Network (1976): The More Things Change ...

Network, winner of four Academy Awards, is a highly polemical satire/comedy about the transformation of broadcast news into infotainment, the evils of corporate hegemony, and the dumbing-down of America. It is one of director Sidney Lumet’s most lauded and remembered films. The film and its trademark rant: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” was the talk of the nation 35 years ago. Sidney Lumet ‘s death a couple of months ago got me interested in revisiting this classic, which I had last seen when it was in general release 35 years ago, to see how it has held up.

Pretty well, I’d say, especially for such a topical, message-oriented motion picture. It remains highly entertaining, outrageous, funny, and thought provoking, though perhaps not quite in the way originally intended. More on that later.
Lumet  (1924 - 2011), although he achieved quite a lot of commercial success,  was/is underrated as a ‘serious’ filmmaker, perhaps because he WAS so successful. Like Network, many of his movies were ‘message’ pictures, such as Fail-Safe ((1964), The Group (1966), Serpico (1973) and The Verdict (1982). “While the goal of all movies is to entertain,” he wrote, “the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience.” He was wonderful with actors, and worked with some of the greats: Pacino, Fonda, Hepburn, Steiger,  Robards, Brando, Burton, Newman, often bringing out some of their best, most interesting work. Take a look at what he got out of Henry Fonda, Jack Klugman, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, Lee J. Cobb, and the rest in one of his earliest films, 12 Angry Men (1957), or watch Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman in the Pawnbroker (1965). Two of Al Pacino’s best roles were directed by Lumet: Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and the title role in Serpico (1973).

The actors in Network do not disappoint. Peter Finch is brilliant in this, his final role, as Howard Beale, an old-school newsman in the Walter Cronkite mold, who, in the twilight of his career and in the wake of declining ratings, abandons his professional restraint and decides to actually tell the “truth” to America. Along the way he is co-opted, manipulated, and exploited by his network and ultimately by the multinational mega-corporation that owns it and – by extension - owns us. Finch’s character rants, raves and ultimately disintegrates as we (and the country) watch.  Finch was posthumously awarded the Oscar for best actor for this performance.

Faye Dunaway explodes as Diana Christiansen - the ambitious, ratings driven network program director who sets this in motion.  She understands that controversy gets people talking; and when people are talking, ratings go up. Content and good taste are immaterial.  So, in addition to promoting  Howard Beale (advertised as the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” ) and his evangelical fulminations decrying life in a corporate-run America, Diane produces a new weekly series, the Mao Tse Tung Hour(!), chronicling the exploits of the terrorist “Ecumenical Liberation Army”, all the while paying these radicals a hefty sum for their participation. A prescient foretaste of the  reality shows of today?  Dunaway’s Diana is all energy, talking a mile a minute, obsessed with success. She is beautiful and sexy, but empty, soulless.  I found her hilarious. The role earned Dunaway an Oscar for best actress.

Which brings us to, Max Schumaker (William Holden), another old newsman, the head of the network’s news department, and our narrator. In a nice touch, Holden starts and ends the movie with voiceover narration, just as he did so memorably in Sunset Boulevard.  Max is appalled at the commercialization of TV news shows. Yet, inexplicably, he starts an affair with Diana, who represents the antithesis of all Max stands for, and then he falls in love with her. Or so we are told. Notwithstanding Dunaway’s good looks, she is not someone Max or any other sentient being would want to spend time with in a non-celluloid world.

This plot development does offer some rewards, however, chief among them being the reaction of Max’s wife of 25 years (played by Beatrice Straight), who lets loose a fine dramatic speech (“This is your great winter romance, isn’t it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what’s left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion and I get the dotage? … I’m your wife, damn it. And, if you can’t work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance.“). Her mere five minutes of screen time won her an Oscar for best supporting actress.

Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty are also featured, and are fun to watch; especially Beatty as an evangelical  capitalist.

Paddy Chayevsky, who wrote the screenplay (and received the film’s fourth Oscar for his efforts), must have had it in for the television industry. Network relentlessly, broadly (and pedantically) skewers the shows, the people working on the shows, TV executives, and the corporate interests – owners and advertisers – to whom the rest are beholden. A lot of this remains funny, but the message is trite and the delivery pretty unsubtle today.

Was it surprising in 1976 to discover that TV is largely vacuous? The terms “wasteland” and “boob-tube” had been applied to the medium years earlier. The mid-seventies may have been a low point in television programming – certainly compared to our times, but I suspect, and sort of recall, that this movie’s diatribe about the stupidity of TV-land was recognized as hackneyed even at the time. The concern about the diminishing quality of network news, on the other hand, was a bigger deal.

Debate over the quality of TV news programming continues.(e.g.  the controversy about Katie Couric as an anchor; or about  the partisan biases of Fox News or MSNBC), but with the explosion of Cable and the Internet, it is hard to credibly argue today that people can’t get the information they need. We can and do bemoan the fact that many people are horribly uninformed or misinformed, but this is a critique of our citizenry or of our education establishment, rather than of the TV networks. Indeed, the networks are so diminished in the 21^st century, they hardly seem to matter. 

In the mid-70’s, there were only three primary networks. CNN (created in 1980), Fox News (launched in 1996) and the rest weren’t around yet. There was no world-wide-web.  Newspaper readership had lost a lot of ground to television.  ABC, CBS and NBC were where most people got their news. So the cultural context when Network was made was vastly different from our world. This was why Network was so impactful then, yet seems thematically dated now.

Actually, part of my enjoyment in watching Network now, is that the movie is such a great time capsule of its era.

There was one aspect of Network I really did not like. The film is unrelentingly, annoyingly preachy. Howard Beale sermonizes over and over about how we all have become puppets controlled by faceless, evil corporations. Holden, as Max, tells Diana how, back in the good old days (in his case, the 1950’s), people were smarter and had morals and ideals. Max’s generation has real human feelings and needs, he declares, whereas Diana and her ilk are merely “humanoids.”   Max goes on and on, to all and sundry,  about the younger generation’s obsession with TV, how it is character destroying, life destroying, how people don’t read books anymore.

To my ears, a lot of this sounds like the stuff we are hearing about today’s young people: the computer generation. “They” don’t read anymore, “they” are always online, on their smart phones, iPads, whatever. The technology is dehumanizing.    Ironically, today’s accusations are coming from the generation of folks that Chayefsky and Lumet were deriding or writing off 35 years ago.

The more things change …

Watch Howard Beale's "Mad as hell" speech on YouTube

Network is available on DVD, or streaming  from Netflix.