Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Nightcrawler
2014 · Dan Gilroy · Nightcrawler on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for how rarely Gyllenhaal's Lou blinks while he talks. (performance)
Gyllenhaal pairs a hollowed-out, starved body with wide unblinking eyes and the smooth cadence of an online business seminar. He never raises his voice and never stumbles over a sentence.
Payoff: The evil here is cheerful and fluent, not brooding, which is what makes it hard to look away from. In the reading: dicisign. The face and the patter carry the argument themselves, before any plot point has to state it.
Look at how beautiful the streetlights and minimart fluorescents are. (light)
Elswit shoots Los Angeles at night as a glittering, emptied grid: sodium lamps, neon, headlamps, long freeways with nobody on them. Terrible things happen inside gorgeous frames.
Payoff: The gap between how good the city looks and what happens in it is the film's steadiest source of unease. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls this an originary-world: an ordinary city that turns out to be a hunting ground under the lights.
Listen for warm, swelling music whenever Lou wins something. (sound)
James Newton Howard scores Bloom's victories with the heroic uplift of an inspirational success story. The bigger the transgression, the more triumphant the strings.
Payoff: The score tells you how Lou experiences his own life, which is not how you are experiencing it.
Notice how often Lou stands behind or beside his camera. (staging)
Gilroy keeps staging Bloom as an attachment to his equipment, the lens between him and the scene. Watch when he steps out from behind it and moves toward what he is filming.
Payoff: The blocking marks the exact moment a man who records things starts arranging them.
Watch the newsroom cut between broadcast footage and how it was got. (cutting)
John Gilroy repeatedly places the polished on-air version next to its off-camera origin. The edit shows you the trimming, the framing, the words chosen in the control room.
Payoff: You see the news being assembled, so you stop taking any footage on screen as simple evidence.
Once you have seen it
Track Lou's car and his clothes from scene to scene. (setting)
The vehicle upgrades, the wardrobe sharpens, the equipment multiplies. Costume and property chart a clean commercial rise while nothing about his behavior corrects itself.
Payoff: The rise is measured in objects, so you can see prosperity and degradation advancing on the same line.
Count the crime scenes and note what he does at each one. (structure)
Each scene goes further than the last: filming, then moving a body into better light, then withholding what he knows, then setting events in motion. No step breaks from the one before.
Payoff: The escalation is logical, not deranged, which is why no fall is ever coming. In the reading: the forger (le faussaire). Deleuze's forger does not report an event, he manufactures it, and Lou crosses that line by degrees.
Watch Russo's face during the restaurant negotiations with Lou. (performance)
Russo plays Nina holding her composure while the terms get worse. She listens, calculates, and concedes. Gyllenhaal delivers coercion in the vocabulary of partnership and win-win.
Payoff: Nobody in the film is positioned to judge him, which leaves the judging to you.
Watch the car-chase sequence for how long each shot runs. (cutting)
John Gilroy builds real speed without shredding the images into frenzy. The cutting stays legible and observational even at maximum velocity.
Payoff: You are kept watching clearly rather than swept along, which leaves your appetite for the footage exposed.
Carry this in: Watch what Lou does with his hands when he stops filming and steps toward the scene.