Not since Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) have characters been chewed and spat out by TV news quite like they have been of late at the movies, with David Fincher's Gone Girl and Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler both presenting portraits of a preying, narrative-distorting media, whether staked out on the lawn or hunting down a homicide for the 11 o'clock news.
While these two 2014 films differ greatly and have other thoughts in their heads, both show the behind-the-scenes pursuit of that old mantra: "If it bleeds, it leads." They join a rich tradition of films that have found drama in the not-always-altruistic machinations of the news.
The tart, shadowy The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) relished the sordid power play between a big-time columnist and a desperate press agent. Michael Mann's 1999 60 Minutes whistle-blower tale The Insider captured the looming threat of corporate interference. And just as it did in Network - the story of "a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings" - the grim spectre of Nielsen hovers over Nightcrawler.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a loner who becomes enamoured of the sleazy, ambulance-chasing business of freelance video for the local news in writer-director Gilroy's crime thriller. His rise is aided not just by his lack of ethics and willingness to manipulate crime scenes for dramatic effect, but by a TV producer (Rene Russo) striving to raise the late-night programme from the bottom of the ratings.
In one scene, she wonders about particularly grisly footage of a home invasion: "Can we show this?" Another producer asks, "Legally?" and she sarcastically responds, "No, morally. Of course legally."
Gilroy says he went out of his way not to judge the media. "I don't think the media's flawed," he says. "The media is part of a much larger math equation."
Nightcrawler mostly takes after Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder's 1951 film noir in which Kirk Douglas, playing a big-city reporter stopping over in Albuquerque, New Mexico, orchestrates a media circus out of a man trapped in a cave. "Bad news sells best," he instructs. "Good news is no news." But while the older film focuses on the fraudulence of a down-and-out reporter, Gilroy sees the nocturnal operators of Nightcrawler as cogs in a much larger machine built around satisfying demand.