There are a few movies that really can get under your skin, not because they are scary in the conventional sense, but that they are shocking because they uncover uncomfortable truths about ourselves and others through a protagonist's actions. The protagonist becomes a funhouse mirror of uncomfortable subjects we don't want to address because it implicates us. Nightcrawler is one of those films and follows in a grand tradition of movies that tended to, but not always, destroy the careers of their makers. Films like Freaks, Peeping Tom, Psycho, Rear Window, Taxi Driver, Network, almost all of the "blaxploitation" films of the 70s, Falling Down; all share this common characteristic where the characters reveal uncomfortable and hidden truths about ourselves and our society that we would rather not face.
Nightcrawler is the story of Louis, a small-time thief who realizes he can make big money by filming the puerile paparazzi subjects at the bottom of the barrel: car accidents, shootings, robberies and such for the local news stations in LA. He first gets a cheap camcorder and police scanner to find all of these scenes and then sells them for death on display for the ratings-obsessed morning news cycle. As he gets more and more successful, he does more and more escalatory actions to get more sensational news. These include things like moving accident victims so they will frame more dramatically, disturbing crime scenes for maximum emotional impact to even causing events to happen in order to manufacture the exclusive. He is also intelligent enough to have a plausible stiory as to how he got the footage so as not to implicate himself. He comes across as affable, but a little off.
His semi-witting (or not so semi) partner in crime is Gina, played stunningly by Rene Russo, the news director for the vampire-shift at the lowest-rated news program in LA. She is the tutor who brings Louis the student into the shadowy underbelly of the news and is the beating, black cynical heart of the story. She is much more than the "if it bleeds, it leads"-type of person. She is obsessed with selling shock. Above all, the idea is to sell paranoia to the public. Not interested in crimes in poor neighborhoods, she says if the victim's white, great. If it's a white woma, better. Extra points if the assailants are minorities. Wanting to paint urban crime creeping into affluent neighborhoods despite the fact crime is going down. She characterizes their preferred types of stories as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut. And this is where the movie implicates society. Even Louis points out that all informative news: local politics, weather, fiscal issues, etc are jammed into 22 seconds of news time, while stories like the ones he is filming take up 5 1/2 minutes. News used to have a public function to inform, but is now meant to entertain, subject to ratings just as much reality TV and cartoons. It implicates us as a society because maybe we aren't as progressive as we like to think we are. We still harbor deep-seated attitudes and prejudices about "other people," whomever they may be. If we didn't, the movie posits, why are these programs and formats so popular? What happened to the news? It doesn't inform, it tantalizes and titalates. Don't believe me? Watch your local news for a week and tell me there isn't some kind of breathless thing that will kill you or your children.
A lot has been ballyhooed in the press on Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as the psychopath Louis. I was half-expecting this to be a cross between Network and Taxi Driver, and it kind of is. Louis is a psychopath in the truest sense of the word, utterly devoid of empathy, and is intelligent and coldly calculating. And while it is a great performance, maybe Oscar-worthy, his character is not the real point of the film and those who think it is or focus on it are totaling missing the bigger picture. It's just that a psychopath is perfect for this kind of work. No, it is the accusatory finger pointing at the media and society that is the point. Why has this state of affairs come to pass? Why do we tolerate it? Why are the voices of reason usually shouted down in favor of expediency? This is the next logical entry into a series of movies that chronicle not the death of, but the rape and exploitation of the power of the media, most specifically, the news. This series includes, in order, Good Night and Good Luck, Network, Broadcast News, Morning Glory, and Nightcrawler. And this type of yellow journalism for the Information Age is not confined to local news. CNN recently aired footage from Ar Raqqa where ISIS members had decapitated and mounted Syrian soldiers' heads on fences in the middle of town as a warning. CNN gleefully aired the footage with a "viewer discretion advised" warning and pixelated the heads. To me, this shows they want their cake and eat it too; disgusting and shocking footage that teases danger just enough, but not enough to offend delicate sensibilities. My only complaint for the movie is that it tends to plod at points with its pacing. However, the does create of sense of unease, lingering longer than one should. But overall, Nightcrawler is a superior, and disturbing, piece of filmmaking.
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