Blow Out: A political conspiracy thriller?

In 1981, Vincent Canby wrote an interesting review of Brian De Palma's Blow Out:

... [M]ore important than anything else about ''Blow Out'' is its total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium in which, as Mr. De Palma has said along with a number of other people, style really is content. If that is the case, ''Blow Out'' is exclusively concerned with the mechanics of movie making, with the use of photographic and sound equipment and, especially, with the manner in which sound and images can be spliced together to reveal possible truths not available when the sound and the image are separated.

This subject is, I suspect, so arcane that most moviegoers will insist on looking at ''Blow Out'' in terms of the story, which was written by Mr. De Palma as well as directed by him. Because that's only about half of the movie, and because the story is not entirely, consistently logical, a number of people may feel cheated. If one takes ''Blow Out'' on this level, it becomes the kind of movie one watches with increasing excitement until one gets to the end and asks, ''Is that all there is?''...

Canby's thought that the film is about getting the perfect scream makes sense. The film begins with Jack (John Travolta) doing the sound for a co-ed slasher film. The producer isn't satisfied with a girl's scream, so Jack's job is to get that scream for their film. Blow Out ends with that perfect scream dubbed into their film. How Jack gets that scream (by unhappy coincidence) is the "story" of Blow Out.

A Blu-ray edition of Blow Out was released on April 26th of this year. The Blu-ray not only includes the film, whose transfer was supervised and approved by De Palma, but an interview (about an hour) with De Palma, an interview with Nancy Allen (about 1/2 hour), an interview with cameraman Garrett Brown (about Steadicam shots -- he invented the Steadicam), two written reviews, and De Palma's 1967 feature Murder à la Mod, which was watched on television by one of the characters in Blow Out. Some of Louis Goldman's behind-the-scenes still photos are also included.

The still from Blow Out, above, showing Jack checking a wire on Sally (Nancy Allen), is from Blu-ray.com's screenshots, several of which -- the black and whites -- aren't from Blow Out. Those are from De Palma's Murder à la Mod.