Speaking Jabberwocky!

At first sight, Nightcrawler is the movie that Birdman wants to be. Birdman’s subtitle “Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” refers to a notion of ignorance in direction/production. Both movies deal with this. How can a movie or a play transform in such a way that modifies the disposition towards existence? The answer is in violence. Not raw like violence, but a more subtle kind.

The disillusion of heroism translates in this pictures into production of the world. Chris Nolan has already tackled this in his Batman trilogy. The Heroes of Batman are a result of social conditions.cin Birdman and Nightcrawler the characters seek to apropiate technical devices to produce a material conditions. They modify the way how thinga belong to everyday life in terms of news and theater as production. It is a matter of humans that break themselves to shift the material conditions. 

Yet, there is a difference that makes Nightcrawler more brutally disturbing. Birdman is a movie that is mediated by the beauty of a long continuous shot, that breaks when it seems to be held for the whole film and its rythm simulates jazz music, making it pretend some kind of traditional beauty. It is still a canonical call for heroism. Nightcrawler is completely sinked into the technical sense of production. How to achieve a place by a twisted consideration of disposition of materials. The perfect take is a economical bet. The character must get to the recollection.

They both are trying to reproduce something that breaks apart from plain narrative. The production of the scenes of Nightcrawler respond to the creation of a perfect shot. While Lubweski is trying to do the same in Birdman. The almost continous shot that Lubezki and Iñarritu achieve is that capture that will give them the perspective on ignorance. On the other hand, Dan Gilroy and Jake Gyllenhaal ask a question: What if this is the model to participate in society? Find how the error is produced and instead of thinking it as ignorance use it as the condition of production.

The ignorance that Iñarritu is filming about in Birdman is the movie that Dan Gilroy is filming. There is no methaphore or subtitle, just the production of the image. It is like Gilroy could be filming Iñarritu and Lubweski working. And making them turn intention into maquiavellical action.  Nightcrawler is some kind of rush in which time turns into unlimited matter as it reaches to the next stage of production. It has separated itself from the standard use of a clock, of knowledge or of a camera. A second, a minute, an hour is something that is  foreign to both movies, but Gilroy makes it the crop.

These thing they confront is how to make up spatial representation. It is always the matter of being on time, being on the rhythm and hitting the notes making a wild improvisation be. In Birdman all the actors come just in time to their scenes, almost late, saying the line in the last moment being on the verge to loose continuity. When they are late, time is lost and has to be re-generated, re-produced. In Nightcrawler they are getting each time closer to murder. The posibility to get there before the law and trigger it. As the technical equipment and technique become more complex, they get closer to produce the commited crime, the law and the news. The win time startinh late, until the point where the timing of the crime is precise. Then it becomes the production of sense, production of what is expected by the public is achieved. Just when they get to the point where they are manufacturing the tissue of production and not just producing.

It is the limit of generes what is also explained there. Movie generes are  saturated and are previsible. So the act of production  needs to run through the mechanics, repeating and messing with the rules of delivery as the only way to put themselves in production.

This is the production of ignorance. But what kind of ignorance are we talking about? Was it platonic to the extent  that one doesn’t know? and then find out that the technology of self: know thyself. In Nightcrawler it all comes to production from ignorance. The massive amount of information that can be found today pops a question: What are you going to do with you can learn?

Jake Gyllenhaal makes  a  statement about this: fucking direct yourself to appropiate mediation. Own the productive means in terms of a twisted logic of property that doesn’t answers.  And to do it, you will have to do what is necessary, produce the broken piece that most simulate perfection, That is what Michael Keaton’s character finds out at the end of the movie, that is what he produces by accident what comes to be a possibility. But in that sense, he is making it Deus ex machina. He stumbles with gold. But, Lubweski and Iñarritu are the ones that are doing it on purpose, knowing that they have to produce something particular.  The movie of a retired superhero-dillusional actor. It could be Space Ghost Coast to Coast behind the scenes. That is why the first take, the very long continuous shot that extends along great part of the movie is a statement for. Lubweski and Iñarritu are real life Jake Gyllenhaals. But, the twisting  of production is still in debt.