Daily Dialogue — July 26, 2017

NINA: We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim or victims, preferably well-off and/or white, injured at the hands of the poor, or a minority.
LOU: Just crime?
NINA: No. Accidents play. Cars, buses, trains, planes. Fires. Suicides.
LOU: But bloody.
NINA: Graphic. The best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you, Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.
LOU: I understand.

— Nightcrawler (2014), written by Dan Gilroy

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Television. Today’s suggestion by Gisela Wehrl.

Trivia: The filmmakers made a point of not having Lou Bloom undergo a “character arc” because they felt he would have become a certain type of person and stayed that way as an adult. That was also why the initial scene has Lou assaulting and robbing a security guard; it was important that the audience not feel Lou became a worse person because of his work as a nightcrawler, but instead recognized he was malevolent from the start.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Gisela: “A graphic metaphor, Lou will provide those images later on.”