Blow Out is concerned with the implications for the human subject raised by simulations. Like much of the Palma’s work of the late Seventies and early Eighties, it concerns the problem of representation, disguised within a convectional film genre. It is a ‘conspiracy’ film, a sub-genre of the detective thriller that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s ‘Watergate’ cover-up: events that seemed to be both symptom and cause of a paranoid social pathology in the United States- the enemy was no longer ‘without’ (the communist threat figured by the science-fiction genre of the Fifties), it was now ‘within’. The sub-genre is organised around the anxiety that the symbolic order of language, the ‘law’ – that which purports to be the bearer of ‘truth’ – is possessed of a malicious and cynical deceit. A breach is exposed between two orders of knowledge, represented by the individual and the social, which can no longer be closed by language since it is in the recognition of the perversion of the social order that the rupture takes place.

The film opens with a proleptic episode that parodies the spectator’s relation to cinema using the crudest of genres – the ‘porn’ horror flick. We follow the Peeping Tom movements, with heavy breathing, of a hand-held subjective camera as it eavesdrops on a college girls’ dormitory. The sequences end with a spoof of the shower scene in Psycho and the unconvincing scream of the intended victim. Henceforth the work of the film is to maintain the viewer in a tension between the film’s status as artifice and its reality–effects. The task of the sound-effects man Jack Terry (John Travolta) is to record a more authentic scream to dub on to the porn film, along with a few other incidental sounds. While in a park at night pursuing this latter commission, he becomes the inadvertent witness to a car accident that kills the potential presidential candidate, Governor McRyan. Jack rescues the Governor’s companion Sally (Nancy Allen) who, we later discover, was hired to lure the politician into a blackmail scam. However, when Jack plays back his tape, he discovers that the blow out of the car’s tyre, the ostensible cause of the accident, was immediately preceded by a gunshot. Jack’s attempts to bring this evidence to the attention of the authorities becomes undermined by a double cover-up that implicates the institutions of the law; firstly, by the Governor’s aide who is anxious that the sordid details are not made public; and secondly by an anonymous but clearly powerful other, identified only through its agent Burke (John Lithgow). It is Burke who engineered the accident to eliminate the Governor’s candidacy, who subsequently erases Jack’s tapes, and eventually destroys the evidence, and the witness Sally.