The Private is Public: On the 10th Anniversary of “Nightcrawler”

Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut “Nightcrawler” was released ten years ago this Halloween. While not conventionally a horror film, the incisive story of Lou Bloom’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) foray into the information industry is a dossier on the misanthropic, violent appetite of news media. Until “Nightcrawler,” video acquisition felt like a relatively unthought element of watching the news. The focus was the content of the broadcast rather than the source of the imagery.  “Nightcrawler” puts the practice directly in your face. As Lou and KWLA news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) work together to manipulate public concern at the expense of personal tragedy and with the intent to highlight “urban crime creeping into the suburbs,” the film ignites a new way of watching the news. 

Ten years later, the film takes on fresh, modern contexts, as media distrust and access to violent imagery have been exacerbated to the extreme of altering the purveyor and spectator. The illusion of objective journalism and the consumption of it have vanished, yet the throughline of agenda v. empathy remains in question. In today’s era of omnipresent surveillance and political division, the motives behind imagery are completely inescapable.

A petty thief looking to land a steady income, Lou stumbles across the trade of nightcrawling: listening in on police radios, being the first to a crime scene or tragic misfortune, filming it, and selling the footage to news stations. As Lou starts his newfound freelance journey, he encounters Nina, desperate to boost her station’s ratings. Following the dogma of “if it bleeds, it leads,” Lou pushes the boundaries of morality, legality, and ethics to obtain and sell the most shocking, fear-mongering, tune-in-to-see-it footage that Los Angeles broadcast news has ever seen. 

Lou’s cynicism about the state of the world and what culture and politics demand from the media is right on point; it’s only his psychopathic behavior that feels distant from relatability. At the beginning of the film, Lou sits on his couch, channel surfing. He swiftly flips past the networks reporting on lottery winners, bank robberies, and landmark court decisions, stopping on the news anchor that speaks of a mother’s car accident, stunned by the phrase “twisted metal and a shattered life.” It’s a pulp fiction approach to journalism: punchy and graphic, heeded by later scenes of Nina emphasizing buzzwords like “vicious attack” to the anchors in real time. 

Because of today’s partisan political climate, defined by mainstay networks that wear their political affiliations on their lapels like Hawthorne’s “A,” witnessing the film’s depiction of KWLA’s desire to intensify white fear feels unsurprising. Much of the shock of “Nightcrawler” is in Lou’s actions as a cameraman: invading the privacy of victims, staging crime scenes, and climatically sacrificing the life of his assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed), for the final shot in his manufactured “masterpiece.” Here, Gilroy’s direction is often gritty, portraying Lou’s ambition with a slick style and an unbiased eye. He prompts us to bear witness to his film in both horrific and heart-pounding anticipation, inciting emotions that occur by way of our own volition. 

However, the qualifications of what makes a “Lou Bloom” have changed dramatically in the last ten years. It’s less voguish than Gyllenhaal’s coyote-like sidling and hollow stare. It’s familiar. The implicating trait of Gilroy’s nightcrawler is that he is not a bystander but a participant. As our relationship with cameras and information delivery systems has evolved, the public often finds themselves a spiritual descendant of Lou or Nina, even with good intentions.

Social media provides a level of authority and agency that was nascent in 2014 but now feels like the aftermath of a citizens’ coup on information. The unholy trinity of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are given the news media treatment, with American citizens of all age demographics using it as a primary, though not necessarily sole, source of information. Virality on these platforms is a lottery of chance rather than an earned status, and every user can repost and utilize footage at the behest of their own desires and motives (with Elon Musk’s 2022 rollout of paid blue checks making Twitter a haven for misinformation feigning authority). 

Gilroy’s cornerstone idea of corruption as a kind of invasion plays heavily into the pivotal role domestic spaces inhabit in “Nightcrawler.” The tipping point in Lou’s career comes with his first step over an ethical boundary, sneaking past crime scene tape and entering the home of a family victimized by stray bullets. He films their refrigerator, where family photos and children’s magnets are framed by bullet holes, and records the family’s police interrogation through the spiderwebbed glass of their side window. While Nina’s coworker condemns the violation, she sees dollar signs and job security in its provocation. 

When Lou beats the police to a triple homicide in a wealthy neighborhood, he enters the home and films the carnage with bloodthirsty voyeurism. Creeping up the stairs just as the killers likely did, there’s icky predation in every step he takes. Homes are meant to be sacrosanct, making Lou’s entrance the breaking of a horrifying taboo. This locale, as a setting of violence, feels inherently off-limits, striking too close to personal, familial, and familiar. However, this is another aspect of Gilroy’s film that has morphed with a contemporary perspective. In 2024, the terror of Lou’s violation still sticks, but in the age of the death of privacy, the shock lands with lighter feet. 

Violent imagery has never been more accessible and circulated. We no longer require the institutionalized pipeline from Lou Blooms to Ninas to bear witness to day-to-day horrors. With crimes committed on livestreams or filmed by bystanders with immediate, unrestricted sharing capabilities, the gatekeepers of the information industry appear obsolete. When the film was released in October of 2014, it preceded a policy to instate widespread use of body cams in the police force by only two months (following the murder of Michael Brown that August). The use of body cams is inarguably an indispensable resource to hold police accountable, and similarly, publicly filmed evidence contributes to the process of justice. Still, the widespread editorialization of such footage gets thrown under the nasty umbrella of necessary evils that “Nightcrawler” echoed but didn’t quite predict.  

Bodycams are the primary purveyor of images and footage that align with Lou’s home invasion: the main source of domestic settings turned to trauma centers for all to see, fear, and mourn. This, in combination with the public-held agency to capture their own footage, results in a prolific output of documented crime. 

Lou believes that he operates from a place of passion, but personal fulfillment and ego are what oil the mechanisms of his ambition. Nightcrawling feeds him. And what serves him even more is the validation and recognition that follows. His sunken eyes glimmer when Nina is impressed. His psychopathic, placating smile flips genuine every time the anchors announce his company “Video Production News, a professional new gathering service,” on air. There is no true service in his trade to anyone but himself. Though this shameless self-interest doesn’t ring entirely true in today’s video-sharing culture, certain bells never fail to chime. 

We live in an echo chamber of “don’t look away” and “this needs to be seen”: messages that feel almost contractually attached to videos of racial violence in specific. “Nightcrawler” declares this through KWLA’s intentions, focusing on the news’ desire to highlight white victims at the hands of people of color. Social media homes in on the inverse, where the balance between genuine activism and effortless posturing are thin. Facile clicks to repost for social capital and guilt expulsion are just as simple as doing so to affirm biases. 

Intention v. impact is a fine line, and while many, if not most, people who share traumatizing images do so with good intention, it is never without expense. The feeling of social responsibility to distribute acts of brutality has put the power of displaying these issues into the hands of everyday people who share frequently and often indiscriminately. This measure of the cost of broadcast is what runs in the undercurrents of “Nightcrawler”’s lifeblood. Objectively, the murders, accidents, and misfortunes Lou encounters deserve airtime, but there’s shakiness in the ethics of how. 

The spectatorship that surrounds the circulation of violent images, especially when racially slanted, often grants personal fulfillment, latent or conscious, as much as it affirms broader social agendas. On an individual level, this freedom of access is an easy out to feign political involvement, as if watching evidence of racial violence is equal to engaging with the context of it meaningfully. Watching a video for white majority viewership is simply the most effortless box to check. And as this symptom of malicious conservatism, and equally, violently hollow liberalism, runs rampant, the opposite of the purported intention occurs: a pipeline from desensitization to dehumanization. 

For Lou, in his curatorial efforts, victims are set pieces in his visual creations: objects in an image, as he says, to “not just draw your eye in, but keep it there.” The depersonalization still applies to the everyday person on the receiving end of these images, who goes on to share and discuss them. Sensationalist whispers of “Did you see?” fill office spaces, schools, and other public arenas with the same fervency as a TV show finale (if only in more hushed tones). It is difficult to bear witness to this kind of habitual, lurid public discourse without noting how it strips away personhood. Those depicted in the images are furnished into symbols and symptoms of society’s ills: non-consenting poster victims for white majority comprehension. This burden of spectatorship is racially unequal, as the public broadcasting of these videos and images is meant for white audiences, whether to radicalize them, satiate their politics, or even, most plainly, inform them. 

While the production itself, whether by bystander, body cam, or something else, can be a means of justice, the breakneck speed with which it traverses social media, untethered by any regulation, simply isn’t. Most murders make the news, but there is no other form of killing that can be spread so publicly and plainly, and with such freedom or lack of question, than those to which racial agendas are attached. The images, despite believed intent, are hardly spread in defense of the victims as much as in the vanity of the viewers – a cycle of political theater that subjugates victims, families, and communities.

“Nightcrawler” is an exercise in watching people juggle their transgressions with social expenditure. The news is meant to inform but is often co-opted to fear, anger, or validation. Gilroy’s thesis, still cutting ten years later, proves timely and timeless as our relationship with viewership has evolved for the dirtier. His grungy portrait of Los Angeles, lit by the neon tower of KWLA and the glowing eyes of Lou’s Dodge Charger, is a timeless affidavit of the bedrock racial voyeurism of American journalism and its looming presence over the landscape it prowls.