Earwitness to an assassination: Blow Out

Jack (John Travolta) is a sound-effects technician, and thus a gifted listener, which might be another way of saying he’s a born aural voyeur, if you will. Blow Out (1981), Brian De Palma’s conspiracy thriller, continues a rich tradition, following Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which was inspired by Cortázar’s story ‘Las babas del diablo’ (1959), and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), in that it hinges on its protagonist’s special ability to perceive an incriminating detail hidden in a recording. The inciting incident: Jack’s perched on a bridge in a park at night in search of some good wind. Wearing headphones, handling a baton-like microphone, he captures not just wind in the trees, but also a whispering couple, an owl, and, fatefully, a car skidding off a road and plunging into the river. Jack rushes to help. He can’t save the driver but manages to rescue the driver’s lovely young companion (Nancy Allen). Later, in emergency, he’s told that the driver was a popular presidential candidate. He’s also told there was no lovely young companion, or rather, he’s told that the companion will simply be erased from the official record, just as Jack might excise a single track from a soundscape. Furthermore, Jack’s told that a certain noise he heard (and recorded) just a second before the accident never occurred, a noise that sounded like a gunshot.

Blow Out navigates the elusive bridge that divides authenticity and artifice: a bridge built on technology. This theme is cleverly integrated right into the film’s opening sequence, when a screening of an excerpt from Jacks’ current project, the exploitation slasher film-within-the-film, could initially be mistaken for the film itself. It’s interrupted only when one of the slasher’s naked nubile victims lets out a scream that doesn’t sound authentic enough and the producer calls the screening to a halt. (Amusingly, the producer tries to find a more authentic scream by bringing pairs of young women into the studio: one screams into a microphone while the other pulls her hair.) Jack knows the woman was in the car; he knows there were two sharp sounds: first the gunshot, then the blow out. But he has to get someone to believe him, to listen as he listens. We in the audience know there’s no ambiguity or paranoia here: we know Jack’s telling the truth because, unlike The Conversation, Blow Out doesn’t adhere exclusively to its protagonist’s subjective experience. De Palma breaks away from Jack on several occasions to follow John Lithgow’s misogynistic hired killer with a penchant for strangling his victims with wire. (A playful linguistic doubling: Travolta and Lithgow each possess their own kind of potentially lethal “wire.”)

Blow Out is the most compelling De Palma film I’ve seen. Its camerawork, courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond, is relentlessly inventive; it’s heightened red-and-blue-all-over production design (perhaps substituting film noir’s black and white with a punchier sort of monochromatic palate) makes for weirdly fascinating eye candy; and its obsessive replaying of Jack’s recording of the assassination, along with its cluttered mechanical milieu of tape, reels and buttons, is engrossing. I have several reservations, yet thinking about them makes me want to watch Blow Out again (something that Criterion’s velvety-gorgeous new DVD and Blu-ray editions make that much more tempting). Travolta is young, beautiful, and gives a focused, nuanced performance, yet his character feels inadequately shaded, less implicated in the story’s darkness. Yes, Jack’s got a guilty conscience about an undercover police gig that went horribly wrong, yet this shadowy past doesn’t resonate in his presence. It feels oddly incidental. Meanwhile De Palma’s use of split screens, process shots, variable speeds and 360-degree pans become increasingly leaden, and Pino Donaggio’s cartoony score thwarts at least as many moments of intimacy or suspense as it enhances.

I know many have tremendous affection for De Palma, fellow critics especially (“Paulettes” most especially). Yet there’s something in his approach that consistently pushes me out. His work deserves scrutiny on a film-by-film basis, but I’ll offer one generalization. Whenever De Palma unfurls his more expensive, grandiose set pieces, whether in Blow Out or The Untouchables (1987) or The Black Dahlia (2006), when everything slows to a crawl and every frame is so conspicuously composed, I inevitably feel as though I’ve been asked to sit through an over-rehearsed audition. There’s a strange thinness to these sequences (not unlike the thinness that plagues certain De Palma characters). De Palma’s frequently taken to task for cynicism or irony, but the way he crafts such sequences strikes me as nakedly earnest. He suddenly wants genuine opera, and it feels awkward. Yet in the case of Blow Out the big set pieces hardly spoil things overall, and the quieter bits (that inciting incident especially) are eloquent and highly memorable. So if you happen to share some of my frustrations with De Palma, do see this one. It’s looking an awful lot like his masterpiece.

Memory unbound: the return of The Unfortunates

How do you tell a story? Be honest now. I don’t mean one you’ve thoroughly digested and developed, rehearsed and repeated and polished into a comfortable, familiar routine. I’m talking about the stories that leave residue in dim, neglected corners of your mind, that come to you in shards, associative, suggesting one thread and then another, driven by unpredictable emotional currents and the caprices of memory. Experience lies before us as a palimpsest. The traces of one moment hover within the traces of others. It’s perfectly sensible that when we tell our stories we try to impose order, through chronology, through causality. But art isn’t always sensible.

“But I know this city!” A man, our unnamed narrator, arrives in an unnamed English city to report on a soccer match. He’s a novelist, but he works as a sportswriter to pay the bills. He arrives, and his recognition of the city is accompanied by waves of memories, most of them about a dear, dead friend named Tony he needs still to remember, some of them about a woman he’s trying to forget. He strolls and looks around, he eats, he works, he departs on the evening train back to London. All the while those memories emerge of their own volition, some startlingly clear, some hazy, and dribbling forth. That’s the gist of The Unfortunates, yet it hardly conveys a sense of how this warm, melancholy, emotionally frank novel unfolds.


The sportswriter/novelist is actually B.S. Johnson, the friend Tony Tillinghast, a young academic who died of cancer. The Unfortunates, in keeping with Johnson’s personal credo regarding the imperative of truth in the modern novel, is basically what we can fairly call a memoir. But it’s a memoir in a box. First published in 1969, The Unfortunates is comprised of 27 unbound chapters, each ranging from one to a dozen pages. The first and last of these chapters are clearly marked as such, the rest are to be sequenced by the reader in whatever random order catches their fancy. The structure is not dissimilar to that of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which was first published in English only a few years previous, yet while Cortázar’s ingenious method of encouraging readers to “hop” through the text via a number of prescribed patterns provides a beguiling sense of immersing oneself into a particular world, Johnson’s approach is starker, and more tactile. Beautifully reprinted by New Directions ($31), with an invaluable introductory essay by novelist and Johnson biographer Jonathan Coe, The Unfortunates allows us a peculiar feeling of discovery. Opening the box and shuffling through the pages reminds me most of finding an old box of photos. First one catches your eye, then another. One you recognize, one you don’t. You see someone in one photo and then see them in another. Was that before or after? Where were they? Where was I when this was taken? Somewhere in all this is a story, but the story changes a little every time you try to reconstruct it.

Johnson was an outspoken disciple of Sterne, Joyce and Beckett—who offered a rare public endorsement of Johnson in return. He fiercely believed that the novel was irrelevant unless it pursued new forms and eschewed the entire notion of being fiction at all. To cast doubts upon the integrity and durability of Johnson’s strident literary polemic is perfectly reasonable. Fortunately, Johnson’s investment in formal strategies—a previous novel featured holes cut into the pages—were equaled if not bettered by the sheer eloquence of his prose, which, as it turns out, is actually pretty accessible. The form of The Unfortunates is in poetic alignment to its content. The tone of the narrator’s experience is matched by the randomness of his story’s delivery. Continuity is an illusion Johnson is unwilling to impose—it contradicts what for him most closely approximates emotional truth. It’s worth noting that in his introduction Coe speculates that Johnson’s unpopularity amongst contemporaneous literary circles may have had more to do with the confessional quality of his novels than with their innovative devices. They were far too vulnerable for the tastes of the moment.

“The waves of the past batter at the sea defenses of my sandy sanity, need to be safely pictured, still, romanticized, prettified.” “Visits run together, the trivial with the important, our life with his dying.” “I try to invest anything connected with him now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected to him.” Grief bleeds into the quotidian over and over in The Unfortunates. Commas proliferate, as though the narrator is trying not to digress to deeply into any number of blind alleys, but rather keep rippling forward. Strange gaps appear in the text as though whited-out, as though our narrator draws a blank, his pause present on the page as a finger of empty space. But the prose is free of abstraction, preferring to focus on the concrete, to offer a cascade of vivid details: Tony and the narrator posing for a photo, squinting in the sunlight, on the front lawn of Tony’s new house in a still-unfinished estate, a dying man set against a landscape of the brand new; numerous meals eaten in numerous places; a rented room where our narrator and Wendy—that woman who “ruined love” for years after—negotiated their lovemaking; a cemetery where the gravestones are marked only with numbers, or was it initials?; a friend of Tony’s who hung himself in his home, leaving carefully rendered diagrams of his suicide techniques for his wife to discover.

Johnson took his own life only four years after the publication of The Unfortunates, the fourth of his seven novels. He was 40, and reportedly in despair over his commercial failures and familial strife. I might suggest that this tragically early demise speaks to the perils of artistic convictions of the sort Johnson held so dear, but that feels pretty trite. Generalizations are a form of lying, so writes Johnson in the last chapter of The Unfortunates, so let’s just presume what drove the author to death was complicated and can only be sought in the details of his experience, the sort of details so lucidly evoked in this book, which with any luck will continue to find the audience Johnson so coveted.