Each Brian De Palma film, in its own unique way, says something about the auteur’s self-perception, as well as his darkly tinctured views on this nefarious world. And, regardless of being essentially a remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, De Palma’s Blow Out is “tweaked” enough to indicate precisely what the director felt about the subject of love and trust in the year 1981. As well as having any faith in American institutions.
With a tagline that goes, “Murder has a sound all of its own,” Blow Out establishes that notion from the outset when we’re introduced to the heavy breathing of a killer whose perspective we’re watching from—for one of De Palma’s favorite tropes is turning his audience into the voyeur (filmgoing itself already a voyeuristic practice without De Palma needing to make us feel guiltier about it; but such is the way of holding a mirror up to society). The killer in question is looking in on the windows of college dorms, filled with all manner of debauchery, including, of course, topless women. Another favorite symbol of De Palma, particularly in his 80s oeuvre. As the killer approaches the communal bathroom where a girl is pulling a Marion Crane in Psycho by taking a shower for the sole purpose of getting stabbed to death, the scream she lets out takes the audience entirely out of what is supposed to be a horrifying moment—and by design. For it’s at that instant we realize De Palma has bamboozled us again with a film within a film concept (per his Hitchcockian reverence). We then see sound effects technician Jack Terry (John Travolta) in the screening room with Sam (Peter Boyden), the producer of the low-budget slasher (called, what else, Co-Ed Frenzy) they’re working on—the fifth project they’ve created together.
Both men are vexed by the lack of conviction in the actress’ scream, prompting Sam to tell Jack to find a better one. Jack quips, “Know any good screamers?” In addition to demanding a more believable scream, Sam also asks for more convincing (a.k.a. less recognizable) wind effects, which Jack goes out to record that night at Wissahickon Creek, standing on Wissahickon Memorial Bridge when he also records the tire blow-out of the governor’s car as it crashes into the water. Rushing to jump in and rescue the passengers, Jack sees the only one still alive is Sally Bedina (Nancy Allen), the governor’s escort. Being a married man and high-profile official, Governor McRyan’s associates obviously don’t want this information getting out, convincing Jack to keep his discovery of Sally in the car a secret and let them have reporters chalk it up to nothing more than a “freak accident.” While Jack is reluctant to conceal the truth, he goes along with it for the sake of getting out of the police and hospital’s clutches. Granted, he’s found time to ask Sally out for a drink, realizing he’s more attracted to her than he thought upon originally seeing her inside of a flooding car.
But more than Sally still lingering in his mind to remind him of the “incident,” it’s the unshakeable feeling that something about the entire thing is off. Soon Jack becomes obsessed with listening to the recording he made that night, hearing the distinct sound of a gunshot just before the car veered off the bridge. In other words, the “blow out” was no accident, but carefully orchestrated by some hiding-in-the-shadows gunman. A deranged henchman we later find out goes by the name of Burke (John Lithgow). Meticulous in his cover-up machinations, Burke is sure to replace the tire on the car with a normal one that has no bullet holes in it.
Burke is a diabolical character up there with Michael Myers in terms of his singular pursuit of a certain woman: Sally. What’s more, De Palma adheres to the Bret Easton Ellis school of thought in that bad shit “just happens.” People “just do” fucked-up things, often with no real “why” behind it other than the fact that they can. It was only a late twentieth century development to try and lend “psychological motivations” to why people are so, well, shitty. In the 70s and early 80s, movies told us there was no “why”—only warned us instead of all the possible permutations our lives could be fucked with. The arbitrary decision of Burke to go against the original plan of Governor McRyan’s opponent by full-stop killing him instead of getting him caught in a compromising position with Sally is such an example of this. Burke is a “wild card” representation of how nothing can be counted on, not even in a society that tries to insist we should. Jack, too, is someone who can’t help but still believe—even after all the instances of “getting fucked,” as he calls it—in the possibility for rightness and justice. Which is perhaps why he becomes so wrapped up in the conspiracy that’s afoot, and proving to the public that it’s just that.
When Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), an “amateur photographer” who was “coincidentally” in the park that night, releases his “motion picture camera” footage to a local tabloid, Jack is among the many to buy the publication. At first merely fascinated, he ultimately finds that he can put together his own crude film of the accident via these photos in “flipbook” form, complete with the soundtrack he recorded to better illustrate the evidence of foul play. After getting Sally re-involved by “tricking” her into missing her train at the station so she can fulfill her promise to have a drink with him, he starts to understand the full extent of his attraction to her. Even when he later learns that the depth of her own complicity in the accident was worse than he originally thought. For, as it turns out, she’s a frequent “collaborator” with Manny in the art of blackmail—which was the entire reason he was in the park that night with his camera. To photograph and film Governor McRyan in a compromising position with Sally.
The breadth of the subsequent conspiracy to cover up the assassination—even if it was done by a rogue “employee”—becomes clearer to Jack when he takes his newly created “movie” from the magazine photos to a police authority. Although this detective doesn’t believe a word Jack is telling him, he agrees to send it to the lab to be looked at. Alas, Burke already got to the tape so that the footage has been “mysteriously” erased, prompting the detective to berate Jack for making him look like a fool for trusting him. Suddenly realizing that all of his tapes have been erased—again, courtesy of Burke—Jack only has his secreted-away original copy to provide as evidence.
He shows it to Sally at her apartment, who tries her best to be empathetic while also distancing herself from getting involved any further. That’s when Jack throws it out that he knows what she was doing out there with McRyan. That he knows what she always seemed to be doing in order to make a living. He goads, “What’d ya tell him? Running water under a well-lit bridge gets ya hot?”
Feeling remorse, she capitulates to his belief that they’re in this together now, telling him everything about the events leading up to that night. And when presented with the whole truth about her story, Jack sees that Manny was clearly in on the setup for some kind of payoff he never told Sally about. Enraged by the whole thing, he jumps to his feet and screams, “I’m sick of getting fucked by these guys!” The “guys” in question being the proverbial Establishment that thinks it can just mow down any “little person” (read: not rich and powerful) in their way whenever they want something done. Worse still, the common man is constantly gaslit, told that what they’re “interpreting” as how events unfolded is just that: an interpretation, and a false one. Mainly because it doesn’t fit within the narrative those in power would like to project. So it is that Jack takes a stand and declares, “I know what I heard and saw—and I’m not gonna stop until everyone in this fucking country hears and sees the same thing.”
Reality, of course, has different plans for Jack and his intentions for full-tilt exposure. And even though Sally gets Manny to admit that some “nut” (Burke) was trying to orchestrate it so that the blow-out would only cause “a little crack-up” that would lead the police to come and find the governor in flagrante delicto with Sally, it doesn’t reassure her about his trustworthiness at all—particularly considering he was hiding his six-thousand-dollar payout from her this whole time.
As Jack finds a way to gain credibility with his story by sharing it on the local news channel with reporter Frank Donahue (Curt May), Burke is on to their plan to blow the lid off the lie he’s worked so diligently to cultivate, complete with serial killing women who look like Sally to make her eventual death seem as though it’s part of the “Liberty Bell Strangler’s” modus operandi. Being that he’s also skilled in the art of wiretapping like Jack, Burke overhears his conversation with both Donahue and Sally about bringing the truth to light with his “homemade movie.” Burke, obviously, isn’t about to allow any of this to happen, intercepting Sally under the guise of being Donahue and wanting to talk to her in person about the upcoming news report…adding that she ought to bring the blow-out footage along as well.
It doesn’t take long for Jack, who has equipped Sally with a wire so he can hear her in case something goes wrong, to figure out she’s been set up. The botched rendezvous takes place amid the Liberty Day celebration, marking the centennial of the last day the Liberty Bell was rung. This deliberately layers on the irony of Jack trying to reveal the truth about the nature of “democracy” in America (filled to this day with undercover bloodshed), which isn’t lost on the audience as he motors through the parade of revelers, crashing into a store window that reads “Liberty or Death” with mannequins hanging from nooses for added effect.
Returning to consciousness after night has fallen, Jack fears he’s left Sally alone in the strangling hands of Burke for too long. Putting the earpiece back in to hear some trace of where she might be, Jack is alerted to her location when she appears on the balcony of the Port of History building’s roof, continuing to scream out his name. Jack makes a run for her, with De Palma employing slow motion and an intense soundtrack from Pino Donaggio to punctuate the stressfulness and tension of this scene. Stylistically speaking, De Palma made the non-predictable choice by not doing any cross-cutting to Sally and Burke as Jack rushes to rescue her.
We’re given a small glimmer of hope as he grabs Burke’s weapon and starts stabbing him in the stomach with it. Unfortunately, it’s already too late for Sally, who we see strangled to death, prostrate on the ground. Staring at her in disbelief, Jack holds her as the fireworks go off, a tradition meant to embody the sound of so-called freedom. In this context, it’s a mocking symbol that only adds to the injustice of it all. And now even the cover-up of the cover-up is covered (oh De Palma and his layers) by Sally’s strangling, with newscasters later reporting that she managed to kill her attacker as she was being choked. What’s more, Jack no longer has a viable tape to give to Donahue after Burke destroyed the one Sally brought, making the entire ordeal for nothing. Accordingly, Jack tortures himself by listening to the recording from Sally’s wire from the day of her murder. Holding on to the final words of hope she offered in suggesting they see some Broadway shows when they run away to NYC together (but of course, any plans regarding running away to New York tend to end in tragedy—yet it’s hard to know if the greater tragedy is making it there or never making it at all).
Just as Jack found Sally on the verge of death when he first met her, so it seemed written in the stars that the reaper was always going to come back to collect her and finish what he started. And, because De Palma is firm believer in the full-circle ending, he also brings it all back to the tagline of the movie and Sam’s search for the perfect scream for the shower scene. Jack is able to deliver it thanks to Sally’s authentic shriek of terror on the rooftop, now immortalized in his recordings. “It’s a good scream,” he agrees with Sam as he listens to and watches the sound emit from the actress’ dubbed-over mouth. Then he keeps muttering to himself, “Good scream. Good scream.”
As Sam continues to replay it, Jack has to cover his ears, not fully fathoming his willing masochism in delivering the perfect scream for the movie until this second. And, in his search for truth for the entire narrative, Jack has managed to unwittingly conflate it with the lie of cinematic entertainment—hating himself all the more for what he’s done to Sally by commodifying her pain. In this sense, too, one could argue De Palma is making a statement on the casual exploitation of women when it suits a man’s “greater” purpose.
