Forgive the delay while I dithered whether to choose "Network" or subject you to a dizzying double-feature of "Resolution" and "The Endless", two little-known indie flicks (which I've only learned just this second were consecutive films from the same director and writer—do I know how to pick them, or what?) about desperate people traveling to remote locations in southern California where the time/space continuum doesn't work as expected.
I have decided to go with "Network", figuring mentioning the other two and leaving you to your own devices would be sufficient.
"Network" is my favorite movie, full stop.
This 1975 movie by Sidney Lumet ("12 Angry Men", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Serpico"), a pitch-black tragicomedy about a media conglomerate capitalizing on the unraveling mental health of one of its news anchors, predicted so many real-life media trends before they happened that it's astounding. Even 50 years later, it still seems to be ringing truer all the time.
In 1975, years before they became broader tropes in pop culture, "Network" showed:
- the rise of reality television,
- the monetization of newsroom as a corporate profit center rather than a civic responsibility,
- the growth of a widespread populist movement inflamed by puppet media ideologues who had started out as nominal journalists,
- the role of the media in promulgating a heartless consumerism,
- the evolution of economic globalism into a quasi-religion for the wealthy,
- the movie's overarching theme of the cruelty and criminal indifference of corporate decision-makers to human life— something there's widespread concern about nowadays, but may not have been taken as a given in 1975, so close to the mid-century American economic ideals of industry and workplace loyalty,
- and, still fairly early into the womens' movement, featured Faye Dunaway's staggering portrayal of the kind of callous, high-powered executive that my mom told me she only years later started to see women rise to become in the real-life corporate world.
It's really a remarkable set of issues for a movie to have addressed in 1975.
The only movie I can compare "Network" to in terms of its social role, in the way it put its finger right on the pulse of societal currents that were really only just starting, and now seems more and more relevant to refer back to the more time goes by, would be "Idiocracy". But "Idiocracy", great as it is, is entirely different—it's a slapstick satire, full of laughs and comic exaggeration. "Network" is played as a drama. There's no laughs, no gags, no punchlines in it. The whole movie is the punchline.
Part of why this is so effective is that "Network" features the stellar writing of acclaimed writer Paddy Chayefsky at the top of his game, with this film containing not just one but several of what I consider to be some of the best monologues in modern movie history. The dialogue is exceptionally well-written all the way through, with layers of depth. A subplot about a May/December affair between William Holden, representing an old breed of humanist, and Faye Dunaway, as the young, heartless new media, serves as a metaphor for the larger real-life transition that's going on that sets the stage for the film's events, and, mong the many incredible scenes in this movie, their scenes together stand out in my mind as pinnacles of film drama writing.
This is a minor enough moment that it's not a spoiler to show it to you now, if you're curious here's among the more restrained two and a half minutes of what you're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NprX9OpYWUc
It's a disarmingly bruising scene, as after laying his heart bare to her, Holden's Max Schumacher, the old guard media, knowing it's staring its demise in the face, says, "I just want you to love me, primal doubts and all. You can understand that, can't you?" And Dunaway's Diane Christensen, the young, callous, heartless new media, incapable of understanding anything but ratings points and jump cuts, quietly tells him, without rancor, "I don't know how to do that." And then the phone rings, and after a tense second, she walks away to answer, to attend to business, while he stands there finally realizing she will never care about him as much as she cares about narratives and surface appearances. If you listen carefully, you can hear an entire society change in the moment after she excuses herself to answer the phone, leaving him to stare dumbfounded. To me, it's like the 1980s started in that moment. Carter wasn't even in the White House yet, but in "Network", it was already the Reagan Era.
Other apt filmic comparisons to "Network" may be some of the dystopic science fiction of its era, movies like "Rollerball" (1975) and "Soylent Green" (1973), films that looked at the social themes of broad human appetites and desires (in the former film, for heroes and aspiration, in the latter for literal food and space), and the ways authority manipulates and abuses those drives.
Unlike those contemporary science fiction films, set further in the future in a clear fantasy world, "Network" doesn't have to exaggerate the real world that much at all, it just turns up the intensity a little. "Network" feels less like it's asking "What if?" and more like it's simply pulling back the covers on "what already is"—although, without a doubt, it proceeds, deliberately, step-by-step, masterfully, from a very ordinary-seeming and everyday world, and a single individual finding himself in a very uncertain place, to a final destination that is, in its way, just as surreal and absurd as a lot of sci-fi.
There's a direct parallel between the increasing adversity James Caan's sports hero encounters from authority as his prowess and fame grows in "Rollerball", in the form of more and more egregious rule changes designed by the government to end his rise in the game, and the corporatist authoritarian forces that Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, encounters as his unraveling mind catapults him from a failing newscaster career to fame and prestige as "The Mad Prophet Of The Airwaves". However, unlike Caan's character, who stares straight into temptation and steps back from the edge at the last minute, proving himself to be a hero, Beale, growing in popularity as he loses his sanity, ultimately receives a direct reprimand from a what might be a literal supernatural higher power, and, rather than stand up for his core principles, gives in and cooperates—and, for doing that, is ultimately consumed by that higher power, making "Network" a very dark tragicomedy indeed.
When one considers that a lot of theological literary depictions of evil revolve around consumption—in Dante's "Divine Comedy", Satan gnaws on the bodies of sinners, while at the end of C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters", the "ravenously affectionate" demon Screwtape signs off by threatening to literally eat his nephew, and I'm sure there's more—it may be grounds for discussion whether what Beale exultantly describes as "the face of God" might not have really been the face of something much more sinister.
One caution: some (ok, one, my brother-in-law) have called "Network" very dated-seeming, and it disappoints me, but there's something to that: it's very of its time in some ways, both visually, and sometimes narratively, particularly the parts dealing with the fading revolutionary dreams of the '60s as they disintegrated into extremist violence or were coopted—or as the case in this movie, both—by the mid '70s. The oblique references to '70s radical groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army haven't aged as well as the rest of the film.
Finally, one trivial detail that must be pointed out: this movie contains an early, uncredited cameo as a nameless network lawyer from a then-unknown Lance Henriksen, who, as I'm fond of pointing out, occupies an unusual place in my personal cinematic canon. Besides being the bellwether how to survive horror cinema, the guy pops up in a lot of places. He was in "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind", too.
"Network" is unfortunately not currently available to legally watch for free. At time of posting, you can watch it for $3.99 on AppleTV and Amazon Prime.
Thanks to Al Abut, whose interest was strongly piqued by "Network", and pitched me on doing this month.
Also syndicated on #indienews
