Already drawing comparisons by more than a couple outlets to Taxi Driver, especially in what it can do for star Jake Gyllenhaal as that film did for Robert De Niro, the new film Nightcrawler is certainly an impressive, tight little thriller. Nightcrawler is probably as close to that riveting study of contemporary sociopathy as we are likely to get nowadays, but other than being a sustained depiction of an intensely Other young man desperately trying to make his way in this cruel, cold world of ours, they are completely different animals. The ways in which they are different are fairly instructive with respect to the evolution of film in the last thirty or so years.
Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom speaks in rapid-fire, pre-packaged LinkedIn profile self-summaries, usually without blinking his enormous eyes. His intense self-promotion is rewarded fast, as the film charts his meteoric rise to the top of the grimy Los Angeles crime scene news footage hustle. There's a whole world of bottom feeders who rush to midnight crime scenes and car crashes to get raw footage to sell to local news stations--they have the advantage of prowling the streets, glued to police scanners, while their union counterparts are sleeping. The prominence of local TV stations does make Nightcrawler feel somewhat like a period piece--aren't they all mostly on their last legs, at best? But their desperation for outrageous footage that will pull in big numbers plays right into Lou's career goals.
Lou starts and ends the film as a complete psychopath--this shot is from about a third of the way in, and is a reaction to hitting a snag in his plans for exponential career growth. Does Travis Bickle ever go that insane? If he does, it certainly wasn't because of a hitch in his personal career growth outlook.
Unlike Travis, Lou never attempts to engage with another person on any level that isn't entirely manipulative. Everything he knows about the world comes from trawling the internet for information and taking online classes. The rest he fills in with sheer intensity and mastery of careerist buzzwords. The world eventually comes around to seeing him for the talented psychopath he is, and rewards him accordingly with his own company, Video Production News, complete with his own set of eager interns.
My favorite scenes in the film are between Lou and his clueless employee Rick (Riz Ahmed), starting with an appropriately awkward Craigslist-facilitated diner interview. Rick "sells himself" in the interview as someone who just wants a job, any job, and will do whatever he is told. Having grown up in and around Los Angeles, he knows how to get around, and has a phone with GPS on it, so Lou hires him on the spot. As their working relationship evolves, Rick becomes self-assured, and takes care of all the little things, freeing Lou to dive maniacally into the seedy world of guerilla TV news. Lou shows himself to be a fine mentor to Rick, despite being a complete sociopath. Lou offers plenty of great advice to his feckless employee, coaxing surprising levels of professionalism and tenacity from the wishy-washy stoner. The lesson is clear--you can, and indeed probably should, be a sociopath in order to successfully grow your own business in today's economic climate.
Capitalist critique is latent in Nightcrawler, but it's never didactic or explicit--it's more focused on showing how removal from human feeling, severing all connections to anything other than a laser-focused drive to improve your own business, are qualities that are quickly rewarded. The key to being successful in 2014 American capitalism is to whittle away as many human qualities as possible. To Lou's great advantage, he doesn't appear to have had very many of those to surmount in the first place. All he needed was a direction, an industry, in which shameless ambition and self-reliance could be rewarded.
Lou has no connections to anyone in any industry that could offer him a chance to start a career. He starts the film by begging for a full-time job at a scrap yard to which he just sold a bunch of stolen metal. (The scrap yard owner tells him he doesn't hire thieves). For most young people (meaning pretty much anyone between 22 and 35, the generation that employment forgot), this desperation to merely get your foot in a door, any door, is pretty close to accurate.
Unless you know someone who can help you get your foot in the door, or if you are already doing the exact thing that a job requires and get poached by another company, there is no chance for you to start your life. The only option is to find an industry that you can enter into on your own and scratch out success through your individual obsessive effort and undeniable dedication. Earning a living in a decent job is the luxury of rock stars only.
The aporia is familiar enough to be a cliche at this point, but it's no less dauntingly true: you need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience without having been given an opportunity. So you need to carve opportunities out of the universe by any means necessary. Are you psychotic enough to make it in America?
Travis Bickle was a lonely Vietnam vet back from the war trying to fit into society. He made earnest attempts to get involved with Cybil Sherpherd's Betsy, going to the campaign headquarters she worked at, and taking her to a movie (a porno movie, yes, but still, it was an attempt to create a shared experience of some sort, that he very wrongly thought she would like). For me, the truly compelling parts of this most ballyhooed of De Niro's performances are when he tries to pass, to be a citizen who could share his life with someone as well-adjusted and desirable as Betsy. When this fails, he gets caught up in his hero fantasy of murdering the pimps and lowlifes exploiting Jodie Foster's adolescent prostitute Iris. Of course, he carries those fantasies out in a real life killing spree, but prior to that he did try to engage with society on society's own terms, in an earnest attempt to be a decent citizen.
The way the latter half of Taxi Driver plays out, viewers believe that Travis is an evil psychopath who will meet a deservedly grisly, undignified end. But after killing the men he hates, to save the "innocent princess" Iris, Travis is unexpectedly lauded as a righteous vigilante who was the only one brave enough to take necessary action to clean up the filthy New York City streets. This is one of the key similarities between Nightcrawler and Taxi Driver, in how indulging your most ruthless, anti-social tendencies leads to acclaim, promotion, and success in American society.
But while Travis struggles with the choice, before eventually concluding that it was the only option left to him, Lou is as bloodthirstily ambitious from minute one as he is at the end of the film. He never has to try to pass--he just has to present the full force of his psychopathy to the right industry gatekeepers. The subtleties of growth, development, and change have no place in the socioeconomic environment of 2014 America--one must know who they are, embrace their strengths, and find any outlet for building their empire and, to quote our main deity, put a dent in the universe. You can't make a real dent in the universe if you don't know exactly who you are, if you aren't marshaling all of your resources to aid you in the bloody fight.
So it's Gyllenhaal's movie, but how are the other performances in Nightcrawler? Aside from Riz Ahmed's excellent Rick, Rene Russo is really the only other player of note. She is back in a big way here, after what felt like a long time just doing Thor movies and veering into something of a Viggo the Carpathian territory looks-wise. As the news director of the station Lou sells his slimy footage to, she excels at first being impressed by the exceptionally eager young footage hound, to eventually being intimidated by how completely he has mastered the seedy local TV news game, figuring out a way to manipulate her, a seasoned, wily veteran, into giving him exactly what he wants.
Even she, necessarily cutthroat and self-focused after a career of perpetually being at the mercy of the latest ratings book, can't quite fathom Lou's career goals. She even offers him a coveted foot in the door as an entry level production assistant, but this is not nearly enough for him. He wants to build his own business, dammit! Working for someone else is not good enough, because some other very ambitious young psycho could come in and hold him hostage as he did her. It's a good performance, but she has fairly limited screen time, and not much of an arc beyond reacting to Lou's aspirational maneuvers.
Bill Paxton could have been the real standout, if he had been in more than two or three scenes. In his very limited screen time, he dials in a truly vintage Bill Paxton performance, letting loose in the way only he can, channeling the raucous Aliens era Paxton. As rival crime footage scrounger Joe Loder, Paxton imparts some vital wisdom to Lou and exemplifies the pirate lifestyle needed to succeed in that field, but dies early on. The movie, like the Los Angeles nightcrawling game, just isn't big enough for both of them.
Nightcrawler has no room for anyone but Gyllenhaal, really. Maybe that's the point--to succeed in our desperate, post-employment economic environment, there is only room for yourself and your necessarily outsized ego. But compare the lack of other indelible performances in Nightcrawler with the at least four classic, career-altering performances in Taxi Driver. Obviously, Travis Bickle is probably the biggest De Niro role ever, and he is probably the most famous actor ever. But it also put Jodie Foster on the map and launched her multi-decade career as a huge star. Cybil Shepherd made a permanent impression as Betsy, and went on to having a long career and being a household name. Harvey Keitel as the vicious pimp Sport blew audiences' minds, and took his already promising film career to the next level. You could even say the film was a huge boost for Albert Brooks, in a smaller but key role, as the wary Tom.
How come there was room for so many classic performances in that film, and no room for anything but one giant fat star turn in Nightcrawler? Where did this cinematic claustrophobia come from?
Maybe it's a product of our hyperfast, hyperselfish American moment--there was no room in Nightcrawler for anyone else to make an impression, and there was no time for Lou to change. All there was room for was one man doggedly assaulting the universe until it submitted to his will. In our economy, subtlety and personal growth are luxuries you can't afford.
So don't contemplate who you are--just dig in with both hands to whatever you suspect your identity may be, play up your most aggressive tendencies, and start battering down everyone and everything in your way, until you reach an unimpeachable position. It's funny how an unrelentingly bleak film like Taxi Driver is absolute peaches and cream compared to its contemporary equivalent.
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