Here's what the ending to Nightcrawler and its final scene really mean. The idea for the film came to writer-director Dan Gilroy in 1988 and was inspired by Naked City, a photo-book by Arthur (Usher) Fellig - better known by his pseudonym, Weegee - that got him interested in making a movie about the criminal side of photojournalism and sensationalized news. After Gilroy moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, the project gradually morphed into a satirical thriller inspired by his observations of the city's local news stations and their obsession with covering stories of violent crime. He eventually made his directorial debut on Nightcrawler in 2014, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo (who is married to Gilroy) starring opposite then lesser-known Riz Ahmed and the late Bill Paxton.
The movie follows Louis "Lou" Bloom (Gyllenhaal), a mysteriously gaunt man who makes a living committing minor crimes in L.A. One night, after witnessing the aftermath of a horrific car crash and encountering a group of stringers or freelance photojournalists (Paxton's Joe Loder among them) hoping to record footage of the accident and sell it to local news stations, Lou is motivated to become a stringer himself. Over time, and through sheer perseverance, Lou establishes an unscrupulous, yet mutually beneficial, working relationship with KWLA 6's morning news director Nina Romina (Russo), selling her exclusive footage of violent incidents in predominantly white, upper-class L.A. neighborhoods.
Along the way, Lou hires an assistant - the cash-strapped hustler Rick (Ahmed) - and becomes complicit in the very atrocities he's covering by tampering with crime scenes and withholding evidence from the police if it means getting an exclusive "scoop". He only continues to escalate things from there, even blackmailing Nina into sleeping with him and, after he beats Lou to a major story, sabotaging Joe's van and causing him to get into a debilitating crash (which Lou - of course! - then records footage of and sells for profit). Yet, in spite of his despicable actions, Lou only continues to prosper in his career... which is the entire point Gilroy is working to get across.
Lou's Victory in Nightcrawler's Ending
Like so many other famous antiheroes, whether they're Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley or Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, Lou isn't who he claims to be starting out. Far from an experienced photojournalist and reputable professional, he's nothing more than a common criminal with no qualms about doing what it takes to get ahead. Yet, whether he's pawning a stolen bike to acquire a camera and police scanner or negotiating (read: telling) Nina what she'll have to do if she wants exclusive access to his footage, Lou understands all he needs to do is commit to the role and he'll be rewarded. In her own analysis of Nightcrawler, critic/writer Alyssa Rosenberg describes Lou as "a perfect example of what entitlement looks like, and the ways in which it can act as a superpower." It's no accident he's abled-bodied, straight, cisgender, white, and male either: the film recognizes all too well Lou's act wouldn't work unless he was always one of the most (if not the most) privileged people in the room at any given time.
From the very beginning of the movie, Lou's performance is completely polished and it never wavers whenever he's in front of other people. (In private, he does allow himself to let off some steam by screaming at and smashing a mirror in one particularly memorable scene.) By the end of the film, he's even hiring interns for his business, which he's dubbed Video Production News, and delivering motivational speeches meant to encourage them to become employees deserving of the "respectability" that comes with the honor. It doesn't really matter if he's still pretending to be something he's not or has essentially become the entrepreneur he was selling himself as for most of Nightcrawler. What's important is that people now fully believe he is what he says, and in that respect Lou emerges victorious.
Is Nightcrawler's Ending Real or Inside Lou's Head?
For years, there's been the ending to the Martin Scorsese classic Taxi Driver, a movie Nightcrawler has been compared to ever since it came out.
Problem is, this would completely undercut what Nightcrawler is going for. Whereas Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle is an inherently tragic character (he's a disturbed Vietnam War veteran who increasingly descends into insanity), there's nothing sympathetic about Lou. He doesn't get a happy ending in spite of everything he did or because his actions were misunderstood, he succeeds precisely because of what he did. It's an extension of the film's larger criticism of the American Dream and how capitalism rewards those who make their way to the top, regardless of what they did to get there or the advantages they had. Furthermore, there aren't any clear visual cues or indicators that signal something's off about Nightcrawler's final minutes (even something subtle, like the way Travis reacts after looking in his cab's review mirror in the final shot of Taxi Driver). The film brings its setting to life with a stark, documentary-esque sense of realism in the early going and carries the approach on through to its dark conclusion, thusly cementing that everything we were shown took place in the same version of reality.
Nightcrawler Dissects The Problems With Modern News Media
Fake News might be a loaded term nowadays, but Nightcrawler does an excellent job of showing was Fake News actually looks like, e.g. sensationalized headlines and stories that are reported on not because they're of great importance to the general public, but because they're huge ratings draws, and often reinforce what people want to believe about the world (and/or what those who run the media decide they should believe). In an interview he gave to Deadline shortly after the film's release, Gilroy confirmed Nightcrawler is intended to be as much a critique of viewers as modern-day media, saying "As much as we indict local news in this film, we always hoped people would make the connection that ultimately, we, the viewers, are the s of the images that get shown on TV. We are part of that system; whatever is being fed to us, and we consume it like fast food, keeps coming because we seem to demand it." It's far from the first movie to examine the inevitable outcome of profit-driven news (a topic Network famously tackled as far back as 1976), but it does so in a way that's especially relevant for the 21st century.
Nightcrawler's Nina Shows America's Class Issues
There's a specific development towards the end of Nightcrawler that really drives home the movie's points about how the media and general public both portray and perceive the world, particularly when it comes to class. When the KWLA 6 news team learns the home invasion that drives much of the action during the film's second half was actually about the criminals responsible trying to steal some cocaine the homeowners were hiding, Nina refuses to include those details as part of the story and withholds footage of the incident from the police. It's all part of her plan to make certain the story has the desired impact, as far as its ability to draw heavy viewership goes. The idea the movie is getting at is pretty clear: a story about some rich people whose illegal drugs got stolen wouldn't sell the way a narrative where the victims are kindly, affluent people would. This alludes to a more deeply-rooted ideology in America of the working-class and impoverished being the criminals who steal from the upper-class, and not vice versa. It's the same reason why Lou and Rick frequent the wealthier parts of L.A. at night, waiting for something terrible to happen (regardless of context).
What Nightcrawler's Ending Really Means
Purely from a storytelling perspective, the thing that makes Nightcrawler so effective is its willingness to acknowledge the problem goes beyond Lou as a person and a profit-driven news media, all the way to the structures that allow them to thrive in the first place. As the film demonstrates, the American Dream is all about attaining power in whatever form it comes in, money and fame especially, and being willing to step over others as you race to the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it). The whole thing is built on capitalism, a system that determines success by how far you get ahead, with little to no concern for the morality of your actions and the effect it has on those less fortunate. It's why Lou's happy ending has to be real and the movie, as a whole, isn't merely an exercise in nihilism: its reprehensible protagonist didn't win because nothing matters or in spite of the American system, he got what he wanted because the system was designed to reward people who do the things he and Nina (who prove to be a truly perfect match) are willing to do.
In that regard, Nightcrawler has less in common with the likes of Taxi Driver and Network (as much as it immediately brings those films to mind) and more with something like Bong Joon-ho's Best Picture Oscar-winner Parasite. Whereas the latter critiques capitalism through the lens of a story about characters trying to improve their financial standing, Gilroy's movie does so by turning its attention to modern news media and the loop between what they sell to the masses and what their audiences come to demand in return. The reason Lou gets a happy ending and the protagonists in Parasite do not is because he fully understands just how terrible this system really is, and has no scruples ing that to benefit himself and take advantage of any and all of the privileges it's afforded to him. It just goes to show: when Lou closes out the film by telling his interns matter of factly "I will never ask you to do anything that I wouldn't do myself," he means it in the most chilling way possible.
