I spent most of Blow Out thinking Burke was a lousy assassin. John Lithgow keeps murdering women who look sort of Sally-adjacent, and I read this as a man repeatedly killing the wrong person. OOPS! Did it again! During our recording Kynan finally explained that Burke is doing this on purpose. He needs a string of similar murders so Sally’s eventual death will look like the work of the Liberty Bell killer instead of a political cleanup. Fine. This is less a Sarah Connor problem than I thought.
It is still an insane plan. Burke sees a Liberty Day billboard and invents a serial killer. He gets himself a little Liberty Bell punch. He starts finding women with the right hair. Every decision is first thought, best thought, immediately followed by murder. He is exceptionally good at his job and not at all clever at his job. He solves every problem by creating three more bodies.
Whatever. I love this movie.
Jack Terry records sound for cheap horror pictures. One night he points his microphone at a bridge and records what appears to be a tire blowing out before a car goes into the water. Except he heard a gunshot. Nobody wants it to be a gunshot. Everyone needs it to remain a tire. Jack heard the other sound and can’t leave it alone.
If you’re not into the behind-the-scenes stuff, Blow Out probably doesn’t have a lot for you. It starts with a sound editor pulling apart the soundtrack of a terrible slasher movie. Wind. Heartbeat. Footsteps. Take each piece away and there is almost nothing left. Then we get microphones, tape loops, sync marks, frame-by-frame reconstruction, ADR, the whole fussy business. I don’t know how not to be into this. I could have watched Jack build his little movie of the accident for another hour.
Travolta seems like he might actually be fascinated by ADR. He has the alert, slightly absent quality of someone who is always listening past the person in front of him. Jack hears a sound and has to know where it came from. He sees individual photographs and has to make them move. He can work backward through the construction of a movie because he understands how one gets put together in the first place. Travolta makes it look less like genius than obsession. If a sound doesn’t fit, he will ruin his damned life figuring out why.
The erased tapes hurt. All of Jack’s work, gone because Burke drove around with a magnet in his trunk. The magnet isn’t even explained. If you miss the box in Burke’s trunk, tough. I appreciate that. Meanwhile, Burke stalking and strangling women gets full sequences. Tommy pointed that out during the show and, yes. That is where De Palma wants to spend his time. The man is a pervert for many things. He is not a pervert for demagnetizing.
I’m still not sure Blow Out is a horror movie. It opens inside a sleazy horror picture and closes there, too. Most of the middle is a political-assassination thriller that has Chappaquiddicked itself. Then Burke turns up with the garrote and we’re back in a slasher. He needs those women for his cover story. De Palma needs them because he likes stalking scenes and garrotes and Nancy Allen in peril. The women Burke kills on the way to Sally don’t exist beyond the job the movie has for their bodies. That feels icky, and I don’t know what the movie would be without it. Maybe only a thriller.
De Palma doesn’t leave much room for us to forget who made this movie. That 360-degree spin around Jack’s editing room is great. It is bravura filmmaking. It is also a 360-degree reminder that BRIAN DE PALMA WAS HERE. The man really loves his own work, and the movie occasionally has to stop while he loves it real, real hard.
Philadelphia is throwing itself a Liberty Day party around all of this. Bells, flags, fireworks, big American chests puffed up toward the sky while Burke moves through bathrooms and construction sites with a watch garrote. The fireworks keep saying look up here! We talked about three movies for this show, and all three turn a public puffed-up-chest-celebration into a killing floor.
Then Jack nails the scream. The movie opens with a director complaining that the scream in his horror picture is terrible. Jack promises to find a better one. By the end he has it. Sally’s real scream, recorded while Jack fails to reach her in time, goes into the movie. The director loves it. Perfect. Jack listens to it run again and again. He covers his ears. The director keeps yelling about how good it is.
I mean come on. Sally ends up a sound effect in a lousy movie, and Jack got the scream he promised. There’s kind of a lot going on in this movie but this punchline is the killer note.