Spring2016-Wysocki

"False Evidence Appearing Real": The Fear of Media in Nightcrawler

Rick Wysocki

I begin this essay with two claims. First, a broad one: Nightcrawler¹ (2014) is a film about media, a meta-mediatic artifact. Second, and more specifically, Nightcrawler invites its audience to consider the media-saturated in which we find ourselves, and it does so by delivering a narrative that draws attention to the agency of reticulated media constellations, on the one hand, and the functions of human beings within them on another. “Do you know what fear stands for?” asks Louis Bloom, the sociopathic focal character of the film, to Rick, the unfortunate individual Bloom has duped into his service. “False evidence appearing real.” In its depiction of the battle between truth and representation, Nightcrawler brings us to fear not just the egregiously immoral Louis Bloom, but also the media apparatus that mobilizes him, that grants significance and value to his acts, and that offers him his social existence.

That the film is about media is not necessarily evident, however. In fact, it offers at least two possible lines of interpretation. One is conventional and humanist in that it emphasizes the (im)moral agency of Nightcrawler’s protagonist. The other is more radical and, at least to some degree, is invested in a particular idea of the posthuman by focusing on the agency of media machines. The former is not difficult to trace. Louis Bloom, a calculating and conniving (though, initially, petty) thief realizes the monetary and social rewards that can be gained by capitalizing on the trauma of others. Having made this discovery, he trades a stolen bike for camera equipment and begins to film shootings, car accidents, and other injurious events with his “employee” Rick, a social “nobody” who Bloom pays $30 per night. As he says toward the end of the film, “I like to say that if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life.” Bloom finds that he can sell such footage to Nina Romina, an unscrupulous news director, but quickly recognizes that he is unable to get to the sites and acquire the necessary recordings in an adequate fashion. Drunk on the monetary rewards, as well as perverse sexual pleasures he coerces from Romina in return for providing her with increased ratings, he begins to carry out increasingly flagrant acts that include manipulating crime scenes to achieve desired shots, sabotaging a rival film crew’s car (and then recording and selling footage of their accident), and filming active crime scenes before the police arrive. In what he calls his “critical moment” he uses information he has withheld from the police in order to force a police shootout and multiple fatalities. He records the events and sells the film. While Nightcrawler ends with the greatest injustice—Bloom in unable to be proven guilty for inciting the shootout and his “business” only grows—this interpretation of the narrative arc is marked by humanism inasmuch as Bloom is understand as the primary agent of its unfolding.

But, as Vilém Flusser helps illuminate in his short text Towards a Philosophy of Photography, there is another, subtler mechanism at work in the film that allows for the posthuman reading mentioned above. In his book, Flusser provides a way of thinking about photography and, I argue, about media generally, as a fundamentally technical phenomenon. Indeed, as he claims, the study of the technical image—“an image produced by apparatuses”—has been glossed over in favor of studies that focus on the cultural work of the images themselves.² From Flusser’s perspective, however, one cannot comprehend the latter until a robust theory of the former is developed; this is the task of his monograph.

The central concept offered is that of the apparatus. Flusser describes this term, in relation to photography and technical media devices generally, as

a complex plaything, so complex that those playing with it are not able to get to the bottom of it; its game consists of combinations of the symbols contained within its program; at the same time this program was installed by a metaprogram and the game results in further programs; whereas fully automated apparatuses can do without human intervention, many apparatuses require the human being as a player and a functionary.³

Apparatuses, then, are complex programmatic devices (that may or may not demand human input) and are in a certain sense fractal inasmuch as the program of one apparatus might contain and be contained by others. As technical media devices, apparatuses accept only those inputs that are allowed by their program, and thus create a feedback loop that ensnares the user: photographers play within the program of their cameras, exploring its possibilities and encouraging technical development, and these developments provide new programmatic possibilities for the photographers themselves. This loop effectually leads to an inversion that calls on “society to act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras.”⁴ Importantly, however, apparatuses can be both cultural/political (“soft”) or technical (“hard”).⁵

Attending to Flusser’s articulation of the media apparatus has certain consequences for one’s interpretation of the film in question. Consider the long list of technical media apparatuses that move the plot: the camcorder, the police scanner, the television, the cellular telephone with its GPS guidance, the computer, and the internet in which Bloom is consistently framed as having partaken in too heavily. At the same time, there is the soft apparatus formed by a news director morally blinded by her history of failed jobs, the broadcasting platform of the network she works for, and a popular audience with a desire for blood implied by the spike in ratings following the release of each piece of Bloom’s footage. This is not a humanist picture. As Bloom downloads and meticulously titles each news story featuring his ill-begotten tape to his computer, the camera focuses on the words appearing on the screen almost to suggest that they are typing themselves. By dragging the body to light, by inciting murder, Bloom is not the agent of humanism but a posthuman functionary mediating information between both hard and soft apparatuses. He is delivering the apparatus what it wants.

The stakes of this meta-mediatic portrayal, for Flusser, are clear. He writes of the photographic impulse that

People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not ‘in charge of’ taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension to the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions. . . . What they [photographers] produce are not memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.⁶

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum is thereby reversed. Machines are not the prosthetics of humans, but the opposite, and we see this in the way that Bloom acts as a conduit in the feedback loop between the technical apparatuses that enable him and the social apparatuses which valorize his footage. In this loop, truth claims, memory, and human agency are dissolved. This is the horror represented in Nightcrawler. A detective knows the “truth” about Bloom’s actions, but Bloom’s skill is precisely changing the truth to fit the needs of media apparatuses. As Flusser says, “Concepts no longer signify the world out there (as in the Cartesian model); instead, the universe signifies the program within cameras. . . . Cameras know everything and are able to do everything in a universe that was programmed in advance for this knowledge and ability” (68). Rendering Louis Bloom as a mediating function between technical devices, social structures, and economic desires, Nightcrawler asks us to fear the media.

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1. Nightcrawler. Dir. Dan Gilroy. Bold Films, 2014. Film.

2. Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. 14.

3. Ibid 31.

4. Ibid 48.

5. Ibid 30.

6. Ibid 59.