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Joseph Soldo

Dr. K. Piatchek

LIT1000

4 April 2019

The Politics of Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler ends with an uplifting speech about hard work, opportunity, and climbing

the career ladder. The protagonist, Louis Bloom, is a stringer1 who has risen to prominance in the

world of media and become the self-made CEO of his own company, Video Production News, in

a rags-to-riches entrepreneurial success story. His speech to his new team of three unpaid interns

(with the opportunity for full-time employment given sufficient perfomance, of course)

concludes with this line: “Remember, I will never ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do

myself.”

Unfortunately, by this point, the viewer knows this to be a lie. Lou’s self-made career is

actually built upon a foundation of corpses and exploited victims. A Machiavellian figure, he

climbs his way to the top by manipulating, threatening, and killing anyone who gets in his way,

while ingratiating himself within the inner media circle. Lou is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who

shed nearly 30 pounds for the role (Bernstein). He appears gaunt, with sunken eyes that are

almost always wide open- scarcely blinking- and an offputting strained smile that similarly does

not seem to leave his face often enough. He speaks almost exclusively in corporate resumé

jargon, gleaned from self-help books and online business classes. The way he uses this type of

speech to obscure his perverse actions and ways of thinking is a major theme in the film.

To Lou, every interpersonal relation, every social interaction is viewed as transactional.

In the same way that suffering and dying people are commodities to be filmed and sold to a for-

1. A type of freelance journalist or photographer who

sells reports, photos, or footage to news firms
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profit media industry that relies on continuously more shocking and graphic footage to stoke fear

for higher ratings (and therefore, profit), so too are his partners, peers, and coworkers

commodities to be negotiated with and bought for the lowest price- and not a penny more. One

of the most disturbing examples of this is when Lou coerces his supervisor at the local news

firm, Nina, into a date with him by threatening to send his shocking footage to another firm if she

declines; he knows that she has come to rely on his footage to keep their ratings up. Through

essentially stalking her- using various sites to track her employment record- he deduces that her

2 year contract is nearly up, and he knows her firm has the lowest ratings in the area. “I want

[romance]. With you. The same way that you want to keep your job and your health insurance.”

This is clearly coercive, and Nina expresses shock that he would threaten her in such a blatant

manner. Lou counters: “I’m negotiating. That’s your choice. The true price of any item is what

someone’s willing to pay. You want something and I want you.” To Lou, there’s no difference

between the commodity of crime scene photographs and the commodity of a woman’s body and

autonomy.

This leads to a radical interpretation: Lou Bloom represents more than a single power-

hungry sociopath. Lou is the embodiment of the current state of neoliberal market capitalism; the

cut-throat competitive worldview his generation was raised on taken to its logical extreme. What

is neoliberalism? It’s defined by David W. Harvey FBA as “a theory of political economic

practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual

entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong

private property rights, free markets, and free trade (2).” So how do these principles shake out in

the real world? One needs only to look towards Reaganomics. When Reagan came to power- as
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well as Thatcher in the UK- neoliberalism began to sweep across the world like the Angel of

Death.

Austerity, privatization of industry, deregulation of corporate power are some of the most

prominent neoliberal policies. Like Lou’s corporate speak, none of these things sound partic-

ularly alarming. Austerity makes sense for a country with tremendous debt. One could argue that

the privatization of industry stimulates market competition leading to more incentives for those

industries to improve. Deregulation of corporate power is economic freedom; in America,

freedom is good! Unfortunately, the language of the policy and the material reality of their

effects do not line up in the way you’d think. Austerity is difficult to defend after $700 billion

was taken from the US Treasury to bail out the banks after the economic crisis of 2008, while

millions of people were left to sink into poverty (make no mistake, they are still sinking). The

most blatant example of the failures of privatization of industry can be exemplified by the

healthcare industry. According to a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2017,

46.4% of Americans- nearly half- can not afford healthcare (Altman). This would be a colossal

policy failure in most nations; in the world’s greatest superpower, it’s a knife jabbed in the

collective neck of the American people, the blood drained for profit. With economic

deregulation, the freedom of corporations comes at the cost of the freedom of the American

people to live a dignified life, free from exploitation and coercive business practices. With this

framework in mind, Lou’s quote again: “I want [romance]. With you. The same way you want to

keep your job and your health insurance.” I want your labor. The same way you want to keep

your job and your health insurance. Are bosses coercing and threatening people into working in

poor conditions for low wages? Director Dan Gilroy seems to think so.
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Works Cited

Altman, Drew. “It’s Not Just the Uninsured- It's Also the Cost of Health Care.” Axios, chart by

Chris Canipe/Kaiser Family Foundation, AXIOS Media, 20 Aug 2018,

https://www.axios.com/not-just-uninsured-cost-of-health-care-cdcb4c02-0864-4e64-

b745-efbe5b4b7efc.html

Bernstein, Paula. “Jake Gyllenhaal Lost 30 Pounds and a Great Deal of Blood to Make

‘Nightcrawler.’” Indiewire, Penske Media Corporation, 28 Oct. 2014,

https://www.indiewire.com/2014/10/jake-gyllenhaal-lost-30-pounds-and-a-great-deal-of-

blood-to-make-nightcrawler-68649/

Curtis, Adam. Hypernormalisation. BBC, 2016.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 1 Mar. 2007, 1-4.

Rich, Frank. “America Stopped Believing in the American Dream.” New York Magazine,

Photograph by Accra Shepp, New York Media LLC., 6 Aug. 2018,

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/frank-rich-2008-financial-crisis-end-of-

american-dream.html