by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

As I write this, just after the 4th of July, Brian De Palma’s 1981 masterpiece Blow Out is having a bit of a moment on the walking corpse that is Twitter. I don’t recall that happening in previous years, so maybe it’s a meaningful coincidence. Maybe I’m just noticing it because I knew I’d be writing about the film. Either way, I do feel compelled to point out that Blow Out isn’t actually set around Independence Day: an invented Philadelphia holiday called Liberty Day serves as the film’s backbone instead. And, though its date is never quite pinned down, I can say with some confidence that nobody in Philly dresses in hats, scarves, and overcoats in July. Despite my nitpicking, I do have to nod understandingly to those who associate Blow Out with that most patriotic (and jingoistic) of American holidays. To understand the shape that association takes, I think it’s useful to take a bit of a detour through Italy.

You see, I recently read The Giallo Canvas by Australian film scholar and horror aficionado Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in which she calls this and other early-to-mid-80s De Palma films–like Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984)–“American giallo.” It wasn’t a characterization I’d thought about before, but, once the connection was made, it really fits. Blow Out, as Heller-Nicholas points out, was inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blowup–a film that also served as a direct antecedent of the giallo films of the 1970s. Dario Argento even cast David Hemmings, Blowup’s lead, in his 1975 film Deep Red (aka Profondo rosso), widely considered the pinnacle of Italian giallo cinema. Heller-Nicholas also notes Blow Out’s “false start” opening–a film-within-the-film that is not revealed as such until several minutes in–hearkens back to 1933’s Giallo (dir. Mario Camerini) which begins with a similar device.

De Palma uses plenty of other genre conventions in Blow Out, many of which I noted in How to Start Watching Dario Argento last September. It features a lead working in a creative field (John Travolta’s character is a sound technician) who becomes an amateur investigator after witnessing a crime that he can’t fully grasp. He teams up with an attractive woman (Nancy Allen), also an amateur, who may or may not have a deeper connection to the crime. What’s more, Blow Out revels in the audience’s uncertainty as appearances are almost always deceiving. It’s something De Palma spent a lot of film exploring, following in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock, but it’s also a key theme of plenty of giallo films. Argento’s giallo in particular often hinge on clues or crimes that are misinterpreted by witnesses or remain unclear until the film’s resolution. 

To meander back to my initial point, though, I want to talk about the way Blow Out uses color. Giallo films are associated with stylized visuals and bold color palettes. Though this isn’t always the case, it is certainly true of many of the genre’s best works. Argento’s Suspiria (1978) and Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (aka 6 donne per l'assassino, 1964) are two examples that come quickly to mind. Blow Out is similar in that it uses a bold and pervasive color palette, but, instead of the more fantastic combinations of Argento and Bava, De Palma and the film’s DP Vilmos Zsigmond seem to have draped this film in the American flag.

Blow Out is awash in patriotic visuals. The colors red, white, and blue abound: we can see them in a newscaster’s outfit and a nearby technical diagram in the opening credits; in the wallpaper, curtains, and bedspread of a motel room after Travolta and Allen leave the hospital; and in the patriotically-decorated cement mixers and the out-of-focus lights that serve as the backdrop for John Lithgow’s skulduggery. Perhaps most famous is the film’s climax: fireworks bursting and red and blue lights flashing as Allen, Lithgow, and Travolta struggle before a massive American flag. It’s that climactic scene–a bombastic payoff and the culmination of Blow Out’s giallo-influenced visuals–that seems to have birthed its association with the 4th of July. And it’s easy to understand why: even though there’s no way Allen’s character would be wearing a knit hat and fur-trimmed coat in July.

Despite the clear appreciation the film sees today and the generally positive reaction from critics when it was released, Blow Out struggled to a $4M loss at the box office. Part of the issue may have been Travolta. Although he’d worked with De Palma on the 1976’s breakout hit Carrie, by the 1980s, the star’s image had been shaped by the successes of Saturday Night Fever (1977, dir. John Badham) and Grease (1978, dir. Randal Kleiser). Maya Montañez Smukler, in her book Liberating Hollywood, points to the reluctance of audiences to accept Travolta in a more nuanced role as contributing to the failure of Jane Wagner’s 1978 film Moment to Moment, in which he co-starred with Lily Tomlin. It’s a shame really because he actually does excellent work portraying a sort of plucky everyman in Blow Out, a fact made all the more surprising by the larger-than-life persona associated with Travolta these days.

More than its star, though, the reason for Blow Out’s box office disappointment is that, at its core, it is a relentlessly and unapologetically cynical film: more specifically this cynicism is juxtaposed with the iconography and colors of American patriotism. Blow Out depicts a post-post-Watergate world where not only is America tired of hearing about political conspiracies, the very idea of a political conspiracy is played-out and tired–the plot of a bad movie. In one of the film’s best (and most cynical) reveals, the audience learns that in fact no conspiracy had ever been planned, that Lithgow’s character is essentially a one-man political conspiracy. It’s his delusions of grandeur as a political “fixer” that push the narrative forward. Even Allen’s character turns out to be similarly banal. She isn’t a damsel in distress or even a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time but a sex worker that blackmails high-profile clients with a partner-in-crime, played (delightfully) by Dennis Franz.

It’s the ending which audiences found most off-putting and which, in my mind, cements the film as a masterpiece. Not only does Travolta fail to save Allen from being murdered–convincing her to step into harm’s way while wearing a wire–but her screams as she’s strangled to death are recorded and make their way into the film-within-a-film that opens the movie. Blow Out’s final scene sees Travolta sitting with the director of the cheesy slasher–titled Co-Ed Frenzy–and listening helplessly to the dying scream of the woman he couldn’t save as it’s played over and over again. It’s powerful, heartbreaking, and incredibly bleak. But it’s a perfect moment, cinematically-speaking, and I love it.