Screen

...Everything fits into an overall pattern of images...

...The question is whether he is capable of transforming himself thus, or will now be doomed to repeat past successes the way Jack repeats his failures...

...In spite of his mastery, he longs for something further, which Antonioni vaguely represents to him...

...It suits the world De Palma is creating...

...From what we can see, it could be a De Palma film, or rather, a self-parody of one...

...The image of the hanged man recurs when Jack crashes his car through a plate-glass window in which a waxworks scene depicts the execution of a Revolutionary-War traitor, and when an assassin named Burke (John Lethgow), whom Jack is pursuing, kills a prostitute in a public restroom by reaching over a stall divider to garrote her...

...To approach filmmaking in this way is to deal with it not as a form of narrative, like the novel, but as poetry-lyric poetry in which the voices heard and emotions expressed are always the poet's own...

...Alfred Hitchcock couldn't have done better...

...Blow Out has been made as if it itself were a kind of conspiracy...

...De Palma does so here not only in a general way by following up Carrie and Dressed to Kill with yet another thriller about a maniac, but recycling specific moments out of earlier films- the split-screen phone conversation, for instance-in order to stylize the action of the new movie...

...Jack's adventures are made from incidents in Dallas, in Chappaquid-dick, and at Watergate...

...In the film, as in reports by federal commissions, events take on a life of their own that no one can control, and in which everyone involved, whether innocent or guilty, is eventually trapped as if by fate...

...I suspect that having achieved commercial success like Hitchcock, De Palma now yearns to be someone more profound like Antonioni...

...All this stylization enhances the film...

...The title Blow Out is a play on Antonioni's Blow Up, in which a photographer discovers a murder in the background of one of his own enlargements...

...No scene is quite what it appears to be...

...Hitchcock and Antonioni are appropriate poles for De Palma's movie to revolve around, for both of them are film poets, inventors of imagery, like De Palma himself...

...De Palma seems to be completely in control in this movie, an auteur filmmaker at the height of his powers...

...The movie's plot is also a plot in the other sense of a secret master plan, a strategy for manipulating events...

...I wouldn't be surprised if De Palma's successes weigh heavily on him these days, too...

...Jack is starting out, as De Palma did, working on low-budget indies, and Nancy Allen, who plays opposite Travolta, is actually De Palma's wife...

...The sound booth, like the car underwater, isolates Jack from an hysterical woman, and the fakery going on in the later scene is a comment on the real drama Jack became caught up in earlier...

...He's able to do this kind of movie so well now that he can see it's not all there is to filmmaking...

...When Jack is out in a park one night recording wild sound to get some effects he needs, he picks up the sounds of a car blowing a tire and crashing into the river...

...Thus there is a connection we do not at first suspect between the scene in which Jack rescues Sally and the one where he interrupts the screamers at the dubbing session...

...Although Jack at first goes along with a hush-up about the woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), he has second thoughts afterwards...

...If Blow...

...Every shot has its covert meaning, its ulterior motive...

...The expressionism with which De Palma has made Blow Out reflects the paranoia and intrigue of the world it depicts...

...But since Sisters, in which he turned to thrillers with a gothic twist, De Palma has been more absorbed in the history of the movies...

...Each shot is thought up as a way to elaborate symbolic themes like that of voyeurism through glass...

...It seems to me that De Palma is finally as tangled up in film history as Jack is in the recent history of politics...

...To make up for that tragedy is, Jack reveals to Sally, motive for undertaking his own investigation of the car crash...

...Antonioni is an epistemologist...

...The screen is split between two characters talking on the phone, or contains two unrelated actions in one frame, as when Jack talks to his boss while two women in a sound booth, in an attempt to dub a scream, take turns pulling each other's hair...

...It's possible that the success of Carrie and Dressed to Kill has left De Palma feeling rather the way Hitchcock did after Psycho-as if he's started something that he'd just as soon not be associated with...

...Where Hitchcock's images are there to captivate the audience, to increase the pleasure of his film, and make the audience surrender to it wholly, Antonioni cares nothing for such appeal...

...Something he can hear on his tape convinces him the crash was no accident, and he talks Sally into helping him find out what really happened...

...Focus shifts from near foreground to far background in a single shot...

...Perhaps more conclusive, though, is what might be called the internal evidence...

...and we have seen in a flashback how a remote pick-up of his once shorted out, with the result that the cop was discovered and hanged from a stall in a men's room before Jack could get to him...

...Out alludes to the politics of the last twenty years, it also alludes to the filmmaking of the same period-to the work of Hitchcock, especially from Psycho on, and to Michelangelo Antonioni, whose films became known in this country around the time Psycho was released...

...On the contrary, he is ready to bore or alienate moviegoers in the pursuit of his symbolic ideas...

...Images dictate plot here, not the other way round...

...Yet De Palma can't be loyal to both these mentors at once, and I think this is a source of the dilemma that makes him feel as helpless as Jack...

...Hitchcock and Antonioni have used the imagery they created in entirely opposite ways...

...Like Psycho, De Palma's films have been a Pandora's box opening the way to all sorts of imitations that feature only the gore, not the artistry...

...In the first place, there are similarities between them...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.WESTERBECK, JR...

...Imagery is for him a form of thought, an exercise in metaphysics, a way to speculate about the nature of reality...

...Each occurs not simply as an episode in the characters' lives, but as part of a concealed design...

...In the end, having tried to catch Burke by wiring Sally the same way he did the cop before, Jack gets on a tape that replays endlessly in his head the scream his boss has been trying to dub for his new feature...

...His political conscience is another facet of his personality that makes him like De Palma, whose first films, Greetings and Hi Mom!, were highly politicized journals of the sixties...

...He used imagery as a kind of subliminal advertising for the chills and thrills he was selling to the audience...

...The truth that slowly emerges from the craziness in De Palma's movie is that history, in Jack's case, is doomed to repeat itself...

...This effort plunges him into a world as murky and full of surprises as the water from which he pulled Sally - a world where prostitution, blackmail, cover-ups , assassination, and murder are all part of a conspiracy with national implications...

...But De Palma's imagery is soon full of omens that the tragedy is going to happen all over again...

...Written by De Palma as well as directed by him, the film is about a movie sound man named Jack (John Travoka) who works for an independent producer in Philadelphia making sex-ploitation flicks...

...I've always felt that Hitchcock made Frenzy as a kind of antidote to Psycho, to remind his more literal-minded disciples that violence doesn't have to be quite so explicit...

...The coincidence between these scenes and others where characters see each other through glass is not really coincidental...

...Maybe the tragic playback we see in Jack's life is what it really feels like to De Palma to repeat past triumphs...

...The camera peers up at characters behind the windows of their rooms, and down at them from the ceiling...

...And in the end Blow Out remains true to our national theory of conspiracies, which is that they run away with themselves...

...Hitchcock was an entertainer...

...Successful filmmakers invariably repeat themselves...

...To see Jack as some kind of surrogate for De Palma is almost unavoidable...

...Jack used to be a conspirator too, wiring police undercover agents so they could record meetings with Mafiosi...

...Blow Out begins in a screening room as Jack watches a rough cut of his boss's latest film...

...Nothing is in this film...

...Diving in himself, Jack rescues a woman from the submerged car in which, it turns out, a well-known politician has died...

...The strongest indication that Blow Out is actually about De Palma himself lies in the way he has made the imagery, rather than straight storytelling, the basis of the film...

...Yet I wonder whether he doesn't see himself less as the mastermind behind this film than as a man who's trapped by history just like Jack...