Network (1976)
45 years later, this satire could be mistaken for a documentary about TV news.
Hello everyone! I am posting this late because I made carbonara and got so excited by it turning out well that I ate it all in about 10 minutes, making myself a bit sick in the process. I have the self control of a poorly trained dog. Anyway!
This week, I’m reviewing the 1976 movie Network, which picked up three Oscars—Actress for Faye Dunaway, Supporting Actress for Beatrice Straight (puzzlingly, since she has very little screen time, but I guess that’s why they call it supporting), and Actor for Peter Finch. Finch is one of just two people to have received a posthumous acting Oscar, having died just two months before the award ceremony.
Network centers around the fictional broadcast network UBS, which, because of poor ratings, decides to fire its evening news anchor, Howard Beale (Finch). Beale, learning of this, announces during a newscast that he will be killing himself live on air next week in order to boost ratings. When Beale convinces the network to allow him one final night on the air to apologize for his stunt, he goes off script and declares life “bullshit”. In a third incident, Beale sneaks into the studio during a news broadcast, rain-soaked and wild eyed, and implores the audience to scream out there windows “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” in defiance of the aforementioned bullshit.
UBS’s programming director Diana Christensen (Dunaway) realizes that Beale’s outlandish, angry behavior a is a ratings hit, and eventually manages to convince network execs to give Beale his own show in prime time where he rants for a few minutes and then inevitably faints from his own fervor. Christensen also strikes a deal with a far-left terrorist group to produce the Mao Tse-Tung Hour, showing raw video footage of their bank heists and like activities, and hires Sybil the Soothsayer to take the first segment of the evening news broadcast where she uses her psychic abilities to predict next week’s world events. Eventually, the ratings for Howard Beale’s show starts to decline, and the UBS execs decide to kill Beale during a live taping in order to make the show successful again. The movie ends with Beale’s murder, bringing his journey full circle.
Ultimately, Network faces the same challenge any other satirical work faces these days: our actual reality is so absurdly grim that absurdity ceases to be funny. Especially in the wake of our country being brought close to fascism than ever before by a former reality show host, what passed for exaggeration in the 70s is now painfully realistic. It feels so banal to compare Beale to Trump, but this movie is not particularly complex and just happens to focus almost entirely on the same industry that wrought him upon our country—network TV. At one point, Beale rants about the Arabs buying up shares of every American company. Replace “Arabs” with “China” and it would be a perfect Trump stump speech (if a bit more cogent, since Beale stays on topic). I want to root for Beale, and even more I want to root for the disaffected populace that he appeals to. Fundamentally, much of life is bullshit, and I think we’d be better off as a society if we examined what customs were worth keeping and what we could get rid of. But in the aftermath of the last 5 years of Trump weaponizing White rage to the detriment of almost everyone, and the numerous Trump paraphernalia sporting the motto “no more bullshit”, I’m torn about which side I should be supporting in this movie. I still don’t really know what to make of it.
Network is a satirical without being campy, which also factors into its aging poorly. By playing the “absurd” situations completely straight, there’s little humor to grab onto now that many millions of Americans see the likes of Joe Rogan and Alex Jones as voices of authority. Beale was at least ranting and raving about things that were actually happening, rather than spinning conspiracy theories—I would definitely prefer we had the Howard Beale Show instead of InfoWars. The movie draws on many real events from the mid-70s, and there is something comforting seeing the news producers talk about assassination attempts on President Ford, radical political terrorists, and the recession. Knowing we faced these things before is a welcome realization.
In my summary above I neglected to mention the B-plot storyline of Christensen’s affair with Max Schumacher (William Holden), the former head of the news department at UBS, because I found it largely uninteresting. Beatrice Straight plays Mrs. Schumacher, and landed her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for about 3 minutes of yelling at her husband—it was very compelling yelling, but I can’t help but wonder if the nominee pool was just weak that year. Schumacher spends a lot of time chastising Christensen for being the “TV Generation” and living life like it was a TV script, which ends up coming across as hollow moralizing. Christensen isn’t exactly punished for her way of life, and during their breakup, Schumacher yells, “This is not a script, Diana!” Of course, it is a script, and I don’t know if there’s a way one can warn against the evils of showbusiness in a literal MGM movie. Dunaway’s facial expressions are the only reason to watch the scenes between the two illicit lovers. She really is a superb actress, which makes it all the more a shame that she’s verifiably a monster to work with.
Since the movie has ceased to be funny in the wake of the last 5 years of American history, and its message is one we have all digested 1,000 times over, I could really only appreciate each individual element in technical sense without ever getting invested in the work as a whole. A few moments of pleasure: the way Dunaway pronounces the ‘t’ in “shithouse”, the chairwoman of the American Communist Party screaming “Don’t fuck with my distribution costs!” during contract negotiation for the Mao Tse-Tung Hour, the set design of the Howard Beale Show, and everyone’s obsession with wearing brown.
At the end of the day, Network is uniquely positioned to have aged extremely poorly as a comedy, and its abject grimness is hard to swallow. However, there’s a good reason it won three Oscars in acting categories, and seeing those performances might be worth it if you don’t mind losing two hours to a bleak prophecy from 45 years ago that turned out to have come true. If that doesn’t seem appealing, try…well, I was going to suggest any of Dunaway’s other films, but she mostly traffics in deeply depressing works. Maybe just turn on the TV and zone out to whatever Beale copycat you land on first.
Playlist 1/17/21
This week is a little more upbeat than last. I’d describe the vibe as a brightly-lit coffee shop where everyone seems to have a MacBook and the barista is cute but too friendly. God, I miss going places.