been known as an enthusiastic maestro of splitscreens and split-diopter shots, and Blow Out is certainly no anomaly in this regard. In fact, you might even say it represents his personal apotheosis with this technology, particularly in the case of split-diopters. De Palma says of both these techniques that they “[give] you this contrapuntal juxtaposition of information…and there could be a synthesis in the juxtaposition. It’s also good for very slow-developing things, because you have a lot going on.” When both sides of the screen are in focus, you can stay better attuned to what it is that’s going on.
But Blow Out is much more than the sum of its technical virtuosity. When Pauline Kael, in her rave review, wrote that “genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision,” she was forgetting about the sheer humanity of the piece — mostly the sympathy inspired by Jack, whose paranoia, past mistakes, and lovelorn heartbreak make him the true sympathetic figure here. Killing him off would have been the real unhappy ending.
And yet, Jack still hands off Nancy’s all-too-real scream to the producer at Independence Pictures, a professional to the end. So what if it makes him weep alone in the snow as he plays the recording over and over again? He had a job to do, and he did it better than even his boss would have dared ask. That’s really what we’ve been watching all along, whether we know it till now or not — a man whose passion for his job allowed him to do that job with supreme excellence. And now he’s left to pay a penance, forced to acknowledge the full human cost of capturing genuine horror.
