NIGHTCRAWLER (2014)

First, he films crime. Then, he starts to stage the crime scene. Soon enough, he’s creating his own crime, scenes so shocking that when he gets it on camera, it’s certain to make headlines. When there’s such a massive audience for that form of entertainment, who can blame him?

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is without a job. A petty thief with no future, he spends his nights stealing copper wire, manhole covers, and strips of chain-link fence. However, when he’s driving home one night, he watches as cameramen film a terrible car crash. Discovering how much money he can make by filming accidents, tragedies, and crime scenes, a few ideas light up in his depraved mind, some of which are more disturbing than others…

After 10 years, Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler remains a harrowing depiction of our voyeuristic nature and the media industry which profits from catering to it. In this scintillating directorial debut, Gilroy enthrals audiences with subtle thematic work, riveting plot structure, and an in-depth character study which is as frightening as it is incisive. With an incredible leading performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler becomes one of the more intriguing psychological thrillers of the 21st-century.

Nightcrawler continues to fascinate us after a decade due to the nuance in how our protagonist is presented to us. This is a rags-to-riches story that’s devoid of joy, a tale of determination and triumph which lacks any semblance of positive emotion. Simply put, there’s no warmth to Nightcrawler. The exquisite camerawork of the great Robert Elswit has a cold, uninviting effect despite the visually appealing surface appearance.

This could serve as a rather accurate description of Lou Bloom himself. He’s our hero, yet we never sympathise with him. His psychology starkly differs from yours (hopefully), and we learn that we can never trust him. What he shows to the world isn’t what he truly is, and we gradually come to understand him as a malevolent chameleon, blending into our society in the hopes of ensnaring a few unsuspecting victims. In a pivotal moment (right before he decides to do something completely monstrous), he looks into the mirror and screams his lungs out, smashing the glass in the process.

Several angles of his visage can be seen in the shattered shards of a mirror. It’s emblematic of the many different faces this psychopath wears to get what he wants: as soon as he steps out his front door, a mask is firmly fitted over his face. Though this theme of rigid societal expectations being imposed upon the complex, amorphous human psyche was explored quite literally in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), in which characters wear masks to shield themselves from the penetrating, judgemental gaze of others, this idea is excavated more figuratively here.

Lou seeks the spotlight. Not in front of the camera, but behind it in the world of showbiz. He desperately craves status and prestige. What makes Lou’s journey so involving is that we witness how he thinks without him overtly describing it. Instead, it’s evident in how he speaks, in the contrast in his behaviour when he’s alone versus when he’s being watched. He clearly has a fastidious mentality; besides sewing and learning police codes, he makes himself wholly familiar with knowledge of people’s private and professional lives. This is information which can be used as leverage, and Lou values nothing more than power.

His toothy smile belies a mercantile, narcissistic mentality: people are nothing but assets to him. With such a mindset, the individuals that populate his life can either aid his success or detract from it. Watching Lou engage with those in his professional sphere reveals much about how a narcissist views others. To put this another way, when do you think about a kettle? When you need a cup of tea. However, you probably won’t ever find yourself thinking about the kettle at another time of the day, and you don’t see a problem in using it when you need a quick cup of coffee.

This is how a manipulative narcissist (and Lou Bloom fits this description perfectly, though he’s also got an unhealthy dose of psychopathy in there) regards people: they are nothing but something that should be used when appropriate, as and when the need arises. As Lou explains to Nina (Rene Russo): “A friend is a gift you give yourself.” He may not have entirely understood what Robert Louis Stevenson meant in saying that, yet it perfectly fits his character; he will take from others and give to himself, and he won’t see an issue with it in the slightest.

Perhaps it’s because Lou is slightly disconnected from reality. Or, at the very least, he’s emotionally disconnected from it. He doesn’t have any emotional involvement with what he films, viewing it only as a means to an end—reputation, esteem, and image. It’s for this reason that he can get uncomfortably close to a man who is haemorrhaging from his neck, bleeding to death, yet never once be impacted. Only when it’s up on the big screen does it have any sort of effect on him: “On TV it looks so real…”

This one line reveals the connection between Lou and the industry in which he’s involved himself. Gilroy’s gripping screenplay appears to make an argument that our media networks are fundamentally disconnected from human emotion, that the camera is, in essence, psychopathic: it doesn’t feel, it simply documents, performing a function coldly and with total disinterest. The camera is only representative of the human eye, suggesting the people behind the machine are machines themselves.

It’s for this reason that everyone within the media production circle phlegmatically dismisses criticisms about their lack of humanity: “That’s my job. That’s what I do.” When Nina describes to Lou what their station is looking for, she elucidates with zero shame: “The best and clearest way that I can phrase it for you, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” It’s pure sensationalism, with modern media that bombards us everywhere we look designed to be incendiary, provocative, and as enticing as possible.   

Gilroy subtly portrays others with just as little humanity as he does Lou Bloom: Nina may not be quite as bad as Lou, but she’s not all that much better. She doesn’t care about the truth, and she couldn’t care less about the ethics of what she provides to the public. When Nina is presented with the grisly footage of a triple homicide, she asks the legal team how much they can show on the air. The station’s lawyer looks appalled: “You mean legally?” Nina scoffs: “No, morally. Of course legally.” This producer is aware that the media industry is a place devoid of morals; no one who makes it to the top cares about ethics, only ratings.

It’s for this reason that Nina rewards Lou’s apathy and opportunism. His voyeurism is perfect for the job. Untouched by sentiment, Lou’s is the quintessential gaze: he is concerned only about aesthetics, and Lou’s detachment amid shocking imagery reveals both our own morbid curiosity and desensitisation to upsetting visuals in an age of ubiquitous media. Part of what makes Nightcrawler so engaging is that Lou emulates our voyeuristic tendencies without a shred of compunction, yet it is still very human, and recognition of this fact both intrigues and vaguely repulses us.

Much like Alfred Hitchcock in his masterpiece Rear Window (1954), writer-director Dan Gilroy was concerned with analysing how we look at things. Lou reveals to Nina that he is attempting to exploit our human propensity to look, seek, and gaze as efficiently as possible: “I’m focusing on framing. A proper frame not only draws the eye into a picture but keeps it there longer, dissolving the barrier between the subject and the outside of the shot.”   

In speaking about the message behind the film, the director revealed his artistic intention behind the film: “I think to some degree it’s certainly an indictment of local television news, but I’d like to cast a wider net in the sense that all of us really watch these images. I would hope that maybe a viewer would take it further and maybe go, ‘Why do I watch these images and how many of these images do I want to put into my own spirit?’”

Though Gilroy’s thematic exploration is commendable, as is his connection between antisocial mindsets and our contemporary media system, it’s Gyllenhaal’s performance that renders this film sublime. It’s impossible to turn away. Having lost over 10 kilos for the role, the normally muscular Gyllenhaal looks like a starved jackal, incessantly hungry for his next meal. Gyllenhaal fabricates human emotion superbly well, and his contrived, affected manner of speech is unnerving.

What’s more, you can tell how his eyes look through people, peer right into their insecurities, rendering them easily exploited. As he speaks about his ambition, talking in a measured, trenchant description of what he wants, it’s genuinely frightening: there’s a keen intelligence to this person, someone who has learned to get what they want. Whether through leverage or obsequious flattery, it’s apparent that he won’t simply stop—if you’re in his way, you should be concerned.

Still, Nightcrawler is a tale of success, even though we never once empathise with our protagonist. As Nina intones ominously to her co-worker: “Lou is making us all reach a little higher…” Of course, in a world with a set of backwards morality, reaching higher necessitates going as low as is humanly possible. Our narrative is bookended by shots of a rising moon, and as Lou disappears into the night with a burgeoning business plan, it’s clear that he’s an infection which will only continue spreading.

USA | 2014 | 117 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Dan Gilroy.
starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton, Kevin Rahm, Michael Hyatt & Ann Cusack.