Blow Up Review

Blow Up by Garrett Lambur

I truly enjoyed the movie Blowup; it was one of few recent movies that had my mind clunking away on all cylinders. But I grew quite agitated during our discussion of the movie. I felt as if we were looking at the movie completely wrong frame of mind. We had assumed a definitive view of what took place within the movie, easily dismissing any point of view that may differ from our own. While in fact, I believe that one point of the movie was to understand that our viewpoint might not always be the only one.
Quite quickly after the movie ended we began to establish as a group entity, myself included, what occurred in the movie, who shot whom, who died, where they died, etc. etc. This to me is where we made our first mistake as a group. If the director had wanted us to know who had been shot, who died, or any other details, then he/she would have easily shown that within the movie. Instead, the director focuses upon making everything that happens within the movie in relation to the pictures taken quite fuzzy and hard to understand. Why do you think that the main character had to blow up the pictures in an attempt to decipher them? He had no idea what exactly was going on.
The more and more that he studied the pictures in the movie, his orientation about that day in the park began to change. And then the as the director continues to lead you on a trail of questions leading to more questions you begin to believe you will get an answer. He finds the body in the park and rushes to go tell his friend, others will soon find the body, and then answers will start appearing. But suddenly, the pictures are gone and so is the body. You are left with nothing but a feeling of wonderment and “huh?” The director does not want you to completely understand. In fact there is a significant lack of details that will allow you formulate a clear picture of what happened. So what do you do instead? You being to create your own order of events and picture, filling in the gaps and making definitive statements, and then somebody tells you their picture of what happened and you theirs. Suddenly, each of you has to go back and start questioning the order of events and definitive statements you created, making sure you had the right information, double-checking everything. Wait, could I have been wrong?
Something that nobody wants to ever admit is that they could possibly have been wrong. Yet it is necessary I believe to completely understand the film. The film is done in such a way that each person will see it from a different perspective and only by sharing and comparing each of these perspective’s, could you come closer to truly understanding the film, although it may never be possible to completely understand the film. In fact, this idea of sharing and comparing different perspectives on the same thing is something that more people need to do today. So very few attempt to understand others view points and automatically assume that theirs is right. But it takes more than just listening to others, it takes the ability to question your own against theirs, and perhaps, just perhaps, change some of your dearly held belief or idea or whatever because you learned something.