Movie snobbery aside, “Blow Out” is a crackerjack thriller, mainly because of how intelligent it is and how intelligent it expects us to be. It has the gloss of a big budget action film and even a car chase, of sorts, although it quits after giving us one great tracking shot through a tunnel. Yet it has the airtight plotting of an Agatha Christie novel or a single set play like “Dial M for Murder.” Travolta, with his feathered early ‘80s proto-mullet, plays a man of above average intelligence, who never abandons us to the “why are you so stupid?!” territory like so many action heroes. The conspiracy aspect of the film works well because of how little we are shown about it; if the movie is about Travolta’s experience, and his experience is of a vague, omnipresent, and powerful intrigue, why should we need to see more than he does?
We also like him because he’s a basically moral character. It can be said that David Hemmings’s photographer has neither faith nor works and Gene Hackman’s wiretapper has faith but cannot translate it into action. But Travolta comes across as the most moral because he has a solid moral center that translates instantly into deeds; he calls upon the name of the Lord in his moments of crisis; and he fights for the truth as an abstract concept long before his own life is in danger.
If there is a weak link, it’s that Nancy Allen—as the working girl who, like Travolta, may have seen too much—is not the best actress in the universe. A regular of late ‘70s and early ‘80s De Palma and his wife at the time, she projects a little too forcefully, a little too much like someone in a high school drama class. But because her character this time around is kind of a ditz she’s pretty easy to tolerate.
But back to Travolta’s morality: a very basic idea of what De Palma is up to is with the cross-referencing of other films could be the moral progression of the protagonists. All three films end with the heroes, to varying degrees, knowing what happened despite the indifference of the world around them. But as the morality of the hero increases, so does his certainty. The nameless photographer—who vanishes in the last shot of “Blow Up”—is almost convinced that what was there wasn’t there because no one confirms it, and what isn’t there is there because everyone wants it to be. As we move up the ladder to Hackman’s Harry Caul, we are more certain of what happened, even if that results in a self-indulgent moral and paranoid morass.
With Travolta and De Palma, morality (the combination of beliefs and action) and technology (the combination of sight and sound) seem to provide us with the greatest certainty—or do they? Have the 15 years of technological improvement between “Blow Up” and “Blow Out” provided Travolta with The Truth (it’s pointed that he knows nothing of the actual conspiracy)? Or has he simply blown up one imperfect reproduction of reality into another reproduction and then into another?
Finished Monday, March 28th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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