Forgot that I had seen this film before, but it all came back to me during the tech-fetishist sequences of John Travolta editing film and audio. It demands a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that a supposedly trashy film production company would have such nice offices and equipment, but it pays off in the same glorification of analogue media that made Antonioni’s Blow-up so viscerally engaging. De Palma relies on a hardware aesthetic that matches the film’s paranoid political thriller narrative, but he is just as much relying on the cutting edge of horror filmmaking. From the opening sequence, a scene from a slasher film-within-the-film whose first person POV references Halloween (1978)—and whose sorority-set shower kill could be a reference to de Palma’s own Carrie (1976)—Blow Out references the changing contemporary state of horror films. De Palma pulls tricks without reservation, bent on innovating on the thriller genre to create something modern; something befitting this era of the American film industry’s paradigm shift to the blockbuster model.
Blow Out has one foot in the past of its film noir precedents; but its other, John Travolta-shaped foot is in a Hollywood star-based industry that could nevergo as dark as a film like Farewell My Lovely (1975). Mitchum was a star, too, but from another era. In Blow Out, when the car goes off the bridge, Travolta dives unhesitatingly into the water to save the girl: as a cultural icon, he is too dependent on a sanitized culture industry. Travolta’s character start out as an unassuming hero among ordinary people, who becomes disillusioned over the course of the film. The same basic arc plays out in the darkest classic Hollywood films, but the difference is that the arc generally occurs within a social milieu where the standards of heroism and redemption are much lower. The most noir-ish elements of this film are contained in the side plot with the killer; and in the general atmosphere of paranoia surrounding the political elements of the narrative. Explicit political references are not common in your standard film noir, Pickup on South Street not withstanding. I mention this just because I think I saw “neo-noir” attached to this film, but to me it just feels like a pretty typical-of-the-age conspiracy thriller.
Nancy Allen’s character was significantly underwritten, and for the first half of the film she felt quite two-dimensional. Ultimately I think the script and the film itself stifle her; but there comes a turning point where I felt like I clued into what she was doing. She is playing a character type from the 40s: not a femme fatale, really, but more like an erstwhile love interest & co-conspirator. She sticks to one note for pretty much the entire film, but she does manage to get a lot of depth out of that one note. Not enough said here, but I can only say that her performance is “magnetic” despite an annoying script and very stupid direction. I don’t know anything about Nancy Allen, but I am naming her 1981’s “One to Watch.”