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.
Payoff: The blocking shows a man who watches through a device instead of standing in the scene.
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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where Lou stands in relation to his camera. The lens sits between him and everything he films.