Blow Out and the pol­i­tics of despair

Despite its overt polit­i­cal themes, Bri­an De Palma’s Blow Out is sel­dom cit­ed as a polit­i­cal film. It is steeped in the para­noia and iconog­ra­phy of post-Nixon Amer­i­ca, draw­ing heav­i­ly on real-life polit­i­cal scan­dals like Water­gate and Chap­paquid­dick, but more direct­ly it oper­ates as a com­ment on the craft of film­mak­ing. A deeply per­son­al text from one of cinema’s purest auteurs.

Or is it? It’s hard to deny that the film, which cel­e­brates its 35^th anniver­sary this year, is prin­ci­pal­ly an achieve­ment in visu­al style, but look a lit­tle clos­er and it becomes appar­ent that Blow Out has an agi­tat­ed polit­i­cal heart. Such anx­i­ety doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly come from the polit­i­cal beats that dri­ve the nar­ra­tive – reflec­tions of Viet­nam-era assas­si­na­tions, Water­gate-era sur­veil­lance – nor is it syn­ony­mous with the kind of para­noia that infect­ed the nation­al psy­che in the ​’60s and ​’70s. Instead, it is relat­ed to a much more uni­ver­sal strug­gle, one which pits a work­ing-class every­man (a career-best John Tra­vol­ta) against a sin­is­ter rul­ing elite insis­tent on pro­tect­ing the pow­er­ful and the wealthy.

Travolta’s Jack Ter­ry does every­thing his con­sti­tu­tion tells him is the right thing to do, and he is pun­ished for it, slapped back into place for hav­ing a blue col­lar and emp­ty pock­ets. The infor­ma­tion he has is of val­ue to the Amer­i­can peo­ple and he pays for it with his life – not lit­er­al­ly, like his part­ner, Sal­ly (Nan­cy Allen), but with his Amer­i­can life, with the things he needs to know and trust to con­tin­ue liv­ing as a cit­i­zen of his coun­try. He ends the film alive but far from well. This is the pol­i­tics of despair.

The film’s trag­ic final scene is among the most sor­row­ful, albeit gor­geous, in all of cin­e­ma; the (fic­tion­al) Lib­er­ty Day parade pro­vides a cru­el and iron­ic back­drop to Terry’s crack-up, Tra­vol­ta match­ing the tone of the sto­ry by twist­ing and turn­ing through a Philadel­phia sea­port awash with red, white and blue. Thou­sands of every­day patri­ots have tak­en to the street while in the shad­ows a gov­ern­ment fix­er (John Lith­gow) is killing a young woman, dis­avow­ing the basic prin­ci­ples on which Amer­i­ca was found­ed. Blow Out’s genius is to present the dif­fer­ence between what a coun­try believes itself to be, and what it actu­al­ly is. No mat­ter the coun­try. No mat­ter who’s in charge.

Through­out this cli­mac­tic scene cym­bals crash and fire­works bang. They hang in the sky, colour­ful bursts of unadul­ter­at­ed patri­o­tism for the rev­ellers below to gawp in awe at. These peo­ple have been sold the belief that if they work hard for their coun­try, if they defend its con­sti­tu­tion and serve its enforcers, they will be reward­ed – in this case with a showy parade that lit­er­al­ly reminds them of the ​“Lib­er­ty” they are sup­posed to be so grate­ful for. What they don’t see is the fire­work com­ing down as a damp squib; its light a mere dis­trac­tion from what’s going on in the dark.