Network

So I watched this for the nth time a few days before writing this. Just about everything about ‘Network’ is incredible (there’s one thing about it I’m not terribly happy about, but more on that later). You probably know what it’s about, or at least parts of what it is about, even if you’ve never seen it — 47 years is long enough that bits of it have seeped into the culture at large (most notably probably is ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’). In short, a low-rated news anchor snaps on air and announces he going to kill himself live on tv in one week rather than be retired. This sets off a chain reaction resulting in, among other things, unscrupulous executives realizing that they’ve got a ratings bonanza on their hands and rushing to capitalize for them and their shareholders. Naturally nothing goes they way any of them expect, except straight man William Holden who can see exactly where almost all of this bullshit is going to land. Along the way, Paddy Cheyefsky’s lacerating script takes wholly justified shots at the Media, both its entertainment side & it’s ostensibly principled capital-N ‘News’ wing, and the carnivorous corporations to which it has sold it’s soul. It autopsies the death of Rebellion & the prostituting of its once-promising spirit on the alter of cash. It cynically punctures the idea of the effectiveness of the lone voice of reason in a avalanche of lies. It lays bare the empty lives of the craven flunkeys and their hideous masters who perpetuate all this. It effectively predicts a lot about the post-internet culture’s relationship to itself. And it does all this while actually being incredibly (albeit pitch blackly) funny, quotable, and highly engaging. The one thing it fails on is to adequately plum the depths of its not-terribly believable May-December romance. Though it briefly calls out ‘daddy issues,’ considering how thoroughly everything else is eviscerated, failing to do so with this is curious and disappointing. Nevertheless, everyone turns in full-on committed performances — Holden is great as the eye in this storm which is often contrasted with Dunaway’s runaway train, Duvall plays the yes man as though his life depends on it, Ned Beatty appears a briefly a couple of times before getting to deliver an astonishingly terrifying showstopper of a ‘greed is good’ style speech by which all other should be judged, and Peter Finch….In his final film, Finch gives one of those lightning-in-a-bottle performances that remind you of things (say, Burt Lancaster in ‘The Swimmer’) but which takes the craft to a completely other and different place. It’s the kind of performance that you can see both why it would win an Oscar and know that nothing like that will ever win an Oscar again. To date, the only film script I’ve ever bought is a book of this, bookended with Cheyefsky’s ‘Hospital’ and ‘Altered States’ (also both fascinating in their own ways). “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT and T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those of the nations of the world today.”