What Is Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard

As the debuting film for director Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler is, in its essence, a film not unlike some we’ve watched in class– one that certainly comes to mind is Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a movie that inspires thought about not only the industry, but humanity. Instead of Norma’s post-film craze, our own protagonist, Louis “Lou” Bloom (portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal) is in almost a pre-career craze. Ruthlessly ambitious, he is, my opinion, the image of a sociopath on the prowl for the beginnings of a job, and further than that– a way up in the finally chosen field of television news, where after being a thief to get what money he can, he becomes an independent contractor, shooting stories of gruesome events around Los Angeles. Overall,

Something that he learned through the internet– as he mentioned he learned a great deal else from– making it seem there’s nothing quite natural about the character, except for his eye for the camera. Even so, there are some points in the film that he references camera angles and techniques to make you wonder if all of that, too, was learned and perfectly copied from the internet. There are only two other notable characters in Lou’s story arch, the first that we meet is Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the morning news director of the channel that Lou sells his footage to throughout the film. She’s a straightforward businesswoman who knows the industry as well as any, and the first person that he’s able to latch onto to learn from, eventually using his power of “getting the best-selling stories” over her to gain more than money from their arrangement. The second and perhaps one of the most important characters of the film is Rick (Riz Ahmed), Lou’s barely-paid protege and intern. The character is homeless at the time of his interview with Lou, but he is absolutely the most human of all the characters in the film– the morality to the protagonist’s amorality, creating an interesting dynamic. At times, he’s a source of comic relief, attempting to follow behind and keep some sanity in what Lou is