Analysis of ‘Blow Out’

Blow Out is a 1981 thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars John Travolta and Nancy Allen, with John Lithgow and Dennis Franz.

Though the film pays homage to Hitchcock and a number of slasher films, it is directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blowup, replacing the medium of photography with that of audio recording. In this way, Blow Out is also influenced by The Conversation, by Francis Ford Coppola.

Though Blow Out was largely praised on release–in particular, Travolta’s and Allen’s performances, De Palma’s direction, and the film’s visual style–it didn’t do well at the box office. Over the years, however, it has developed into a cult film. Quentin Tarantino has called Blow Out one of his favourite films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Since Blow Out is based on Blowup, it’s useful to compare and contrast the themes in both films. I discuss the themes of Blowup in my analysis of that film, so you can look there, Dear Reader, for a more thorough discussion of that; whereas here I’ll only briefly refer to them as I compare and contrast them with those of Blow Out.

In Blowup, there is an exploration of how one’s perception of reality is deceptive: something caught and frozen in mid-action in a photograph may not be what it seems, since reality is fluid, in endless motion, and so what is caught in the photo may be wildly out of context. Similarly, sounds can go by in time so fast that our ears can miss them…unless one happens to have the sensitive, attentive ears of a sound effects technician like Jack Terry (Travolta).

There are crucial contrasts between these films, though, in their exploration of perception and reality. Thomas, the photographer in Blowup, overanalyzes photos he’s taken, and he ends up imagining a murder having taken place that, in my interpretation at least, probably never happened. His analysis has led to an illusion, projected from himself onto the scene based on his own guilt feelings. Jack’s analysis of sounds he’s recorded, on the other hand, lead to the truth, as well as proof of that truth…though his attempts to publicize that truth are thwarted.

Thomas’s conflict between his faulty perceptions and reality are of a more philosophical nature. Jack’s difficulties proving the truth of what he’s perceived–the sound of a gunshot blowing out the tire of a politician’s car, causing it to fall into a lake, killing him–are the stuff of a political conspiracy, which in the end Jack cannot prove, because the evidence is destroyed.

So both films explore how reality is manipulated in some sense: in Blowup, it’s manipulated in Thomas’s mind in an effort to deflect personal guilt; in Blow Out, a Chappaquiddick-style killing is manipulated to look like an accident, with all the evidence of the blown-out tire removed.

Another point of comparison between the two films is how they deal with sexism. Thomas is routinely disrespectful to his models, generally female, until an assertive woman in the park where he took the photos, which included her and her lover, confronts him about them, demanding him to give her the negatives. In Blow Out, pretty much every woman (apart from extras and a TV anchorwoman) is young, beautiful, sexualized, and–I hate to say it–ditzy. Rather than being a promotion of sexism, though, I’d say that De Palma’s film, like Antonioni’s in its own way, is a comment on sexism.

By presenting almost all the women in Blow Out as hot-looking bimbos, we’re seeing a commentary not on how women actually are, but rather how they’re perceived in society, especially in the media. Remember that a theme common to both films is the contrast between perception and reality, and how perception is manipulated through such instruments of the media as photography and sound effects.

Feminists have written book after book about the evil of presenting women as sex objects, and of how such presentations of women give men power over them. The film’s portrayal of women as stupid and talentless reinforces that sense of female powerlessness under men. It’s easy to see the link, therefore, between on the one hand, female beauty (so attractive to sexual predators) and a woman’s perceived lack of intelligence or talent (i.e., those awful, fake screams for the slasher film that Jack is doing the sound for), and on the other hand, women’s vulnerability to male serial killers. One is reminded of that old Chinese misogynist saying, “女子無才便是德” (“If a woman has no talents, that is virtue for her.”)

Blow Out is known as a film concerned with the mechanics of movie-making, how visuals and sound are put together to make an effective illusion (e.g., Jack’s synching up of the recorded sounds of the blow out and car crash with a set of photos of the incident, run together to make a crude, short film), a story for an audience to get lost in watching. The element of political conspiracy in the film, and the cover-up of the assassination of the politician in the car, presenting it in the media as a mere accident, shows how this film’s preoccupations with the mechanics of visuals and sound can be expanded on into a general critique of the media as a tool used by the powerful to thwart the powerless.

The film begins as what looks like a third-rate slasher film. We see things from the POV of the killer, who is approaching a sorority house at night; we’re reminded of the opening of Black Christmas. That many of the sorority girls are engaging in various forms of naughtiness (dancing in see-through nighties by a window, where a security man is enjoying the show; a woman having sex with a man by her window, where the killer watches them; a woman masturbating in her room) before the killing spree starts suggests a parody of Friday the 13th, released the year before Blow Out.

That POV camera also suggests Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera, and the killer’s first victim being a girl in a shower is an obvious allusion to Psycho. The actress’s terribly unrealistic scream at seeing the killer’s knife destroys the illusion, and we soon realize that we’ve been watching Coed Frenzy, a slasher film that Jack and producer Sam (played by Peter Boyden) are doing post-production on.

This shift from thinking the slasher film is the real story to knowing it’s a film within a film is comparable to many moments in Blowup when we’re led to believe, for example, that at the beginning Thomas is one of the destitute men until he gets in his nice car and drives away. As in Blowup, a major theme in Blow Out is the tension between appearance and reality.

And just after we’ve been briefly tricked into thinking that Coed Frenzy is the real story, we soon come to realize that much of what’s going on in Coed Frenzy is paralleled in what’s going on in Jack’s story. The theme of maniacal men terrorizing the powerless is seen not only in the killer in the slasher film; he has his double in Burke (Lithgow), a psychopath working for the rival candidate of McRyan, the presidential hopeful killed in the car crash.

Sam likes neither the showering girl’s fake-sounding scream nor the wind that Jack has chosen for the beginning of Coed Frenzy (i.e., with the killer outside the house at night), so Sam wants Jack to help him find a better female screamer as well as to record new wind effects. This altering of sounds to get a more ‘realistic’ effect ironically makes the film all the more fake (i.e., getting the sounds from sources far removed from the originals), and it reinforces the theme of how the media, a tool of the powerful, is used to deceive the powerless.

Jack goes to a park by a lake to record wind that night. As he’s recording the blowing of the wind, we see an example of De Palma’s use of the split screen (i.e., Jack recording in one half, and a closeup of an owl in the other…to get that ominous effect). This splitting-up of the screen causes a kind of Brechtian alienation effect, destroying the movie goers’ illusion that what they see is an actual world, and reminding them that they’re seeing a show. Again, the use of split screen is part of the theme of media as an illusion used to manipulate the emotions of the common people.

Wind, air, breath–these make up a recurring motif in the film, symbolic of life and of communication. If Jack hadn’t been out there this night recording wind, Sally (Allen) would be dead in McRyan’s car at the bottom of the lake–drowned, her air supply cut off. Burke typically kills his victims by strangling them with piano wire, by cutting off their air supply.

The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, which literally means ‘breath.’ Recall Genesis 2:7. There’s also the Spirit of God, the ruach, which literally means ‘wind,’ or ‘breath.‘ So wind and breath are symbols of life in the film.

Another point is that sound travels through air. Jack’s preoccupation with sounds, the sound of the blow-out of the tire (from Burke’s shooting of it) in particular, letting air out of the tire, further reinforces the motif of air throughout the film.

Only Jack, with his sensitive, attentive ear for sounds, is up to rescuing Sally…and at the end of the film, not even he can save her. He represents that male ideal so many modern women have wanted: a man who listens.

He is the kind of man Sally so desperately needs, because all of the other men in her life exploit her. Manny Karp (Franz) is more or less her pimp, giving her jobs to get in bed with powerful, wealthy men so he can take photos of them together, blackmail the men, and pay her far less that she’s worth. McRyan was supposed to have been thus blackmailed, him being the one challenging the president in the upcoming election, but Burke wanted to blow out the tire of his car as well.

Powerful men like McRyan exploit Sally for sex; sleazebags like Karp exploit her for money and sex (indeed, he even tries to rape her at one point), and psychopaths like Burke want to kill her to clear up loose ends, for political purposes. That Sally is pretty and speaks in a high-pitched, ‘ditzy’ voice, reinforces her sense of naïve vulnerability, her everywoman powerlessness in a male-dominated society.

She is exploited and abused in all of these ways, and she is also made invisible, in how the politicians allied with McRyan don’t want the public to know that she was in the car with him. Keeping her involvement out of the media’s awareness, to prevent a scandal that would taint his memory and hurt his family even worse, is nonetheless another example of disguising the truth with the media, by way of omission. Hence, Jack is made to sneak Sally out of the hospital so the media won’t know about her.

The theme of disguising the truth comes in other forms, including Sally’s own choices. In the hospital, she’s embarrassed to be seen by Jack without her makeup on, though he insists, being the nice, sensitive guy he is, that she looks fine without it. Later, she talks to him about her skill as a makeup artist to make women’s faces look better…that is, to disguise reality in a mask of cosmetics.

Other disguises of reality include Burke’s replacing of the shot-out tire with a new one, so the news will report McRyan’s death as a mere accident, and when Jack insists it was a deliberate murder and a cover-up, everyone will think he’s a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Certainly, Detective Mackey (played by John Aquino), who has done the investigation on McRyan’s death and doesn’t even like Jack (for having used his sound-man skills to put away a number of corrupt cops), thinks the death was an accident and treats Jack’s suspicions with contempt.

It’s significant that Burke, hired by and therefore associated with American politicians, is a murdering psychopath. Hollywood movies typically portray psychopaths as violent killers, as in the slasher films that Coed Frenzy parodies. In fact, this Hollywood portrayal is a wildly exaggerated stereotypification, for usually these people, though lacking in empathy, enjoying exploiting and hurting others remorselessly, and needing excitement, often enough get their kicks within the limits of the law. Burke thus is another distortion of reality in Blow Out.

Still, as an employee of the American government, Burke is aptly presented as a serial killer, as a symbolic critique of the imperialist US government. Consider all of the violent deaths caused by American interference in the politics of other countries. In this connection, it is grimly fitting that this serial killer is referred to as the “Liberty Bell Strangler,” given that the killings occur around “Liberty Day,” the time of celebrations and a parade commemorating the Liberty Bell.

Indeed, the murder of Sally happens right on the night of the commemoration; we see her screaming for Jack to save her while she’s standing against a huge backdrop of the American flag. This land of ‘liberty’ has a killer hired by American politicians going after some of the most vulnerable people of the world–women in particular.

The false presentation of reality–the celebration–is what is seen on the TV. The identity of the serial killer, he being an employee of the US government, is conveniently kept secret, since the news reporters claim that who he is remains unknown…which seems odd when the police, after finding his body, would presumably find some kind of ID on him. The government plot is covered up, and the people continue to believe in the ‘freedom and democracy‘ of the US.

Now, the liberal producers of Blow Out would have us believe that Burke represents an aberration of the system, since the politician in on the plot to blackmail McRyan–during a telephone conversation with Burke, and disgusted with his excesses–tries to distance himself from the psychopath. This is a common liberal tactic: the system, apparently, is OK; we just have to get rid of the ‘bad apples’ in it. Again, this is how it appears to us in the media–not so in reality.

All of Jack’s attempts to present proof of the plot to kill McRyan are erased or destroyed by Burke. Stills from video filmed by Karl are sold to a tabloid, presenting the false story of a car accident instead of a killing. But at least Jack has been able to provide better wind and “a good scream” (Sally’s) from his recordings. It’s painfully ironic that the only way the producers of Coed Frenzy can get a convincing scream is from one of a girl really being murdered.

The weakest and most vulnerable in society are looked down on, demeaned, over-sexualized, and ultimately killed. Only sensitive Jack has seen the human being behind Sally’s pretty face; as a result, he’s fallen in love with her, and he mourns her death, obsessively listening to recordings of her last words before Burke gets to her. He cares for her through listening to her, not leering at her.

Just as his attempts to root out police corruption, through wiretapping someone to record evidence, result in an undercover cop’s getting killed, so do his attempts to expose a government conspiracy, again through wiretapping Sally, get her killed. Jack’s attempts at achieving justice fail; his sensitive listening just falls on deaf…and dead…ears.