Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) manages to be an outstanding thriller while also educating the audience about the mechanics of making such a movie. Many moviegoers might not understand the concept of editing, sound mixing, or why they have their own categories at the Oscars. Through the eyes (and ears) of a sound technician, we get to see how every sound in any movie is carefully picked in order to elicit the right reaction from the audience. Things take a tragic turn when said technician records an actual murder.
Jack Terry
(John Travolta) is a self-described “sound guy” who has quite a few movies
under his belt. Unfortunately, those movies are not Oscar-winning dramas shot
in Hollywood, but low-budget slasher films that border on sexploitation. Yet
Jack works diligently out of his Philadelphia office, always trying to find the
right sound to mix into the film. Those sounds can be anything from the sounds
of a creaking door to the scream of an actress as a maniac is about to stab
her. If the actress doesn’t sound scared, other actresses need to be brought to
record a proper scream, which is then mixed in the audio track for the film.
This, as they say, is how the sausage is made.
To make
sure he has a full bank of various sounds, Jack sometimes goes out at night to
record sounds of nature in a park. With a high-powered microphone he can record
the wind in the trees, a croaking frog, or a couple out for a stroll. What he
did not expect to record is the sound of a car crashing into the river right
after one of its tires blows out. Ever the good Samaritan, he jumps in the
river and pulls out a young woman (Nancy Allen) while the driver goes down with
the car having died on impact.
Things
start to get murkier at the hospital where Jack learns the driver was a
promising politician that was on his way to becoming the next president. He was
also a married man, which is why the politician’s friends ask Jack to keep
quiet about the young woman, a makeup artist named Sally, who was in the car. However,
after Jack hears what he believes to be a gunshot on his recording he decides
to keep digging for the truth and pressures Sally to tell him why she in the
car in the first place. His sound, combined with images taken by a conveniently
placed photographer (Dennis Franz) at the scene, indicates there might a
conspiracy afoot. Having previously worked in law enforcement by putting microphones
on undercover cops, Jack feels the need to the right thing and uncover the
conspiracy.
The problem
with conspiracies is of course proving them. Nowadays everything from 5G
network to Bill Gates putting microchips in COVID vaccines is deemed a
conspiracy. This means if you do uncover a real conspiracy, odds are you will
be first regarded as paranoid instead of a whistleblower. When Jack comes to
the police with his footage, an exasperated cop asks, “Why does everything have
to be a conspiracy?”
Another
problem is the question of what constitutes hard evidence. Even though this
movie is set decades before technology like Photoshop and Deep Fake, Jack
eventually begins to realize his footage is not worth much. Even if were to release
it to the one reporter who is interested in his story, anyone could accuse him
of faking every sound. It is what Jack does for a living after all.
Then again,
sometimes just because you are being paranoid it doesn’t mean someone is not
after you. In Jack and Sally’s case, that someone is Burke (a very menacing
John Lithgow), a fixer tying up loose ends by any means necessary. Part of his
plan includes brutally murdering women who look like Sally, so that when he
does kill her it will look like she was the victim of sex maniac. That seems a
pretty overelaborate plan to get rid of one person, so Burke is probably not
pretending to be a maniac. It is scenes when that monster is hunting his next
victims that De Palma’s skills as a filmmaker really shine. Scenes are shot
from Burke’s point and view as he hunts his victims, and there is a terrific
sequence in which Jack is desperately trying to find his location based on sounds
he is hearing on a microphone hidden on Sally.
I found the
very ending of Blow Out to be a tad morbid, albeit darkly poetic, but everything
before is superb. Here is a movie that gives you a bit of an education on the filmmaking
process, makes you think about big issues, and delivers quite a few thrills.
Comments
Post a Comment