Watching Blow Out tonight for the first time in years (and the first time in widescreen!), I was struck by how beautifully made it was. I do think that this and Body Double especially make for a great matched pair - they are both about a rather naive hero trying to act idealistically (slash selfishly due to his wish not to compromise his feelings above all) and causing more havoc than would have occurred had the bad guys managed to get away with their plot.
John Lithgow's hitman is a good example of this - if Jack had not got involved in the assassination at the start and Sally was left to die in the car (as we can assume that Dennis Franz's character was going to do - his only involvement was to be the Zapruder-esque witness before he gets doubled/upstaged by Jack), then the whole assassination could have been presented to Lithgow's superiors as a fait accompli. Instead he has to get his hands dirtier and seemingly goes off the rails as the need to silence Sally and the inital accident of killing the wrong person leads to a plan (a liberation of suppressed urges?) to create a series of sex murders within which he can hide the politically necessary murder. While it might be seen as a political compromise to have the scene where Lithgow's politician contact is disgusted by the murders and explictly tells him that none of what the hitman had done was given the go ahead, it does help to connect Lithgow's and Travolta's characters together as people who are caught up in their own game together, their actions going beyond whether they are accepted within the system or not to the more dangerous extremes of doing what they think is 'right' or 'necessary' or which 'needs to be done', whatever the consequences.
I know there were some earlier coments about Nancy Allen's Sally being rather insufferable. But I think Sally and Melanie Griffiths's Holly in Body Double are very similar characters in that they're both girls 'hired for jobs' - while both characters may be naive, dumb (in both senses of the term) and rather childish they do however at least know enough to try and not be more involved in the situation than they already are, at least until the 'hero' reels them back in and forces them into an uncomfortable coalition. The thing that condemns Sally to death in some senses is that she actually falls for Jack's charms and hopeful plans of exposing a conspiracy, while Holly in Body Double is much tougher and far less romantically inclined!
The difference is on emphasis - while Blow Out is a rather sweet crusading adventure which shades into bitter irony (in the end injustice is never exposed and while the hero brings the story to a conclusion, it is a shoddy, compromised one which is highly unsatisfactory for our protagonist, ableit a perfectly operatically judged one for the audience), the 'normal world' in Body Double is an utterly compromised, empty sham from which the characters managing to build
any sort of life from themselves out of the emptiness at the end can be seen as a certain kind of victory in itself (Body Double also manages to have its cake and eat it in the way that it is able to have both a tragic end to an idealised relationship along with a happy continuance of another, more pragmatic, one). There is also the way that Body Double involves a rather intimate conspiracy, taking after Vertigo, rather than the main action taking place underneath the framework of a larger political scandal.
I also noted the use of the train station in Body Double seems to prefigure the way a train station is similarly used as a dangerous location in Carlito's Way, with tannoy announcements becoming a voice of doom at moments of greatest tension or violence! Both films (along with the train sequence involving Nancy Allen in Dressed To Kill, which seems to bear some relation to the 'running from carriage to carriage' as well as the 'use of a cop as a temporary human shield' sequences that both turn up again Carlito's Way) fully utilise the tension between being tenuously safe from attack in a crowd of strangers, but also the possibility that as soon as the crowds disperse the characters are going to be in immediate danger. Although the ordering of the sequence is reversed between the two films - Blow Out moves from a main terminal into the local subway trains, whilst Carlito's Way moves from the local trains into the main terminal as Pacino races towards his liberating train out of the city.
(I also casually wondered whether that sequence in the train station in Hannibal, where Clarice Starling tails Hannibal Lecter through the terminal using sound clues could have had a Blow Out influence?)
In terms of things I liked about Blow Out, along with the split diopter shots knives mentioned above I particularly liked that shot twirling around Jack's office as he runs back and forth playing all of his tapes only to find they have been degaussed - the white noise building up and swirling around directionally whilst the visual interest is built with the increasing number of reel-to-reel machines being frantically turned on and the camera which has initially followed Travolta circling around the room with him taking on a momentum of its own and continuing to spin in the same direction whilst catching small moments of Travolta running back and forth or against the direction of the circular movement. It is a high mannered movement, but a fantastic one and one of the highlight scenes of the whole film (with a good companion shot for Lithgow's character being the amusing controlled straight line back and forth, rather than panicily circular, movement across the row of phone booths as he watches whilst the sailor and his companion fail to be discreet about their transaction!)
This is probably just my imagination running away with itself but I also liked to think while watching the climactic sequence this time around that it could have been playing as De Palma's homage to Ashes and Diamonds(!) - the assassination set against a firework display celebrating the end to a conflict whilst the hero runs futilely through a landscape that is almost mocking his values.
Perhaps something a little more plausible is that it was nice to note the ubiquitous-in-Italian-genre-film yellow and red label J & B whisky bottle in Dennis Franz's apartment and from which both he and Allen take direct swigs from before the bottle gets used as a weapon! There is an
entire thread at the AV Maniacs forum devoted to cataloguing the appearances of this particular brand of whisky and it turns up in quite a lot of different films - that company either had a lot of product placement dollars, great relationships with filmmakers and producers or it could have just been ubiquitous on the sets of many genre films!
I also liked that moment of the overly sweating cop in Jack's flashback giving a fine illustration of the way that somebody can be
literally hoist by their own petard! (There is an amusing call back to this moment at the end of Jack's Liberty Bell parade car rampage when he flies through a window and his car seems to knock the doll with the noose around its neck off of the stool it was standing on. Yet another illustration, and premonition, of the way that Jack unfortunately cannot seem to save anyone no matter how hard he tries!)
I suppose Blow Out has the distinction of being one of the most devastating of De Palma's films (perhaps Carrie coming next closest, but that softens the emotional blow somewhat with the jump-shock ending!), which shows the retreat back into the imperfect, manipulative world of film, where even a moment of captured pure truth can be utterly tainted by the way it is utilised. Throughout the film the terrible screaming of the actress in the shower in the horror film and of the women brought in to try to dub over the scream has been the subject of some rather cruel jokes at their expense, however the ultimate slap in the face is the way that Sally's death scream then gets pressed into service to serve this most pragmatic of purposes. Jack might have lost the girl but he's found the perfect blood curdling scream that he's been needing to find for the entire film.
Is this callousness on Jack's part, showing how little Sally
really meant to him and everyone else? As a meta-statement on how even the most horrible events get folded into an artist's work? Or (as perhaps in Casualties of War) is Jack putting himself in a position in which to re-confront himself with his part in failing to prevent Sally's death and broadcast that fact, even if he is the only one who knows the significance of that moment, every time the film is projected.