Nightcrawler

    Nightcrawler tells the story of of a stringer (freelance journalists) who tries to earn living by recording and selling footage to the nightly news. The freelance, Lou,  gradually escalates the graphic nature and content of the footage that he shows. There are several instances in the movie that accurately show how Lou uses the increasingly violent and graphic accidents he captures for his own financial gain. The reason why Lou captures these violent and often bloody accidents and crimes is because that is what draws viewers to the news. At one point the producer of the evening news that Lou sells the footage to tells him, "If it bleed it leads,". This relationship proves to be beneficial for both parties and Lou eventually begins to give more graphic content in exchange for more pay.
    One of the first acts that Lou does that shows how far he is willing to go is that he changes the position of the victim of a car accident in order to achieve a much more visually pleasing shot that can fully capture the scope of the accident and can successfully quench the thirst of macabre visuals that evening news viewers crave.

Lou changing the location of the accident victim

   

    As we see Lou starts to commit crimes, tampering with the scene of an accident, in order to make profit of it. But, it does not stop there, as the film progress Lou starts to commit highly unethical decisions to make his footage more desirable to the news station. Some of the unethical decisions and criminal activity that he does includes tampering with a competing stringers car to cause an accident for footage, he enters the private residence of a family that was caught in the middle of a shoot out and records their private information, he withholds information from the police from a home invasion where he arrived before the first responders, and finally he led his assistant to his death as the climatic conclusion to a high speed chase that he caused, all in order to get as much footage from a single event.

     Lou committed all these acts because he knows that is the only way that he will earn money. He knows that we as humans are fascinated with our own mortality and that we are drawn to these gruesome events because it pulls at the very core of our human nature. As any other living thing, humans are driven by the need to survive. It is the reason why we eat, we exercise, why we go to school, why we have jobs. We want to survive and we want to delay the inevitability that is death for as long as we can. By watching these gruesome events on a nightly basis we are reminded that everything we do is going to be eventually stripped from us. In a way these visceral images help motivate us to want to achieve more and to do everything that we can to prevent that from happening to us. 

    Turn on the news at any point during the day and you will see that the leading story is usually something dealing with death or destruction. Wether it be a freak accident, a murder, or any other thing remotely related to those things, they are the stories that always come on first in the news and the newspapers and as a result are always given the most attention by those presenting the news and us the viewers and readers. Right now, the most popular news stories are the growing tensions between the U.S and North Korea, the U.S bombings of the Syrian bases and of ISIS camps by the dropping of a large bomb. The local news channels, the local newspapers, the 24/7 news networks and the nation's largest newspapers are all focused on these conflicts.  All the positive news? Well they're usually relegated to the closing segments of any news show, and those are usually only 30 seconds to a minute long. 

   Director Dan Gilroy managed to create film that depicts the insatiable thirst that we as a society have when it comes to violent and visceral footage that we see on the news. He manages to make a commentary on the appealing factor of these gory events and at the same time demonstrate the ethical and legal lines that those who present them are willing to make in order to satisfy the viewer and to most importantly, profit from them.