Los Angeles Plays Itself

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2015)

A bizarre young man, jobless in LA, drifts towards 'nightcrawling', chasing after true crime with a camera that he can sell footage of to news stations; there's lots of frantic driving through neon night in search of suffering, life where it's broken by dumb accident, fires, carwrecks, home invasion; along the way we have those evocative moods around LA, up and down canyons, that I love.
But this isn't about the pursuit of truth in that suffering; he progressively intrudes upon reality, moves a body to where it will photograph against a LA horizon, rearranges life to yield a more horrifying truth until of course the sardonic conclusion. So it's not about confronting horrible reality out there; a murder of Latinos is worth nothing the man is told, it happens everyday, no one wants to hear. It's about using life as fiction, something people can talk about in the morning around the water-cooler.
The satire is that doing even this ruthlessly enough lets you climb the ladder, buy the fancy car etc. Okay.
So the first-time maker acquits himself well, the observation cuts at the modern void with regards to how we're swallowed up by images: "news" isn't news unless it spells out disaster. I'm with this so long as it shows a desensitized modern world drifting in the night towards images; but only their outer form. His footage (merely form, bloodied bodies) mirrors the protagonist's mind, a sociopath only concerned with the outer form life can take, about success. Suggesting meanwhile the broader malaise that makes viewers tune in; people are addicted to dwell in suffering, misery, apparent meaninglessness around us.
I can never muster much excitement about satire though, not Network, not Firemen's Ball or Fight Club, so I leave that part to be enjoyed by others. I can like this only up to a point, up to when it expects of me to be appalled at being secretly titillated at how much the protagonist can get away with; the same carwreck fascination that is behind Fight Club (thankfully without the twist). Past that point I find it feeds the same void and lack of center, making me wonder if unfurling stylized swathes of LA night isn't much the same thing as moving that dead body to where it will photograph better. Is it?