Nightcrawler: Nihilism, Neuroses and the Portrait of a Sociopath

by Christopher Barr

Nihilism – total and absolute destructiveness, especially toward the world at large and including oneself.

False

Evidence

Appearing

Real

“It’s not that I don’t understand people; it’s that I don’t like them.”

There are some spoilers ahead.

Nightcrawler is a scathing film about a strange young man that happens upon the dark and exciting world of freelance, crime video journalism along the dark nocturnal streets of Los Angeles.  Lou Bloom pursues a career in this underworld, action-packed video reporting to such an extent that he not only alters crime scenes to get great footage, he obstructs murder investigations for his own career boosting benefit.

The film is a disturbing take on the state of humanity within the moral urban landscape.  Lou is a detail-oriented, sociopathic individual that is a product of a society that produces such ‘motivated’ people.  This socio-side effect is a result of the upper class squeezing the lower class to such a degree that some lose, or never install, the basic levels of humanity that is expected in a ‘civilized’ society, such as compassion and empathy.

The story surrounds Lou's unrelenting desire to not only succeed but to be seen doing it.  We as an audience member follow along with this cold-calculating modern man as he, quite unsympathetically, injects himself into active crime scenes and/or car crashes without any consideration of the police, fire department and paramedics who are trying to do their jobs.  His blood-thirst becomes only about the story, which leads to the sale of the video, which will lead to financial rewards and above all, notoriety.   

Nightcrawler is a portrait of a decaying society that is unfolding all around us, but as long as we see this pre-apocalypse unfold on television, most seem somewhat fine with that.  The evidence of their complicity can be found in the inaction of the majority of the inhabitants of most major cities.  Adopting apathy and employing indifference becomes a survival mechanism that fuels the very problem in the first place.  People become scared to do anything as the authority in any given society squeezes their control over their workers.

Lou Bloom is a nihilistic man operating, freely among most people that would pride themselves on their own code of ethics.  Lou dodges morality with the indifference of a scorpion.  He crawls his way over the corpses of nameless people to get the correct angle on his camera for the most terrifying effect.  Lou believes in nothing other than succeeding for his own purposes, he has no loyalties toward anyone in his environment, people to him are an expendable means to an ends. He’s a fastidious individual that bleeds for control and dominates others because he hates weakness but admires and is desperate for strength.

He’s a product of an internet-educated generation that feels self-righteous to such an extent of what he has learned, on his on-line business courses, that he is didactically motivated to spread this meme to anyone who will listen, believing wholeheartedly that he’s providing them a service that will benefit their entire lives.

“Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.  Life itself still remains a very effective therapist… The therapy affected by life itself is not, however, within one’s control.  Neither hardships nor friendships nor religious experience can be arranged to meet the needs of the particular individual.  Life as a therapist is ruthless; circumstances that are helpful to one neurotic may entirely crush another.”

 – Karen Horney

Karen Horney was a German Psychoanalyst from the first half of the 20^th century whose work on neuroses is to this day, considered crucial when attempting to understand the neurotic mind.  Interpersonal relationships created by basic anxiety Horney described as, “The feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world.”  Karen Horney held that basic anxieties were the root to the neuroses that was developed as a method to deal with them.   She identified three categories that these neurotic needs could be classified under.  Within these categories she saw the well-adjusted individual as someone that could apply all three of these categories in the function of their daily lives.  The neurotic individual was someone she saw overusing or dominating one or more of these categories and decentralizing the remaining categories.

The three categories of Karen Horney’s theory of neuroses are as follows:

Needs that move an individual toward other people.

Moving toward people, the self-effacing solution, here is the desire for affection and approval by way of pleasing others and being liked by them.  There is this tendency to need a partner, a person they can love and solve all their problems.

Needs that move an individual against other people.

Moving against people, the expansive solution, this avoidance of humiliation reflects an undying need for power; this often leads to bending the wills of others to achieve control over them.  Exploiting others to get the better of them is another way for this individual to become manipulative, resulting in the notion that people are simply there to be used.  This person needs social recognition under a limelight while experiencing a personal admiration and achievement for themselves. 

Needs that move an individual away from other people.

Moving away from people, the resignation solution, provides a need for self-sufficiency and independence, while autonomy is desired by most people; the neurotic individual may simply wish to discard other individuals entirely.  Often with a need for perfection this person may avoid other people for the purpose of avoiding their own fear of being slightly flawed.

Lou has some of each of these categories swirling within him but ‘Moving Against Other People’ is the dominating category that describes his level of neuroses.  He has a need for power, a need to exploit other people (as he does with his employee Rick), a need for prestige, a need for personal achievement and a need for personal admiration.  As a result he’s become one of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’, a solipsistic no-man that simply feeds off his environment.  Lou has sub-consciously created a basic anxiety that is coping toward/against/away from the idealized image of himself and forcing him to self-alienate from his real self.

Lou’s nihilism is symbolic to the corrosive affects that if unchecked could lead to the end of the species.  This is a grand epistemological failure on society’s part, where values are destroyed and cosmic purposelessness becomes a preoccupation to the people of the modern world, to a polarizing affect.  Society has failed at dealing with these underbelly issues and has instead swept them under the carpet. Prisons are full of people that don't actually need to be there, but because they started with nothing and was given nothing for the most part to achieve a respectable quality of life, they've chosen crime as a means of survival.

Lou's means of survival was operating as a petty thief, he then buys a camera and a police banner and becomes a nightcrawler, which is what people who frantically speed to accidents and crime scenes to film them are called.  With the aid of Nina, a veteran producer and news director of the local TV news, Lou predatorily hunts the disparity swelling in the city and brings the footage for Nina to air on her morally questionable television news program.  Nina is a ruthless news-hound, who herself would step over the bodies of dying children to get a good story.  When she meets Lou and learns of his tactics at getting his leads, she is even a little stunned.  Nina at first appears as if she’s seen it all but it’s still no match for how low Lou is willing to go to get what he wants.

“Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air is think of our newscast as a screaming woman, running down the street with her throat cut.” 

- Nina

Lou begins to manipulate the crime scenes by moving bodies around to get better camera angles.  He enters a house with two people that have been shot to dead minutes earlier and one soon to be dead man lying on the kitchen floor.  Lou quite cavalierly films the blood-bath with a calm steady camera just as one might film a flower garden.  Lou often holds a smirk on his face as he did in the 'house of horror' that assures us that he isn’t fazed at all by what he’s been witnessing.

Existentialist Philosopher Kierkegaard's insight that one can lose one's soul and somehow not miss its absence is echoed in Horney’s views on alienation.  Lou never changes his attitude over the course of the film; he never sees what he is.  His story arch is a career arch, not a character arch, his only interest is to be noticed in his brand new shiny blood-red ostentatious sports car, signifying his success and his manliness.  He becomes, if anything, more sinister, more ruthless by the end of the film.  Like with the end of David Fincher’s Se7en, although nowhere near as monstrous, Nightcrawler’s writer and director Dan Gilroy is stating that this type of individual is a problem in society and is one that isn’t going away.   

This type of individual that symbolically consumes other people can be found in most of all our institutions and corporate board rooms.  This existential disparity is becoming more and more pervasive in society and the news and those that report it are often complicit in distorting reality to make their leads, juicier.  Nightcrawler from beginning to end is a tragedy and if the audience doesn’t see that then what can be said about the future, that hasn’t been conveyed in the eyes of Lou, when he rushes up to an accident and damn near rams his camera lens into the face of a helpless victim without ever considering once if he should help them.   

“The neurotic feels caught in a cellar with many doors, and whichever door he opens leads only into new darkness.  And all the time he knows that others are walking outside in sunshine.  I do not believe that one can understand any severe neurosis without recognizing the paralyzing hopelessness which it contains… It may be difficult then to see that behind all the odd vanities, demands, hostilities, there is a human being who suffers, who feels forever excluded from all that makes life desirable, who knows that even if he gets what he wants he cannot enjoy it.  When one recognizes the existence of all this hopelessness it should not be difficult to understand what appears to be an excessive aggressiveness or even meanness, unexplainable by the particular situation.  A person so shut out from every possibility of happiness would have to be a veritable angel if he did not feel hatred toward a world he cannot belong to.” 

- Karen Horney