Blow Out (1981)

Brian De Palma's Blow Out arrives from 1981, a year when a movie could still be cynical about American power without filing a diversity report. John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a Philadelphia sound man who records a gunshot beneath the squeal of a tire and spends the rest of the picture trying to convince anyone that a governor was murdered. The cast is white, the romance is heterosexual, the conspiracy runs from one white man in a suit to the next, and nobody pauses to interrogate any of it. The film has no interest in such matters. It has other business.

That business is paranoia. De Palma's targets are the machinery of politics and the press, the way a cover-up gets laundered through a tabloid and a talk show until the truth becomes unpublishable. There is a sour contempt here for institutions, for the men who trade in power, and for the citizens who consume the resulting noise. We can call this cynicism, and it is genuine, but it never reaches for a wallet. The villain is not capital. The villain is a man with piano wire and a plausible alibi.

Nancy Allen's Sally is an escort, a blackmail accomplice, and finally a corpse cradled in the hero's arms, which is to say the film's politics of gender are those of a 1981 thriller and nothing more. What remains is craft. The split screens, the synced audio, the scream Jack harvests from a dying woman and sells to a slasher producer. De Palma builds a machine for watching and listening, then lets it grind everyone down. It is a bleak, elegant thing, and it asks nothing of us but attention.