The opening scenes of Blow Out feature a serial killer/slasher in a mask breathing heavily as he looks through a window at a couple of co-eds in negligees dancing energetically to bottom-drawer disco. The slasher enters the building as the camera lingers on more scantily-clad co-eds (one of whom appears to be masturbating) before we enter the bathroom where a soaped-up blonde is in perfect position for a Psycho homage. The knife goes up and the girl screams, anemically.
This isn’t the film, though. The bad movie is a teaser for the real movie, which is a rip-off, not of Psycho, but of Antonioni’s Blow Up. The “real” movie stars sound man Jack Terry (a suavely seedy John Travolta). Jack does effects for bottom drawer slashers like the co-ed one we saw some footage from. The film that opens the film is a bad failed film within a better film. The twist, though is that, to the extent Blow Out is great, it’s because it’s also a failure.
The plot proper starts when Sam (Peter Boyden), the director of the co-ed film, tells Jack to get him a better scream and wind noises. Jack goes out to a bridge in the middle of the night to try to record the latter; to his horror, he hears a bang and then watches as a car swerves off the road and into the water. Jack jumps in and rescues a woman from named Sally (Nancy Allen). The driver, now dead, was presidential candidate Gov. George McRyan. And after listening to his recording, Jack’s certain that the bang was a gunshot. McRyan was murdered.
Powerful people, though, want everyone to think this was an accident. In an effort to get more evidence, Jack uses pictures taken by seedy photographer Manny Karp (Dennis Franz)—who, it turns out, was working with Sally to get compromising photos of the Governor. Jack takes Karp’s images and syncs them together with his own audio, creating another (differently) bad movie within a movie—this one serving as evidence.
There’s more to the plot—including a serial killer, Burke (John Lithgow) who murders young attractive women, echoing the plot of Jack’s film. But Burke isn’t actually an obsessed slasher; he’s the guy who hired Manny, and then changed up the plan by shooting out the Governor’s tires. He wanted to murder Sally to cover his tracks, but made a mistake and killed a look-alike. He then improvises, murdering at least one other woman in order to provide a cover story for when he murders Sally. Or to put it another way, Burke’s creating his own slasher movie within the movie, in hopes that his cinematic evidence will cancel out and overwrite Jack’s.
Blow Out is a series of feints or false starts at one bad movie after another. Or it’s a bunch of bad movies simultaneously, when De Palma deploys his trademark split screen. The director lingers over all the abortive movie-making, getting distracted by the details just as Jack has been distracted from his movie-making job. We see Jack painstakingly assemble his crude movie, running the footage back and forth, marking the reel, rerunning the footage. We see Sam trying to get the right scream from actresses in a sound-proof box. And we see Burke stalking his prey, calling into the police so they think there’s a serial killer on the loose, and tapping and manipulating Jack’s phone.
De Palma obviously enjoys the mechanics of movie-making for themselves—the nuts and bolts scrabble for the right sound, the right visual, the right narrative, the right juxtaposition. There’s a pleasure in creation, even if what’s created is B-movie crap, or a jury-rigged reel made out of photos clipped from newsprint.
At the same time, bad movies are frustrating. The ineffectual scream is irritating and undercuts suspense. Burke murdering the wrong woman is a long tease that dead-ends. And Blow Out itself is an irritating watch in many ways, as the movie keeps getting distracted by the many other movies within it. The romance arc between Jack and Sally, in particular, is repeatedly interrupted and forestalled as they chase around the city in a series of pointless efforts to get someone, anyone, to look at and pay attention to Jack’s movie—an experience that many a would-be filmmaker can identify with.
The romance arc, and the film, end with Burke murdering Sally as Jack watches helplessly. He manages to kill Burke too late, and then holds Sally’s dead body as fireworks erupt for a patriotic Philadelphia celebration behind him. Fireworks are in film often a symbol for sex or consummation, but here there’s no consummation, as there was never really a romance. The horror went wrong and then the romance went wrong. Every movie is broken.
The final irony is that Jack does find his scream. Jack affixed Sally with a wire, and he therefore has a recording of her final calls for help. He dubs them into the original slasher, and Sam declares them perfect—just as De Palma must have signed off on Sally’s screams in the (supposedly) real film. It stretches credulity to think that Jack would use Sally’s screams for his B-movie job. He’s traumatized by her death, and there’s nothing in his character that suggests he’s capable of such ghoulish callousness.
But the gratuitous narrative flaw fits neatly into De Palma’s themes. Movies are spliced together, ad hoc, unconvincing approximations of reality—or, worse, as the shower scene suggests, they’re spliced together, ad hoc, unconvincing approximation of other movies. Horror, romance, American greatness; for De Palma they all collapse into a scattering of dingy, unconvincing tropes, plot holes, exploitation, and frustrating loose ends. It’s tacky and depressing. And yet, there’s a joy in finding that perfectly right, wrong scream for that perfectly wrong, right scene. In Blow Out, the beauty of the movie, as perhaps the beauty of life, is in its failures.