Journalists have always captured the fascination of filmmakers. From the classic Citizen Kane to the more recent Rosewater, Hollywood loves to tell storytellers' stories. The more journalists risk for their work and the greyer the moral areas they traverse, the juicier the story.
Enter the seedy, scheming cast of Nightcrawler, led by Louis Bloom, a hustler who decides to abandon scrap metal and car parts for a video camera and editing software. Played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Lou is a stringer for a Los Angeles news station, specializing in crime footage for the morning news show. The film, directed by first-timer Dan Gilroy, follows Lou as he builds his career scoop by scoop, ethical sidestep by ethical sidestep.
With Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal makes quite the leap from his previous newsroom role, the antsy, pushover cartoonist in David Fincher's Zodiac. Lou is unnervingly intense, his eyes glittering and bulging preternaturally from his gaunt face. Lou has no qualms about breaking a hundred traffic rules with his red Dodge Challenger the moment something newsworthy comes up on the police scanner. He has no doubts about interfering with a crime scene to get the best possible angle.
Nightcrawler pivots on Gyllenhaal, whom I've always known to be a good actor. His performance as a dedicated small-town cop in Prisoners kept me on the edge of my airplane seat on a redeye from Hong Kong to Chicago. I cried when he turned away from Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain and muttered, "I wish I knew how to quit you." And as Lou Bloom, Gyllenhaal thrilled and disgusted me. He was a sociopath who spoke the language of big business. He was Patrick Bateman doing Journalism 201-2.
I spent most of the two-hour film with my hands over my face. Not because it was too frightening (although it was that at times), but I was mortified by the flashbacks I was getting to an internship I did with a tabloid paper back home. Lou waiting restlessly by the police scanner reminded me of the times I sat at my desk during a 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. shift, hoping something or nothing happened. Lou plunging into the action, surrounded by flashing lights and screaming sirens, camera in hand, reminded me of the nickname we had as tabloid reporters: "ambulance chasers." Lou's news editor Nina matter-of-factly laying out whose lives were newsworthy and whose weren't reminded me of my editor telling us what made the perfect story for our tabloid: blood, sex and babies.
Thankfully, I got out of that internship in three months, but throughout Nightcrawler, I wondered, "Could I do what Lou is doing?" Right now, as a sophomore at a prestigious journalism school writing the occasional story for student publications and summer internships, I would never stoop to Lou's level of cutthroat, competitive reporting. Nightcrawler presents one highly-dramatized facet of a rapidly expanding world of journalism, but it also demonstrates the real bearing that TV ratings, scoops, and page ones have in the industry. It shows that freelancing is a real option in journalism, albeit in a depressing and unsubtle fashion.
Someday I might have to buy a video camera and stake out crime scenes to pay the bills – but hopefully, only out of desperation and self-preservation. No self-respecting journalist should emulate Lou, who derives perverse pleasure from looking death and destruction in the face through his viewfinder, and later, by becoming a participant.