Blow Out is here to trick you. It pretends it has something deep and profound to say about America. Set on the weekend of the fictional Liberty Day Parade in Philadelphia, Blow Out revolves around a political assassination and cover-up, and concludes with a murder committed under fireworks and in front of an enormous American Flag.
It’s the story of Jack Terry ( John Travolta ), a soundman for cheap B-movies, who accidentally records audio of a car crash that kills a presidential candidate and becomes determined to prove a conspiracy. There are echoes of the JFK assassination and Chappaquiddick , and Jack’s paranoid mind reflects the collective suspicions of an entire generation still processing the failures and tragedies of the ’60s nearly two decades later. But director Brian De Palma is not a political artist, and that’s for the best.
He’s a filmmaker who is most fascinated with the art of cinema —or you could say, the act of looking. Blow Out might not be about conspiracies at all. Maybe it’s about getting off.
It opens on a point-of-view shot of a serial killer peeping into various windows of a sorority, where he sees buxom young women in various states of undress. He then enters the building and begins slashing away. De Palma expressed similar ideas in Body Double, Dressed to Kill , and most of his other films, aligning us with killers and perverts.
He turns our need to watch—a prerequisite to buying a ticket for a movie—into a vulnerability, turning t.