BRIAN DE PALMA’S BLOW OUT “If we get this out in the open there’s no one who can hurt us…”

 © 2016 by James Clark

      Brian De Palma—a science prodigy and high school wunderkind—could, no doubt, have carved out a peppy career in some corner of what practitioners call “hard science.” At the doorway (in the form of Columbia University) of this generally considered to be fulfilling life, he turned away in favor of becoming a movie maker. Some might jump to the conclusion that he realized he didn’t have what it takes to pursue a “hard” endeavor. My guess is that he came to realize that science isn’t hard enough.

Whereas classical rational science is about managing the architecture of a brilliant intellectual past in order to discern growth potential which could up the ante of discovery, it also functions as a form of church which sustains taboos against regarding sentient entities as logically more cogent than aggregations of elemental particles. It is, I think, the matter of that hostility and coercion which induces, despite the many attractions of scientific research, the drastic turnaround into personas and their seemingly unacceptable, unpredictable actions. Exciting as dynamic scientific discoveries may be, even more exciting (to De Palma) are the truths and consequences of dynamic courage which only full-blown human sensibilities can discover.

The métier which De Palma has settled upon is not without its possibilities of profiting from the architecture of its own brilliant past. Much has been said about his being suffused with the work of Alfred Hitchcock. But that rather ordinary tip of the iceberg traces to Continental avant-gardists as suffused with the energies of the surreal, where humans count for much more (reality) than mathematical flecks. The sensual priorities of this repository entail a remarkable sense of embattlement with mainstream dictates. (In view of this disposition it is well to note that two distinguished colleagues of his generation, namely, Ridley Scott and Michael Mann, present close accompaniment to De Palma’s modus operandi. Mann is particularly significant in being [unusually, for this situation] explicit about his indebtedness to Jean-Pierre Melville—a preposterously underestimated giant—and his own formative years as a close associate with Surrealist jack-of-all-trades, Jean Cocteau.)

There is, in De Palma’s rejoinder to business as usual, a most impressive engagement with insights, as cinematically expressed, on the part of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007). He cues up two films—Dressed to Kill (1980) and today’s film, Blow Out (1981), in conjunction with Antonioni’s couplet consisting of Red Desert (1964) and Blow Up (1966)—which not only yield important truths to be pondered at length; but, particularly in the case of Blow Out, tend to turn the tables, with some difficult skepticism, on the panorama of mayhem having become the lingua franca of the bulk of cutting edge cinematic disclosure within which he thrives.

In evoking the viscosity of full-bodied historical action—quite a different thing from lead-pipe materiality—Blow Out (much more than Dressed to Kill’s slight, though remarkable speed bumps at its denouement; and much more than Blow Up’s chagrin that organized crime tends to trump liberal entitlements) envisions for us a law of the jungle whereby liberal-preaching oligarchs, like Teddy and John F. Kennedy, sometimes disable the laws of the hoi polloi and sometimes get burned by their own preferred and model ruthlessness devolving to signs of the times. The well-known Chappaquiddick drive into a tidal basin and the even better-known gun play upon another car, in Dallas, come to us eerily spliced together in the narrative accelerator of a melange of blow outs. Into this rough play, but rough play far from taken up on the part of electrons, we have a reprise of the warm and frisky axis of Liz and Peter, in Dressed to Kill—here named Sally (Liz having sallied off the rails a bit with her nightmare about a demonic nemesis—actress Nancy Allen covering both Liz and Sally with great transparency) and Jack (a formidable sound technician and not only clever but Lancelot-handsome and chivalric). Whereas the youngsters in the first part of the couplet had been endowed with the mystic dash of Red Desert’s Giuliana’s sprite and gyroscope, here we have a Sally being Marilyn Monroe-easy and a knight cleaving to the daft-dream-rise-of-the-little-man which the political Jack would have frequently spread around without believing a word of it. (Hitchcock and Kennedy, being both stylish humbugs, having much in common.)

As if to demonstrate that Liz’s more than Camelot equilibrium was more on the order of a fluke, Blow Out kicks off with a bemusing and vaguely irritating soft porn shoot of a dorm where college girls seem dedicated to speeding up the incidence of entropy (which, at any speed, is not in the last analysis about classical physics). A nod to Liz’s sign-off nightmare has an amateurishly presented psycho approaching one of the girls having a shower. The main point of this introduction to Jack’s workplace being that soon we have to assimilate that Sally, though somewhat beyond college age, has made a career of such disequilibrium not far beyond the idiocy of the cynical exploitation vehicle. The director, giving us an unwitting laugh, tasks Jack, the sound designer, with the only flaw he can’t abide, namely, the feeble scream of the victim (a factor in Dressed to Kill’s Kate’s far more fertile demise in the shower-stall-like confines of an elevator). Correspondingly, we are about to bemusedly find in Jack’s charismatic poise a drive on behalf of turning the tide of that spiritual pollution which both of De Palma’s safaris into the realm of Antonioni take to heart. In the course of his trying to move mountains by way of sonic evidence we learn that he did not choose to work in the entertainment industry right from the get-go (whereby, he could, at the juncture where we meet him, dispute the point of an authentic scream when all the audience would care about would be the quality of her tits), but that in fact he first worked in the surveillance department of the Philadelphia (our setting) Police Department, until a fatal breakdown of his equipment design led to the death of a fearfully sweating (battery-arcing) undercover detective at the hands of that constant malignancy here, namely, organized crime. (JFK’s famous epigram, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” contains a sense of rebel physics, the true destination of far from well-focused Jack!)

By contrast to his unchallenging day job in studios intent on porn and gore, Jack, wandering in near pitch-dark parkland along a river, quietly thrills to replenishing tired, assembly-line wind and animal sounds at the demand of a director suddenly seeing much not to like. He holds a wand-like silver antenna plugged into a tape deck swallowing up the ambient and occasionally more defined notes, and he’s alert to what excitement there still obtains (the high-proof windiness [dynamics] on a rainbow-style foot bridge bringing to bear rebel physics). The sounds of a frog and an owl bring him back from a spate of eavesdropping upon a couple enjoying a romantic stroll. His amusement at the woman’s anxiety about his looking their way seems remarkably out of place in the context of disinterestedness, linked to the owl’s imagined wisdom. The owl, occupying the foreground to Jack’s background, moves out of there fast on hearing a speeding car; and, with a subsequent gunshot and veer through a railing, it heads upwards, out of the range of imbroglio, perhaps intuiting that in restoring its chosen uncanniness a canny full frontal sanitization is probably not the way to go. The mainstream sedan plunges into the depths and Jack’s purchase upon seriously creative concentration is shattered, perhaps for the rest of his life.

“Jesus Christ!” he emotes, to a not noticeably impressed night. He sprints to the shore, dives in and swims to the point where the car went down. Unlike Chappaquiddick, he manages to rescue the girl while the driver—the Governor of Pennsylvania and a strong possibility to be elected President—does not live to become embarrassed (not coincidentally) by discovery of a young call girl in his car, namely, Sally. We’ve been primed to notice the sounds here in Philly; and, the city adither with preparations for the Liberty [Bell] Day celebrations, there is something about Sally’s voice that reminds us of an actress, Judy Holliday (1921-1965), who specialized in dumb broad roles—Bells Are Ringing; The Solid Gold Cadillac—but also could shine in evincing a drive to improve herself—especially in Born Yesterday, a whimsical tale about mob influence in governmental matters. Here the straight shooter who elevates her is a figure with a most chequered track record, to say the least. Jack and Sally evince such a pungent timbre of drowning in their own simplism that we are helped along handsomely in seeing where this binary film sets in relief a necessary tempering of the gung-ho smarts of Dressed to Kill.

Before embarking on that appointment with the wise owl where sheer joy quickly becomes something else, Jack watches TV coverage of the Governor on a roll during a reception regarding the city’s special affinity to the bounty sustained by freedom. A commentator refers to the rising star as “a new voice of liberty throughout the land…” The program gives air time to the embattled President’s campaign manager who predicts, with an angry sneer, that the front-runner won’t be in front much longer. “The people will rally to support the President…” This abrasive key lifts away, from the juvenile histrionics of the example of Jack’s workplace, to a pattern of more firmly hinged distemper constituting the backbone of the disclosure. At the Emergency Department where Sally has re-established what balance she possesses, Jack (bent on making some gracious contact with the one he saved from drowning) is inundated with the Governor’s associates and hordes of police and media intent on that celebrity-corpse. The former team has shifted into a rude and rather limp damage control on the subject of deleting from the record the former Golden Boy’s preference for a free-floating harem. “I already told the police” [that she was in the car]is Jack’s bid to get out of this dreariness. “It’s already taken care of,” one of the big shots insists, who signalled him over as if he were valet staff. The bossy Dead-Eye goes on to assert his deep sensitivity to the former Governor’s family; but the interplay sets in relief that what matters to Jack does not matter to the wherewithal a heartbeat away from the White House. Jack’s point of view that the unimpressive “truth” be recognized for more than domestic logic is responded to as if the bearer were some kind of hermitic nut bar. “What difference does that mean to you? Can’t you keep your mouth shut?” Wavering, as we already know he tends to do, Jack eventually goes along with the whitewash and the relieved political gamester assures him, “We’ll slip you and the girl out the back…”

On the heels of this subterfuge we see Jack driving a barely conscious Sally along a dark and scuzzy industrial road to a motel of her choice—he quipping, “First it was a drink, now a motel…You’re moving fast, Sal…”—and they pass a sign (Potamkin Chevrolet). Having just blinked in face of power elites, Jack would be, by this conjunction, quietly measured against the Potemkin mutiny of sailors in face of an officer corps in bad odor.

Whereas the early moments of this film give a fairly clear sense of Jack’s range of effective motion, we know at this point very little about Sally. He dutifully tucks her into bed and then rushes out to his jeep (a war wagon for an unwitting warrior) to listen once again to the evidence of evil. As he reaches into his trunk to play the tape deck, a blood-red neon sign resembling a branding iron superimposes over his head on the back window lifted to access the apparatus. The bottom point of the red image resembles a cruelly smiling demon. Next morning finds him seated at the unit’s window with his tape deck and a bit worn out from not having slept; while she comes over and in a chipper tone asks, “Want some coffee?” On hearing of Jack’s link to filmmaking she mentions one of her profit centres, makeup (in fact behind the counter in Corvets), and her dream to become a film artist along those lines—claiming she could do a better job on Barbara Streisand than the service she now employs. By contrast, she is bewildered and vaguely annoyed by Jack’s enthusiasm about the soundtrack he captured. “I’ll tell ya the truth, I don’t think we’re listnen’ to the replay of last night, ya know? It’s kinda depressing…” As at the Emergency Zone with the political insider, he caves in to the outsider. “Forget it.” Therewith we have a very different take on buoyant youngsters, as compared with Liz and Peter, in Dressed to Kill. Two hookers and two geeks; but worlds apart.

She gets a bit short with him when he asks what she was doing in the Governor’s car. Soon, after an unpromising promise to get together for that drink—she telling him she can be reached at the number of someone named Judy (“She’s in the book”)—she teams up with a guy named Karp who was to photograph the not particularly happy couple in the golden car, for the edification of the voting public, until another operative (like Dressed’s Elliott, fond of slaughter when less bloody measures would be in order), with utopian leanings, hastens the course of entropy. Karp’s elation at filming the lucrative watery crash and becoming a bit of a celebrity does not in any way tickle her funny bone. In fact, she begins to form some comparisons (like Judy in Born Yesterday) and some discomfort in having been part of a killing. Jack acquires a tabloid copy of Karp’s putatively serendipitous little documentary and assures himself that the gunshot now possessing him has been cut away, a factor increasing his obsession. Dialing Judy, he learns that Sally is headed out of town by rail; and he’s pleased to have caught up with her before her train leaves, an event urged and handsomely financed by that suspiciously insistent family friend of the victim. (Her being dressed all in shades of blue recalls the blue factor of Liz’s ensemble as stemming from a source of effervescence and uncanny resilience making a difference for someone bogged down amidst dullards and their close accompaniment of pollutants. Without such a component of pick-me-up, Sally, pausing for that promised drink with someone more palatable than exploitive Karp, would not come into play as a self-improving dark horse with Brooklynese enunciation. In the space of a few minutes she goes from dopey evasion (“I wanna get a good seat, ya know…”) to digging into her adeptness with makeup, particularly the process of hiding blemishes. “Every face needs makeup” [dash of magic]. In the same vein of enthusiasm for skills (she claiming to often spend two hours to achieve a non-made-up look), Jack relates that as a schoolboy he was (like Dressed’s Peter) often a prize winner for science projects. He goes on to specify that first choice of work being devising sound-recording equipment for the local police, in the course of “stopping corruption.” Jack, feeling kinship and momentum in the air, asks her to stick around for a couple of days; and she smiles and says, “I’ll think about it…”

Far more germane to De Palma’s art than technical procedures, however fetching, pertaining to countering a political scandal, we have both Jack and Sally spurring on their latent powers per se, by which to accomplish a creative partnership.(A cut to a figure [previously seen replacing the shot-out tire] murdering a woman in the food market area at the basement level of the railway station, a woman he mistakenly thought to be Sally, exposes in a special way the urgency of our protagonists’ business of equilibrium, inasmuch as the kill is topped off by mutilation, sending into the contest severity absolutely intolerant of self-indulgent slipping and sliding.) Before seeing the deranged spoiler carving a bloody Liberty Bell across the hapless look-alike’s torso, we are shown the ways of these amateurs to be ominously about themselves. She avers, on hearing from him the disaster that ended his first battle with crime, “It wasn’t your fault!” On her over-zealously dragooning him into being a model of her prowess in offsetting with makeup the jarring effects of a broken nose, he’s amused and she takes it peevishly. “Now wait a minute! This is serious business… You’re not interested at all…” He assures her, “I’m impressed that you know so much,” which leads to her asking about his, in her eyes, dream job, and a flashy segue to his pressing the self-serving—artisan to artisan—tone, along lines of,” I just think you could help me. If I could just clear myself of this…” dicey illumination.

On Jack’s insisting that his close researches involving the sonic coverage do not correspond to the “official” visual version the carp had swallowed a chunk from, a now on-side Sally, in blue, makes a second sojourn to Karp’s hotel room with a view to securing the un-cut tape. She begins with slamming the slippery partner (whose main connection with her is to snap compromising shots featuring her in the course of making a difference in divorce proceedings—a la Velda and Mike in Kiss Me Deadly!) who nearly got her killed. Karp tries the sophistry that they did the victim a favor in making a martyr of him rather than looking an adolescent jerk. “What’s this conscience stuff?”) She fires back, “I gotta do somethin’…we’re like a bunch of vultures…” She pretends to be desperate for a drink, he drags her to bed and she slows him down by bashing his head with a Scotch bottle, followed by her running off with the original film.

There’s a little victory party for the significant two as they see the film confirm the murderous mishap. But the moment is fleeting as a kind of astronomical eclipse blots out their mutual sunniness. The stalker/gunman—having determined that mere political intrigue can be made far more exciting when bloodshed floods the firmament, an attitude which the President’s spokesman counters with, “I’ve never seen you;” and an attitude including the fretfulness of Bobbi the transgender candidate in Dressed to Kill—finds wonderful the rationale of creating the mass murder of women (to eventually include Sally), which would conceal the political violence; and readily invades Jack’s studio to erase all the prints, save for one in a ceiling panel. Then he invades the basement of the latter’s home, bugging and selectively blocking his phone, which keeps him abreast of Jack’s recent alliance with a muckraking TV celebrity setting up a blockbuster expose the centerpiece of which would be the tale of the tapes. Moreover, in the course of imagining the police might be interested in “stopping corruption” the super sonic gets a stiff rebuke for wasting the Department’s time, inasmuch as for them (a pliable force, as we’ve already noticed) the truth is, “Accident, plain and simple.”But perhaps the most disturbing darkness here is Jack—on rallying a Sally succumbing to fright (as even Liz did) by making the case that the best defence is a great offence—looking forward to a TV sensation which would put them on Easy Street: “If we get this out in the open, no one can hurt us…”

Sally’s murder at the hands of the precursor to Mr. Blonde in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs puts us dramatically on notice that extraordinary confidence and heart are not determinants of a physics of peaceful longevity. Over the phone the improv terrorist convinces the muckrakers that he’s the TV ally and claims to be ready to take possession of the beam of truth, at the railway station. Smelling the faint odor of rat (his phone reception being strangely on and off), Jack nevertheless puts her in harm’s way with a broadcasting device very like the wiring for the hapless cop in the disaster years before. (The TV star had insisted, in an intercepted call, on at least meeting a Sally reluctant to be shown onscreen; and therefore her being on the Front Lines [definitely the choice of the addled butcher who would have carved that design of the Liberty Bell upon Sally’s gut, were it not for Jack, jacked up by an episode we’ll get into presently, grabbing his knife hand from behind and directing it into his torso many, many times more than required to merely kill him] had an appearance of being far from the Front Lines. “This isn’t right!” Jack insists, on hearing about the Correspondent having reached Sally. But he was so euphoric that for once life was going his way (“I’m sick of being fucked by these guys…” [and with Sally wavering— “I’m tryin’ to save our asses!”]—that he had to push ahead to the promise of power surge, notwithstanding the risk.) Suiting Sally up to track closely her conversation with the talent scout, he brushes aside her seeing the point of making a copy of the true film showing the gunfire (Thomas, the photographer in Blow Up having to settle for conjecture from unforthcoming magnification and thereby sinking in far more shallow water than the instance of Jack’s purgatory). “I don’t have time to make a copy now!”

    Blow Out being a form of serialization following up Dressed to Kill (the Antonioni overture no one has seen), there is on the part of the viewer a demand not to take for granted its physical destination. Its political superstructure comprises a melancholy narrative the violence of which may be seen (as in Dressed to Kill) to occupy the same phenomenal current from which protagonist buoyancy stems. Kate’s slaughter plays directly out to Liz’s joie de vivre. Sally’s slaughter plays directly out to Jack’s would-be-joie-de-vivre redirecting the psycho’s knife. Liz, from out of a stimulating trajectory, takes possession of an essentially irrelevant weakling’s weapon. Jack, from out of a humiliating trajectory, repays an essentially irrelevant weakling (blubbering into a pay phone, “She made me do it!”) by adopting, however momentarily, the psycho’s methods.

The denouement of this binary cinematography takes place during the annual Philadelphia event dedicated to its symbolic Liberty Bell, liberty being a phenomenon many rush to love but few care to comprehend. That the Bell is intrinsically damaged goods would not be lost on our Philadelphian helmsman. That Jack works for Independence Pictures is a means of remarking a trend of shabbiness all round. Wave after wave of colorfully, often self-deprecatingly uniformed marching bands swirl about as Jack—the only person on the street not smiling—hears the rendezvous going very wrong. Thus begins an episode disclosing the gulf between his cracked judgment and fluid motions when awakened to danger. He guns his jeep in the direction of the subway line being taken by them, careening amidst police and fire vehicles and marchers dressed in old-timey costumes swaggering as if all was well. In doing so—even ripping through a fine 19^th century government edifice (seen from a chopper), going right through one interior—his progress resembles a warrior at full strength. But somewhat shaking that image (and reminding us that the debacle was due to his lack of managing his emotional profit-taking) is his crashing his jeep into a shop window display of a Revolutionary-era execution of someone who failed to handle the heat. He comes to in an ambulance parked along the route and immediately hears from his monitor that they had made their way to the river and the predator had just finished tossing the film into it. Jack bounds out of the ambulance and, now highly animated, he rips along toward their seclusion on the roof of a government building—his race shown in unforgiving slow-motion. His anguish amidst so much lightheartedness sets in sharp relief his having become remarkably unsuited to normal pleasures. After stabbing the gourmand of gore (who had, in another of his phone bulletins to the trickster, given us more of his verbal diarrhea to the tune of his shooting out the tire being within an acceptable margin of error in securing “the operation” a term which the pro finds insane and which we can sniff out in its ideal of an anything goes pig-out [Sally having screamed at Karp “We were pigs!]), in such a way that we begin to realize that kicking ass right is tougher than brain surgery, Jack, seemingly at the end of his own life, holds Sally’s body, kissing her and lifting her as an excellent fireworks display fills the night sky. (The different fireworks on the LA coast where Velda and Mike exit with topspin provide their own special consequentiality.) What could have been playing their song becomes a bombardment of vicious irony. (The several bird’s-eye-views of Jack’s workplace and living room giving a boost to a nascent shift of point of view are no match for the adamant melodrama down at floor level, a great example of which coming to bear at the interview with the think-small cop: “If they get away with this, who’s next?”)

There is a cut to several weeks, if not months, later, with Jack replaying the stomach-turning sounds of Sally’s horrific final moments—while sitting on a snowy bench with his system next to him in the near-nighttime and the whiteness of the park as lacking in lift as were the Roman candles on that night he can’t get past. Both the gloom and the glitter might have been the start of something Big (very different from “the biggest thing,” Manny’s sense of Big being the $6000 received for covering the Governor for someone crude enough not to plunge as far as our protagonist’s termination: termination in the form of supplying Sally’s death throes for that crude artefact which, at long last, has acquired, by dubbing, a convincing fearfulness and horror.

Sally had come to feel that she and Manny were “vultures” for getting involved with the lowest stripe of power politics. Jack’s boss had wondered out loud “how a smart guy like you” could have spent the last two years working on pointless shit. Jack had replied, with a self-lacerating optimum of cynicism, “This [present effort] is our best!” Though we now see him weighted down with woe and guilt, our attention has to be directed to his long-standing penchant for lacking a firm grip on his dream or idyll or wellspring. As with Dressed to Kill’s Liz, Sally is a dressed-to-kill figure wearing, over the days, a variety of ensembles in blue. (In the DVD supplement, De Palma—Go figure! —goes out of his way to insist that wardrobe is never chosen with care.) That would put Jack in the same boat as Kate—Way too little, way too late. That would put us with eyes wide open to omnipresent presumptuous midgets whom only the strongest resolve (exercise of sensual power, free choice, liberty) and its infinite inventiveness could obviate.