The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY SEVEN

Beginning with its opening shot of a full moon, Nightcrawler hums with the limitless potential of Los Angeles at night. Jake Gyllenhaal plays professional thief and aspiring entrepreneur Lou Bloom, who shifts lanes into the high-adrenaline world of the nightcrawlers – freelance news cameramen who eavesdrop on police radios and race through the nocturnal streets of L.A. for graphic crime and accident footage – when he gets a taste of the money and the excitement there is to be sucked from human suffering. Gyllenhaal turns in an electric performance as the bizarre and intriguing Bloom, whose drive to get closer to the carnage than his competitors takes him first into situations of questionable ethics and then into outright illegality and endangerment of police officers and the public. The always diverting Bill Paxton appears as a rival nightcrawler, while sexy Rene Russo is a rung on Bloom’s ladder of self-promotion.

5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Nightcrawler is:

5. Anti-drug. Among the titles of Bloom’s salacious videos are “D.W.I. crash kills four” and “drunk mom kills biker”.

4. Pro-police. Cops are depicted as brave men who risk their lives to protect the citizenry. California Highway Patrolmen are shown putting themselves in peril to pull a woman from her burning vehicle.

3. Anti-white. “We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs,” says news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo). “What that means is the victim or victim’s preferably well-off – and white – injured at the hands of the poor or a minority.” The suggestion that television news ignores black victimhood in favor of rich whites is preposterous. Many news organizations, in fact, have policies of censoring information about black criminal activity – particularly when whites are the victims. Anybody who casually watches the news knows who Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray are – and even a misbehaving South Carolina schoolgirl has been receiving a lot of press of late because an insufficiently obsequious white cop yanked her out of her desk – but how many Americans could name a single white person murdered by a congoid within the last five years?

2. Media-critical and anti-capitalistic. Nightcrawler presents the television news industry as the worst, most nihilistic manifestation of capitalism, with human drama and suffering commoditized and exploited for titillation and ratings. Bloom blurs the line between objective documentary reportage and filmmaking when he drags a crash victim’s body to get a better shot.

1. Anti-Semitic! Bloom is an icy, emotionless freak who thinks of every situation in terms of potential profit and exercise of control. Even his sexual come-on to Nina Romina is conceived as an impersonal business negotiation. The viewer is told that Romina resists unspecified sexual demands from Bloom, which suggests that he may have deviant tastes. He exploits the gullibility of assistant Rick (Riz Ahmed) and shows no pity or human interest as he lies bleeding in a street.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

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