Nightcrawler (2014)

**Survival of the Batsh!t Craziest** Here we have a sociopath for the digital age. A _Taxi Driver_ for the early 21st Century. Louis Bloom might have been born yesterday, just before taking an online course in Small Business Management, the new way to self-educate, without the petty annoyances of human contact and interaction. Every basic lesson he absorbed is put to the test with the obsessive solitary singular purpose of succeeding. Jake Gyllenhaal immerses himself in the role with psychotic stupor. He speaks with the same forward-plotting conviction whether tossing about obvious clichés or revealing something brilliant. The perfect entrepreneur. A maniacal detached idiot savant on a ruthless predatory mission. Morality and the legal system are minor roadblocks to dodge, riddles to resolve, sentiments to overcome. His brand of narcissistic psychosis is a genetic mutation that insures the survival of the species. Like an Aryan bulldozer, he cripples and kills the weak, exploiting the flaws in humanity, cannibalizing the limits of civilization, and capitalizing on each opportunity every step of the way, all for his own personal gain. All while intuiting which backs to scratch and/or stab and when. The perfect entrepreneur. The quintessential post-9/11 movie hero. Where Travis Bickle sought to take down corruption to rescue the innocent, Louis Bloom does the opposite, preying on the fallen and severing the social codes and mores that bind us for his own solitary success. American Exceptionalism. Nightcrawler is nanoeconomics in its purest, most wicked and vicious form. I'm sure some may see it not so much as a comment on what ails us but as an inspiration to venture out from, and Bloom as a persistent determined role model to imitate. How-to-Succeed-in Business-Without-Feeling. Humanity is merely a construct that can be subjugated, an apparatus to dismantle, a child's toy for the child that wants it all.