Thousands of Years of Love

The Coyote of Los Angeles

You can practically smell the desperation on Lou Bloom before he even speaks. When we first meet him in Dan Gilroy’s *Nightcrawler*, he’s cutting through a chain-link fence in the middle of the night to steal scrap metal. He doesn't look like a criminal mastermind; he just looks starving. Jake Gyllenhaal lost nearly thirty pounds for the role, and it shows in his gaunt, hollowed face and bulging eyes. Gilroy apparently modeled Lou on a coyote—an animal that always looks like it hasn't eaten in weeks. It’s an unsettling, brilliant move. Lou is a scavenger prowling the neon-lit asphalt of L.A., waiting for the next thing to bleed.



Gilroy, a veteran writer making his directorial debut, originally wanted to tell a story about Weegee, the 1930s crime photographer. When the period setting didn't work out, he looked at modern L.A. and found 'stringers'—the freelancers who chase police scanners to sell footage to morning news stations. But *Nightcrawler* isn't just about journalism; that’s too easy a target. Instead, it plays like a pitch-black comedy about corporate capitalism. Lou doesn't talk like a killer; he speaks in boardroom jargon and self-help quotes he probably found online. He genuinely thinks he’s an entrepreneur.



There’s a scene in the middle of the film that really sticks with you. Lou gets to a fatal wreck before the police, but the lighting isn't right. So, he calmly reaches down and drags the bleeding victim into the glow of the headlights, framing the shot like a painting. It’s a horrifying breach of morality, yet Robert Elswit’s cinematography makes it look sickeningly beautiful. We’re watching Lou watch the body through a viewfinder, and the scary part is that we want to see it too. We’re part of the transaction.



Gyllenhaal had spent a few years trying to find his footing, moving into darker work like *Prisoners* and *End of Watch*. But Lou Bloom is his masterpiece. He sheds all his leading-man charm and becomes something reptilian. As Jonathan Romney noted in *The Guardian*, "The insights about the moral vacancy of TV news are hardly novel, but what gives Nightcrawler its class is Gyllenhaal's unnerving, sometimes icily comic performance." I don't think the movie works without him holding it all together. He makes Lou’s rise feel disturbingly inevitable. By the end, you aren't just afraid of Lou Bloom; you’re afraid of the world that rewards him.