Network (1976) is one of those classic movies that turn out to be very bad indeed. Its status is due, beyond the general glamour and competence Hollywood could still reliably deliver back then, to its element of prescience. The plot centers around a newscaster, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who, upon hearing he will be fired due to his low ratings, announces to his audience that he will kill himself on air. Beale does not kill himself, but starts engaging first in plain speaking about how everything is “bullshit”, and then, after some sort of angelic visitation, in outright prophecy. In the movie’s most famous sequence, he urges his viewers to go to their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more”. Viewers duly oblige, and Beale’s show becomes a hit.
In the 1970s, American television was a relatively sober affair, but Beale has come to be seen as a forerunner of the ranters of cable TV, and now of their still wilder and more loquacious heirs in the age of the podcast. There is an audience who will lap up the words of vatic pundits, and there will be producers to make money off that: the movie got that much right.
Prescience may make a movie memorable, but it is not enough to make it good. Network stinks in a great number of ways. For a start, its tone is all wrong. In due course, Beale’s ratings fall, and the suits have him assassinated on air. This development could only be swallowed within a cartoonish and cynical satire, in the mode of Doctor Strangelove. But Network is not cynical at all. We are invited not to laugh at Beale, but to take his utterances seriously: we really are supposed to be “mad as hell”. Moreover, most of the movie isn’t even about Beale, but about the doomed love affair between his veteran producer, Max Schumacher (William Holden), and a hot young showrunner, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), who has sniffed out that money can be made from Beale’s breakdown. Max stands for Old TV, shopworn but ultimately dignified, and Diana for the new stuff, bewitching but utterly devoid of soul. This is occasionally played for laughs, but it is largely a malodorous stew of solemn allegory and soap opera.
Prescience may make a movie memorable, but it is not enough to make it good.
As all this elaborate preaching and symbol-mongering suggests, Network is very much a writer’s movie, in the worst possible way. Its main creator was not the (admittedly distinguished) director, Sidney Lumet, but the screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky was famous in his day as a writer of movies reaching for significance, and so collecting Oscars (Network was nominated for ten and received four). The movie is full of twists, asides and profanities, inviting us to admire the writer’s ingenious daring. Worse still, it is full of acting set-pieces: big monologues and contrived dramatic moments, slots for the actors to grandstand. They duly oblige, particularly the younger ones. Finch and Holden, the old professionals, show some retstraint, but Dunaway, and Robert Duvall (as a ruthless executive) offer telegraphed, phony versions of the new sort of naturalistic acting that made them famous.
Network is very much a writer’s movie, in the worst possible way.
Indeed Network is a thoroughly phony movie. Its hypocritical mission is to scold audiences for not duly appreciating movies like Network. “It’s all just entertainment to you slobs” is its constant sermon. That thought also underlies The Truman Show, perhaps the greatest of all movies about television. But where The Truman Show grows into a Borgesian meditation on the theatrical nature of the human condition, Network proposes an escape from the trivialities of decayed showbiz via reverence for middle-brow pieties like its own. It is incapable of reflecting on how middlebrow piety is itself a form of marketable entertainment. That is the true secret to its lasting success—not its prescience or biting satire, but that it offers its target audience a warm bath of self-congratulation. Network is the very worst kind of trash, neither naïve enough to be innocent in its stupidity, nor honest enough to recognize its own part in the debasement it purports to reveal. It’s not worth being mad about, but we ought not to take it anymore.
