The sordid side of TV news
The depiction of the US media scene in the film Nightcrawler - zero ethics and standards - should alarm us. How long before India gets there too,
asks VIKRAM JOHRI (Pix: The Viral Fever video).
Concomitant with the release of Interstellar last week, the American media informed us that Matthew Nolan, the older brother of director Christopher Nolan, had been arrested by the FBI in Chicago and was awaiting deportation to Costa Rica where he faces murder and kidnapping charges. No attempt was made to explain why this news was useful to the lay reader/viewer, unless he were a genetic scientist and wished to explore how the same gene pool can effect vastly different outcomes.
It is this search for sensationalism, the looking out for the damned and the (not yet) departed that is the subject of the other big release of the past week. In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, an unemployed young man with a penchant for MBA-speak that he picked up online. Down and out in Los Angeles, and scraping a living as a thief, he chances upon an accident site one night. A woman’s car is on fire after hitting the pavement, and the police are at the scene to rescue her. But what catches Bloom’s attention is the bevy of cameras that are also at hand with motley crew shooting the scene from various angles. He is fascinated, if that is the appropriate word, and begins “nightcrawling”.
But this is no ordinary worker of the vampire shift. Bloom is a hardened sociopath who will let nothing come in the way of his success: “I did a course on entrepreneurship,” he tells editor Nina Romina (Rene Russo), “which taught me the importance of making a business plan. The first step is to find something that you love. I have a list of jobs I might like doing, which I update every year. I think I might finally settle on TV news.”
To prove his worth, Bloom goes deeper into the game, eliminating competition, attuned always to the right angle here, the arresting visual there. On one occasion, unable to get “good shots” of an accident victim due to poor lighting, Bloom shifts the body to appear in the headlights of the crashed car. On another occasion, he builds an elaborate artifice to get a story that damns any of journalism’s moral or ethical considerations.
In Nina, he finds an amiable accomplice. As editor, she runs all of Bloom’s distasteful videos, shooting down criticism from within her department. Who can complain when viewership spikes, so that she and Bloom come to share a symbiotic relationship built on depravity and prurience.
From abusing his bargaining power vis-à-vis Nina to getting rid of his assistant Richard (Riz Ahmed), Gyllenhaal fully channels the devil. That his words ironically drip with the wisdom of corporate warriors makes this anti-hero strangely mesmeric. Director Dan Gilroy maintains the tempo and the music runs in step with Bloom’s perception of the situation, so what we hear is rarely tragic.
Nightcrawler is a sharp indictment of the media scene in the US. With newspapers shutting down, local TV stations are going to great lengths to capture eyeballs. One (arguably authentic) statistic from the film compares the time devoted to national issues such as defence and immigration with that devoted to local crime – the former is a mere percentage of the latter.
But the crime too needs to be the right kind. As Nina tells Bloom in the beginning: "Get me crime that's creeping into the suburbs – rich, white locations – crime preferably committed by a member of the minority." This is the anxiety that she and her ilk prey upon. The more gruesome the crime, the greater the (manufactured) outrage. As a stringer in the film says: "If it bleeds, it leads."
The movie may be fictive and set in another country but look closer and there are parallels with the scene back home. When spoof websites poke fun at the media, the result is mostly funny, as I have chronicled in an earlier piece. But what The Viral Fever did with their latest video "The Making of Breaking News" is more disturbing than comedic.
Reminiscent of a lot of news we are served today, where it is tough separating fact from fiction, the spoof shows an old media hand emerging from retirement at the request of a TV editor to stir up viewership figures.
And what a concoction he stirs! He advocates a story called "Kyun maanglik ho rahi hain hamari mahilayein" in which the blame for the spike in broken marriages is laid at the feet of India's Mangalyaan mission. The story employs every trick in the sordid trade, one that viewers will instantly recognize, from shouting panelists to a gratuitous inclusion of sex, not to mention a Twitter hashtag #MaanglikMahila.
It seems so tragically real that one must remind oneself that it's only a spoof. As the channel gets back to the top of the league, the old media hand signs off: "A high-TRP story is like a five-star dish. It must have every recipe – drama, violence, sex – in good measure."
At the end of Nightcrawler, Bloom does not meet his just desserts. His production company has gone from strength to strength and he is now hiring interns to help him expand. The Indian scene may not be there yet, but parts of it sure seem to hanker after such a disquieting landscape.
(Vikram Johri is a Bangalore-based writer. He tweets at @VohariJikram.)
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