“So you got your choice. You can be crazy or dead.”

Jack Terry in Blow Out

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Blow Out is a 1981 film directed by Brian De Palma. By this point De Palma had already made an impact on audiences with Sisters, his adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, and Dressed to Kill (this one being one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies). Though Blow Out wasn’t as commercially successful as some of his previous work (and certainly not as successful as his next film, the 1983 remake of Scarface starring Al Pacino with a script by Oliver Stone) there is a lot to appreciate here.

I’ve always preferred De Palma’s thrillers to his other work. I love his use of stylistic film choices in a popular genre film. He is part of that group of directors descended from Hitchcock who, while working on genre films for mass consumption, employed innovative film techniques and artistry to tell their stories. Though Blow Out is not my favorite De Palma thriller, it is a very solid and enjoyable film with technical merits. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to watch an entertaining thriller with some fun twists and turns.

Michael: I was never bored. It kept me engaged the whole time. Overall, I liked it. It definitely had dialogue of its time, though.

Jordan: What do you mean?

Michael: Every movie at that time had this naturalistic dialogue. So people are talking over one another and saying “you know” a lot and trailing off. They say a lot of things without it meaning anything, which is realistic, but it’s not something that is really done anymore.

Jordan: Yeah, it was really popular in the late 70s, early 80s.

Michael: Yeah, of its time.

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WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD – Go watch the movie first, then come back. Or don’t, whatever you want, it’s your life.

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Blow Out centers around Jack (played by John Travolta), a movie sound designer who inadvertently records the sounds of a tire blow out while capturing new sounds for the horror B-movie on which he’s working. He sees the car careen off the road and crash in a river. He dives in to save the life of make-up artist Sally (Nancy Allen), a passenger in the car who seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jack is unable to save the second passenger. It turns out to be the governor who is a presidential hopeful and ahead in the polls. Jack knows he heard a sound before the blow out, but is unable to convince anyone else there is more to the incident than meets the eye. He begins to piece together the clues in the sounds he recorded, unaware that both he and Sally are being stalked by a murderous hit man (John Lithgow).

Michael: I love John Lithgow, but I think he’s played this type of character better.

Jordan: I think this was really one of the first times he played a murderous character like this.

Michael: He’s done it a lot since then.

Jordan: Yeah, he has.

Michael: I think he does it better now. He’s more effective at it when it’s like “Grandpa’s a serial killer”. Like on Dexter and Pet Semetary.

Jordan: He’s had a whole career to perfect it.

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One can’t really talk about Blow Out without talking about the sound design. After all, the whole film revolves around a sound designer and what he’s heard.

When the film opens there’s this kind of weird wheezing/humming/static like noise. At first I thought it was something outside our apartment (we can hear a lot of things from the street, and it often sounds like it’s coming from the surround sound speakers) or that something was wrong with the streaming service since we were watching the movie on the Criterion Channel and not a disc. After a minute or so, I realized it was supposed to be breathing. We’re seeing a horror film where the movie is shot from the point of view of a serial killer stalking a sorority house.

Michael: Oh, my God, that breathing noise! I couldn’t stand it! It wasn’t even breathing! John Travolta’s a horrible sound designer if that’s what he thinks breathing sounds like.

Jordan: Well, they show that it wasn’t finished, they were still mixing it. And it was a B-movie.

Michael: Still! I almost had to cover my ears, it was so bad, it was such a horrible noise.

The serial killer murders and stalks people, lurking through the dormitory halls until he gets to a line of shower stalls.

Michael: These girls are really oblivious, aren’t they?

A woman is showering, (well, she’s repeatedly rubbing her breasts over and over again, because that’s how women shower, right?) and the killer moves towards her, raising his knife. The woman FINALLY sees him and lets out the weirdest whimpering cat noise. The film pauses, reverses, and replays as we hear some men talking about what that noise was she was making. We cut to a viewing room where a director is talking to Jack about the woman’s scream, that he expects Jack to get a better one to put in, that he didn’t hire the shower actress for her scream.

This starts a recurring joke throughout the movie where, no matter how high the stakes get for Jack in regards to the crime he’s inadvertently recorded, the director keeps trying to get Jack to record a better scream. He keeps pulling Jack into audition rooms, into the recording studio. “We need that scream!”

Michael: They kept coming back to him needing that scream over and over. There was a point in the middle of the movie when they had the two girls in the recording studio screaming and shaking each other where I was like, “What? Ugh! Are we really talking about this scream again?” But then it all made sense in the end.

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De Palma has been known for utilizing the split screen effect. He famously did it in Carrie during the climactic gym sequence. It always annoyed me in that particular film. The split screen mostly showed another angle of the same piece of action. Movie critics have said he needed the split screen to show all the horror and mayhem, but I thought the split screen was superfluous and the sequence could’ve been more effective with strong editing and quick cuts.

However, the beginning of Blow Out utilizes split screen effectively. The scene begins with a wide shot where Jack walks back into his studio on one side while the TV plays in the foreground on the other. Jack works in one half of the screen while the other half shows the news report of how the governor is polling better as a presidential candidate than the current president. Suddenly the screen splits; the Jack side of the screen cuts to a close up on the playback equipment and the TV side of the frame shows the news report full on.

De Palma’s split screen creates a direct correlation between Jack’s sound recordings and the fate of the governor. It’s building tension in that moment, but the audience is not entirely sure why (unless you’ve read the beginning of this review and already know the governor is going to die while Jack witnesses it). Sure, De Palma could’ve just had the sound of the news report going while he focused the camera on Jack’s work, but it wouldn’t have had the same effect. The audience would have been likely to tune out the news report as if it were realistic background noise. Using the split screen is De Palma saying, “Hey, pay attention. Both of these things are important.”

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Jack reveals to Sally that he had once worked with the police, wiring detectives for sting operations. His equipment malfunctioned and gave away one of the police force’s best men; the malfunction resulted in the detective being brutally murdered before Jack could save him.

Michael: John Travolta’s face looked really attractive in some shots, but in others looked like a mish-mosh of nonsense.

Jordan: What do you mean?

Michael: Well, he has these large features that sometimes you’re like, “Oh, he’s handsome!” and sometimes you’re like, “He’s weird looking!” But that’s the best Bette Miller ever looked!

Jordan: You only say that [about Nancy Allen] because Vilmos Zsigmond did the cinematography for Blow Out, and he had finished The Rose two years prior.

Michael: She was very of-her-time pretty.

Jordan: I think Nancy Allen is pretty. She has a great face.

Michael: Meh.

Jordan: Though she’s got that big, permed, curly hair.

Michael: Yeah. Of her time pretty.

Jordan: I think this is some of her best acting. I’ve never really been impressed with her acting before. I mean, she was playing a character voice in this movie, but I believed her the whole time, which is saying something.

Michael: It’s too bad about John Travolta, though.

Jordan: Yeah, he wasn’t great, though this is known to be one of his best performances. I thought he did okay.

Michael: He’s always better when he’s playing characters that are just him. Like, in Grease or Look Who’s Talking when he gets to be just charming and fun. He’s good, he’s fine, whatever. But when he has to act…! There were times in this movie where I was really sad it wasn’t an actor who could play more depth, because you could tell they would’ve been great moments. It’s just John Travolta isn’t good enough to play them.

Jordan: I liked him in this movie. It’s one of the only times I think what he was trying actually worked. It’s too bad he didn’t keep growing in that direction.

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There are two spinning shots which are very striking in the film. The first one occurs as Jack finds out his sound recordings have been erased. This is when he first understands that he has stumbled upon a conspiracy and the people responsible know he’s a threat. The camera is positioned in the center of the room and spins round and round, showing Jack destroying his studio in a desperate attempt to find any recording that has not been erased.

The second spinning shot occurs at the end of the film. Jack has wired Sally to keep tabs on her while she makes contact with a man they think is a news anchor who will publicize the conspiracy they have uncovered. The man turns out to be the hit man, who whisks Sally away to murder her. Jack can hear her screaming and attempts to save her but ultimately fails. He cradles her body as the camera spins around them.

In the first shot, the camera points OUT; in the second shot, the camera points IN. Both spinning shots reflect Jack’s frustration and despair, but they also show how madness has moved from outside of himself to taking over his inner mind. He loses his sanity not necessarily because he was deeply in love with Sally but because his sound equipment has led to yet another horrific death of which he is responsible.

Michael: I didn’t like the ending. It couldn’t’ve really ended differently, but I don’t know…

Jordan: You want her to live. You don’t want to see her die. But they do set you up for it. He does say they’ll either end up crazy or dead, and that’s what happens.

Michael: Yeah. And it’s not like I wanted these two to end up together. They really had no hope for a future together. It’s not like they were deeply in love or anything, they were just together because…what? She thought he was cute?

In the end, Jack finally has a good scream for the B-movie: Sally’s death cries.

Michael: The whole thing with the scream at the end was just morbid.

Jordan: But it was really clever. It ties the whole movie together. Him getting the scream for the movie is this comic relief touchstone that keeps popping up to ease the tension of the main story, but then you realize the movie is about how he got that scream. It’s not about the assassination attempt or Jack and Sally’s relationship at all. Those were all MacGuffins.

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De Palma seems to embrace melodramatic conventions in all of his thrillers. He’ll move from scenes of gritty realism to high melodrama at the drop of a hat. It appeals to my emotional side as well as my campy side. Blow Out contains considerably less camp than some of De Palma’s other works, but it’s still there if you’re the kind of person who likes to watch movies in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way (I absolutely do–shout out to my former co-conspirators Amanda and Katrina). But if you’re someone who honestly enjoys high drama in your films (I absolutely do–shout out to me), then you can take this film at face value and enjoy it (unlike Raising Cain, which at the least requires a very dark sense of humor and at the most the re-edited fan cut of De Palma’s original shooting script to really appreciate).

Michael: I’m glad I watched this one. I probably won’t ever watch it again, but I’m not sorry that I saw it.

Michael’s Rating: 5 “Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose”s