Nightcrawler, Taxi Driver, and the New Claustrophobia

When it came out, Nightcrawler (2014) drew comparisons to Taxi Driver (1976) mostly due to the sensational performance of Jake Gyllenhaal. While Gyllenhaal does channel 70s De Niro intensity to an extent, the movie around him ultimately doesn’t have as much to say as Taxi Driver. But it is as close to a Taxi Driver-esque study of contemporary sociopathy as we are likely to get nowadays. Still, other than being a sustained depiction of an intensely alienated young man desperately trying to make his way in this cruel, cold world of ours, they are very different. But the ways in which they are different reveal a lot about the evolution of film in the last thirty or so years, and how film has come to mirror the lack of time and space that we all experience now as capitalism speeds everything up and squeezes everything dry.

Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a wiry, solitary guy who speaks in rapid-fire, pre-packaged LinkedIn profile self-summaries, usually without blinking his big, intense eyes. His maniacal self-promotion is rewarded fast—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 maniac—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 wasn't because of a hitch in his personal career growth outlook. 

Unlike De Niro’s Travis Bickle, Lou never attempts to engage with another person on any level that isn't entirely manipulative. Travis had some kind of concern for other people, but Lou doesn’t really care about anything other than growing his business. 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 sociopath he is, and rewards him accordingly with his own company, Video Production News, complete with his own set of eager interns.

The best scenes in the film are between Lou and his clueless employee Rick (Riz Ahmed), starting with a very awkward Craigslist-facilitated diner interview. Riz Ahmed is so convincing as an LA fuckup that it was shocking to learn that the actor is English. 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 LA, 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 fully dive into the seedy world of guerilla TV news. Lou becomes a kind of mentor to Rick, despite being a sociopath. Lou offers 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 never explicit—it's more about just 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 advantage, he doesn't appear to have had very many of those to lose 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 was totally on his own. That’s basically how it was in 2014—just sending out zillions of resumes and hoping you hear back, but never really getting much. And it’s much worse now—at least there was some kind of shell of an economy back then! We had to be sociopathic animals like Lou to make it back then—what must we be to make it now, in 2020, when the economy, and society itself, barely exists? Lou 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 was nearly no chance for you to start your life in 2014. 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.

It’s almost a cliche at this point, but it bears repeating: 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 sociopathic 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. I think the most interesting parts of this most famous of De Niro's performances are not when he is going crazy, but when he tries to pass as a normal guy, a responsible citizen who could share his life with someone as well-adjusted and desirable as Betsy. The subtle ways in which he clearly fails to pass as normal are eerily accurate and riveting—De Niro was always at his best at his most subtle, which he had fewer chances to do as he got more famous. In many ways, this is his most subtle performance. There is nothing subtle about Gyllenhaal’s performance in Nightcrawler, however. And Lou starts the movie off totally insane already. Travis on the other hand is driven insane by the world around him. Lou exists in 2014 America—a post-subtletly time and place. There’s nothing subtle about this man:

The way the latter half of Taxi Driver plays out, we believe that Travis is a psychopath who will meet a deservedly grisly, undignified end. But after killing the lowlife scumbags he hates, to save the "innocent princess" Iris (Jodie Foster), Travis is unexpectedly praised 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—how indulging your most ruthless, anti-social tendencies leads to acclaim, promotion, and success in American society. Travis ends up a hero, despite his psychotic spree of violence at the end of the movie—or rather because of it. And Lou ends up a successful small business owner, despite his sociopathy and egoism—or rather because of it.

While Travis struggles with the choice to become a merciless weapon of divine justice, before eventually concluding that it was the only option left to him, Lou is as bloodthirstily ambitious from the start as he is at the end of the film. He never even has to try to pass as normal for polite society—society doesn’t really even exist at all anymore, just business. Lou just has to present the full force of his sociopathy 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 capitalist demigod Steve Jobs, “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 of survival that is 2014 capitalism. Travis Bickle had time and space to become who he was, and his development was a response to his surroundings—Lou Bloom already knew exactly who he was and what he wanted to do, and his development was, as his name suggests, more of a blooming of something already latent within him, rather than real character growth or change, in the way that characters in movies used to have.

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. 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 even 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 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 relatively 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 was very memorable as the villainous pimp, Sport. Even Peter Boyle as Wizard, a fellow taxi driver who gives Travis advice, is memorable. You could also say the film was a huge boost for Albert Brooks, in a smaller but key role, as the campaign worker Tom, who tries to keep Travis away from Betsy.

How come there was room for so many classic performances in that film, and no room for anything but one big showy 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. One character, no growth—that is movies now. But Taxi Driver worked because there was time for real character growth and there was space for more than one character. Now if you want to see character growth in a movie it’s going to happen over a series of sequels, and if you want more than one real character in a movie you’re going to get like 30, and none of them will have any impact. That’s how things have changed. Nowadays, there is only room for one man doggedly denting the universe until it submits 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 chance to make it may be, play up your most aggressive tendencies, and start trampling over and/or manipulating everyone and everything in your way, until you reach a position of security and success. This is the world of Nightcrawler, and it was an extremely accurate depiction of 2014 America. And it’s funny how even an unrelentingly bleak film like Taxi Driver  is so much more full of life and hope and humanity than its contemporary equivalent.