The Nightcrawler- Exploitation under Capitalism

The Nightcrawler is about LA hustler Lou Bloom finding a job as a nightcrawler, a job where he hunts for violent crime scene footage to sell to local news stations. Lou excels at this gig because doesn’t mind the job’s core duties: exploiting others’ suffering for money. Emboldened by his success, he uses his growing leverage to exploit the people around him. He’s able to do this not just because he’s a smooth talker and he lacks morals, but because the capitalistic system allows, or even encourages him to do so.

Lou;s first victim is a homeless man named Rick (played skillfully by Riz Ahmed). While interviewing for job at Lou’s “successful company”, Rick cluelessly admits his homelessness, lack of any experience or skills and by all measures fails his interview. Nevertheless, by admitting his financial state and by letting the words “I’ll do pretty much anything” slip, he became the ideal job candidate. His desperation for money as a homeless man allows Lou to impose his will onto Rick, all for a measly 30 dollars per night. Rick works long hours giving directions while Lou nearly kills them both racing to crime scene after crime scene. Homelessness is caused by, among other things, a lack of government-provided services. With no other option, homeless people, or really anyone in a poor financial state, can be easily exploited by people hungry for criminally cheap or unsafe labor trying to save a buck. An example of this is sweatshops, where workers are forced to work in cramped, hazardous factories for unlawfully low wages, usually for first-world country companies looking to cut costs by flouting labour laws. Not only do these businesses serve no consequences for their actions, but they’re often hugely successful. Unregulated capitalism both fails to protect its citizens and rewards those who abuse them.

Lou’s most sickening exploitation is that of Nina, the no-nonsense news director and Lou’s most frequent customer. Ousted from one contract to another, her job is in a tenuous position at Channel 6 News, driving her to disregard ethics and to consistently use Lou’s gruesome footage to lead her stories and drive ratings. Lou sees an opportunity and extorts her job insecurity by threatening to withhold his footage in exchange for sexual favours from her. Without a hint of emotion, he lays out to her why he’s certain that if Nina doesn’t give in, the loss of his footage will cause her to lose her job, and more specifically her health insurance. This sort of undisguised misconduct works so well is because under a capitalistic system, is because there is no universal healthcare to guarantee her coverage if she loses her job. While it’s possible Nina could’ve been entitled to programs like Medicare and COBRA, many are at the mercy of exorbitant private costs and susceptible to healthcare bankruptcy or worse. Lou’s threats wouldn’t have succeeded had the government provided a guarantee to services such a healthcare to those in need and not been influenced by neoliberal version of capitalism which favours the free market, often by opposing things like public healthcare. Eventually, Nina gives in to Lou’s growing demands of reward, financial or otherwise, and convinces herself that Lou is “inspiring all of us to reach a little higher”, a sad example of the cognitive dissonance of people stuck in a capitalistic system

Temperament is the reason why Lou thrives under capitalism. It’s no accident the film opens with Lou assaulting and robbing a security guard because he noticed the luster of his watch. His continuous criminal violations and unsettling lack of fear displays that Lou isn’t just a hustler, but a psychopath who’ll do anything for money. When put in a business perspective, a psychopath’s inherent lack of empathy for others makes them hyper-capitalists. They are physiologically unable to care for anything but their bottom line. This is shown when Rick sees Lou withhold evidence from the police. Aware of his dangerous position as intern/accomplice, Rick demands that he be paid half of their earnings for tonight’s sale. While this isn’t an unreasonable request for a perilous two-man job, Lou sees it as a threat to his sole concern, which is why the first chance he gets, he tricks Rick into being killed by a runaway murderer. Standing over Rick’s dying body, Lou explains that this had to happen because he “can’t jeopardize his company’s success to retain an untrustworthy employee”. From a hypercapitalist point of view, this was just an unavoidable business decision because it protected the only thing that mattered: money (it’s later shown that Lou films and sells footage of Rick’s death, allowing Lou to squeeze one last bit of profit out of his employee’s corpse). This allegory isn’t very far from our own world. Unregulated capitalism tends to forgo human life for money. Look no further than the pandemic, where some businesses like Starbucks preferred to endanger their employees by staying open and putting them at risk of contracting COVID-19. In this system, our humanity is perpetually the runner-up to our own greed.

Rick’s death isn’t the first time Lou has a used corporate language to justify an evil. From the moment he started his business, Lou became a devious Silicon Valley Startup manager, using professionalism and business phrases to manipulate others for his own benefit. After finding out that Rick is homeless in his interview, Lou offers him not a job, but an unpaid internship. His reasons with Rick by claiming he’s “giving you the chance to explore career options and gain insight into my organization”. This phrasing hides the labor exploitation by making it appear like Lou is doing Rick a favor by making him work for no material compensation. Businesses often use this kind of capitalistic rhetoric to embellish their own image, putting employees in a position of indebtedness which makes them easier to exploit.

By the end of the movie, we see that Lou has not only evaded any consequences for his crimes but has expanded his business with shiny new vans and unsuspecting interns. It would be easy to say that Lou is a one-off menace whose success was the result of dumb luck. But to say that would be ignoring that fact that Lou only succeeded because the system allowed him to. Unregulated capitalism is a system that rewards those who exploit others and ignore morals in favour of their own bottom line. The system empowered Lou, a psychopath but more importantly an opportunist, to squeeze out most possible success out of his coworkers, who were forced to either bend to his will or be eliminated. In real life, it's not usually psychopaths who're the sole beneficiaries, it's regular people who are seduced by the dividends our merciless system offers. It’s only until we recognize these flaws in our society that we can create policies to minimize abuse caused by people and businesses who become like Lou.

1.https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm4w8/starbucks-employees-are-begging-the-company-to-shut-down-stores-because-of-coronavirus-coffee-is-not-essential