Blow Out is a series of feints or false starts at one bad movie after another. Or it’s a bunch of bad movies simultaneously, when De Palma deploys his trademark split screen. The director lingers over all the abortive movie-making, getting distracted by the details just as Jack has been distracted from his movie-making job. We see Jack painstakingly assemble his crude movie, running the footage back and forth, marking the reel, rerunning the footage. We see Sam trying to get the right scream from actresses in a sound-proof box. And we see Burke stalking his prey, calling into the police so they think there’s a serial killer on the loose, and tapping and manipulating Jack’s phone.

De Palma obviously enjoys the mechanics of movie-making for themselves—the nuts and bolts scrabble for the right sound, the right visual, the right narrative, the right juxtaposition. There’s a pleasure in creation, even if what’s created is B-movie crap, or a jury-rigged reel made out of photos clipped from newsprint.

At the same time, bad movies are frustrating. The ineffectual scream is irritating and undercuts suspense. Burke murdering the wrong woman is a long tease that dead-ends. And Blow Out itself is an irritating watch in many ways, as the movie keeps getting distracted by the many other movies within it. The romance arc between Jack and Sally, in particular, is repeatedly interrupted and forestalled as they chase around the city in a series of pointless efforts to get someone, anyone, to look at and pay attention to Jack’s movie—an experience that many a would-be filmmaker can identify with.

The romance arc, and the film, end with Burke murdering Sally as Jack watches helplessly. He manages to kill Burke too late, and then holds Sally’s dead body as fireworks erupt for a patriotic Philadelphia celebration behind him. Fireworks are in film often a symbol for sex or consummation, but here there’s no consummation, as there was never really a romance. The horror went wrong and then the romance went wrong. Every movie is broken.

The final irony is that Jack does find his scream. Jack affixed Sally with a wire, and he therefore has a recording of her final calls for help. He dubs them into the original slasher, and Sam declares them perfect—just as De Palma must have signed off on Sally’s screams in the (supposedly) real film. It stretches credulity to think that Jack would use Sally’s screams for his B-movie job. He’s traumatized by her death, and there’s nothing in his character that suggests he’s capable of such ghoulish callousness.

But the gratuitous narrative flaw fits neatly into De Palma’s themes. Movies are spliced together, ad hoc, unconvincing approximations of reality—or, worse, as the shower scene suggests, they’re spliced together, ad hoc, unconvincing approximation of other movies. Horror, romance, American greatness; for De Palma they all collapse into a scattering of dingy, unconvincing tropes, plot holes, exploitation, and frustrating loose ends. It’s tacky and depressing. And yet, there’s a joy in finding that perfectly right, wrong scream for that perfectly wrong, right scene. In Blow Out, the beauty of the movie, as perhaps the beauty of life, is in its failures.

Over a pivotal three-minute sequence in his studio, we follow the meticulous mechanics of Thomas’s process: he develops the photos in the darkroom and arranges them into a fragmented storyboard. The film’s image then shifts to the photographs themselves, constructing a slideshow narrative that begins with two lovers embracing, moves to the man noticing the camera, and ends with the woman standing beside a body. The possible murder is only revealed through a series of (eponymous) blow-ups, forcing both Thomas and the viewer to interpret the truth from increasingly grainy visual fragments.

As the slideshow rolls, Antonioni also inserts the ambient sound of trees and wind to the scene—sound that doesn’t belong in Thomas’s studio but rather seems diegetic to the photographic record itself. This auditory addition complicates the relationship between the “real” and its photographic representation, questioning the reliability of Thomas’ memory and instead suggesting an intrusion of his imagination.

Despite the fact that it is over fifty years old, I will not be spoiling the film, but will nevertheless note that this conception of the recorded and truth is echoed in its final scene. As Thomas watches a group of mimes play with an imaginary tennis ball, he begins following the arc of their movements and, eventually, hears the ball’s faint bounce for himself. In that sense, truth is for Antonioni less an objective fact than a consensual illusion—a lie upon which we all agree in order to make sense of an uncertain reality—with its photographic record perhaps as mutable as perception itself.

By the mid-70s, as new intelligence technologies emerged, themes of privacy and surveillance came into the focus of (particularly American) filmmakers. Alongside films like Klute and The Parallax View, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation shifts its focal apparatus from image to sound, questioning the capacity of clandestine audio recording in the search for truth. The protagonist, Harry Caul, is an expert surveillance technician, obsessed with uncovering the content of a recorded conversation yet troubled by his inability to fully understand the intentions behind what he hears.

The pivotal construction sequence is, in Coppola’s film, entirely auditory (though the audience can see flashes of the recorded scene itself). As Harry listens to fragments of the titular conversation between two people in a busy plaza—isolating words, phrases, and tonal shifts as he tweaks the audio—those occasional glimpses of the visual, presumably imagined, suggest that his record is incomplete. Harry’s surveillance, while technologically advanced, only reveals as much as his own paranoia-clouded interpretative lens permits.

This dynamic between recorded sound and its interpretation becomes central to the film’s meaning. The Conversation paints surveillance technology as both enabling and restricting: it uncovers details but inevitably imposes their observer’s anxieties and biases. While the challenge of recording in Blow-Up is centred in the ephemerality of life and consequent elusiveness of truth, the struggle of The Conversation is an internal one, rooted in the limitations of human perception (regardless of technological development).

With Blow Out, released in the wake of Watergate and the political disillusionment of the 1980s, Brian De Palma unites image and sound, referencing both Blow-Up and The Conversation (along with occasional nods to the infamous Zapruder film). His protagonist, Jack, is a sound technician who accidentally tapes a political assassination. In this film, the “construction” scene sees Jack synchronising his audio-tape with photographic footage, finally creating a coherent and indisputable record of truth.

The meaning of De Palma’s film, however, lies in its insistence that undeniable truth can nevertheless be denied. In the darkly ironic finale, Jack is symbolically silenced beneath a spectacle of fireworks and patriotic pomp, and as he listens to the scream of a victim he could not save—now a crucial sound effect in a cheap thriller he is working on—Blow Out closes with a devastating commentary on the American ethos, which prizes appearance over substance. The film’s bleak vision, illustrated by its protagonist’s impotence in the face of public deception, suggests that even the most carefully assembled record of truth is not enough to guarantee justice.

In the progression from Blow-Up through The Conversation to Blow Out, the depiction of respective recording technologies reflects changing attitudes toward truth. For Antonioni, truth is a mutable construct we collectively agree to accept; for Coppola, it is the imagined end-goal which drives paranoia, susceptible to individual misinterpretation; and for De Palma, truth is rendered futile in the face of a political apparatus that manipulates reality for its own ends. The three films join together to reveal how technology, rather than bringing us closer to an objective reality, shapes our understanding and acceptance of truth—a truth that ultimately remains as elusive as the devices used to record it.

If there’s an animating force behind Blow Out, it’s De Palma’s love of filmmaking. His fondness for split diopter shots—when two objects at disparate distances are seen in focus at once—serves him well here, making the viewer’s eyes dart back and forth to grasp the juxtaposition, replicating the inner workings of Jack’s mind. De Palma’s use of pink and red lighting lends the proceedings a lurid overtone, while the pounding score by Pino Donaggio accentuates the filmmaker’s maximalist style.

More importantly, De Palma is mostly here to watch Jack piece together the mystery by using the building blocks of filmmaking. The newspaper obtains video of the accident, and Jack cuts out the photos, putting together a crude flipbook. It’s almost as if he is creating cinema all over again. De Palma lingers on these scenes, his camera seduced by Travolta’s dexterous fingers and his famously determined chin. This sequence—and the film as a whole—is a loose remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up about a fashion photographer who scrutinizes his own photographs to solve the mystery of a missing woman. But De Palma is more upfront about his voyeuristic tendencies. We can feel his yearning in the painstaking detail with which he shoots these scenes, but his passion extends beyond mere affection. The scenes of Travolta mastering the editing equipment, splicing together sound and film, are as sensual as any of the director’s famous sex scenes.

Blow Out is a strange, perverse film, and unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a hit when it was released in 1981. Made for $18 million (a lot at the time), Blow Out flopped upon its initial release and was only reclaimed by the next generation of cinephiles. Quentin Tarantino praises it to the heavens, and it’s easy to see how De Palma’s brash, lurid style was a clear influence on the young director, who, somewhat less elegantly, also challenges viewers with their voyeurism and implicates them in his on-screen violence. In that way, Blow Out does have something to say about the country that produced it, a place where we consistently pretend to care about the victims but we really can’t tear our eyes away from the screen.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.