Film School (Three Day) Weekend: NETWORK Is a Movie A Lot of People Who Haven't Seen It Think They Know

 I feel like I've been in a cultural funk lately, and this past Super Bowl weekend did very little to pull me out of it.

Like a surprising amount of non-football fans, I find myself drawn to the Super Bowl due to it being perhaps the last remaining thing we all experience in real time together that isn't inherently polarizing (unless you're the type to get completely worked up over a fifteen-minute halftime show, I suppose).  So I suppose you could say I "watch it for the commercials".  

The thing about that, though, is that the commercials are rarely any good.  Hell, I'm not sure one could claim more than ten or twenty in the history of the game are actually all that funny or memorable.  Yeah, that's totally debatable and the subject for a whole other article, but I think I'm right about that.  I'm absolutely certain that nothing from this past weekend would make the list either.  

It's been a long, slow march over the years to get to this point, but essentially every commercial felt entirely algorithm-driven, the results of constant studies of the viewing habits and tweet engagement of the night's now-prime demographic (elder millennials!) and just quadrupling down on the top results.  Cast members of The Sopranos were selling cars.  Two leads of Schitt's Creek were selling different cars.  Larry David and two LeBron Jameses were there to shame you into getting into cryptocurrency, ads which will definitely age well five years from now.  Even a seemingly-sweet Chuck E. Cheese-inspired ad about a cute animatronic dog just ended up being a fucking Meta ad.

I know that "cashing in on celebrities who are riding high in order to hawk a flashy product" isn't new to advertising; need I remind that the Flintstones used to stop everything to start selling you cigarettes.  But for some reason, this year especially felt bleak.  The prospect of taking something that people got legitimate enjoyment out of over the years and shoving it back in our faces to say "Buy cryptocurrency!!!  Do it, you coward!!" felt extra-cynical this time around.

So, yeah.  Definitely felt a little lost this year.  I wish I had known where to turn to in order to hear someone talk more about this phenomenon of taking something organic and commoditizing it in a quest for ratings.

Then I watched NETWORK.

Network (1976)

Directed by: Sidney Lumet

Written by: Paddy Chayefsky

Starring: Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Robert Duvall

Released: November 27, 1976

Length: 121 minutes

There's a lot about the plot of NETWORK that might not even read as satire in 2022.

It all starts with an established news anchor, Howard Beale (Finch), who learns from his friend, news division president Max Schumacher (Holden), that he is going to be let go from the network in two weeks due to "low ratings".  Furious, Beale announces on air the next night that he will be killing himself live on the air next Tuesday.  If you're a lost media aficionado like myself, this sounded an awful lot like the Christine Chubbuck story, and I immediately assumed that had happened after this movie.  I eventually checked and, nope, Chubbuck's on-air suicide was in 1974 and NETWORK came out in 1976.  Whether this was an intentional reference to a horrific story remains unclear but, in a way, it's a natural jumping off point for a bitterly cynical film. 

Anyway, this is merely NETWORK'S inciting incident.  Ratings jump in anticipation of this suicide, which makes the network reconsider Beale's firing.  Alas, even righteous indignation can only hold a nation's interest for so long, and ratings dwindle again.  The head of the entertainment division, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), reaches out to Schumacher to help bring viewers back by bringing Beale's show under the entertainment division, rather than the news division.

By the way, I think the state of media is such that I'm not sure having a head of entertainment take over a news division even comes off as a joke nowadays.  We openly and willingly acknowledge the enmeshment of entertainment and news now, even as we rail against it.  Because the truth is, we kind of like it better that way, right?  Even though we long for the days of real news shows, we will still happily watch Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson give an impassioned screed about whatever we're supposed to be mad at today (Trump, CRT, Antifa, the post office...the list goes on and on) because it validates us and our opinions.  It entertains us.  And the thing is, I can feel, literally hear, someone out there going, "come on man, you really think there's no difference between Maddow and Carlson???".  And, of course, there are differences is delivery style and tone, but I'd posit that the biggest difference between the two is dependent on what you are currently mad about.

And maybe that's the point.  We know to reject all "news as entertainment" shows.  Well, except for the ones that entertain me the right way.  Those are different.

Anyway, this is all leading to The Scene, the one that everybody knows, even if they haven't seen (or even heard of) the movie.  You know it.

Watching NETWORK from start to finish for the first time, it struck me as funny that the whole "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" speech has kind of become this shareable meme now that we share when, again, we're bitching about whatever cable news network we're willingly watching is pissing us off that day.  And there's a reason why the monologue endures over 45 years later.  First, who doesn't like a good old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone rant?  Second, you couldn't argue it's gotten less relevant to the issues facing society today.  Lines like "everything everywhere has gotten crazy, so we don't go out anymore; we sit in the house and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller" hit especially hard in a post-March 2020 world.  

The whole speech is real, organic, and delivered by a man that truly does feel like the world has gone mad, the walls slowly collapsing in on him.  It's the kind of moment you rarely see in real life anymore, and it's a scene that probably single-handedly won Finch his posthumous Oscar (he sadly died a few months after NETWORK's release).

But turning this moment into an out-of-context Sorkin-eqsue speech about the state of the world, something you can share with a click and a caption like "THIS" or " Watch this as many times as you need to until you get it!!!" doesn't feel quite right, does it?  

That's because it shows either a lack of awareness, or a willful ignoring, of what happens immediately after this speech is given in the movie, the moments after Howard Beale seemingly gets everyone in the country to yell out of their window, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!".

Because what happens is that Diana gets thrilled at the ratings this speech has provided the network and now wants to expand Howard Beale and turn him into a mascot of sorts, an anchor that can only bring the ratings up and up, ever higher.  The one real thing that has happened on that station in who knows how many years, and they're going to chase that high right into the ground.

Thus, The Howard Beale Show is borne.  Although the show features, among other things, a psychic, Beale remains the star, and he gives his screeds to a live audience like he's Brother Theodore.  The audience responds in kind by yelling "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!", this very real moment now reduced to a catchphrase along the lines of "set it and forget it".  

Look, the movie goes on from there (weaved into the plot is a terrorist group known as the Ecumenical Liberation Army, but...needless to say, I loved NETWORK.  Pretty much every major player in this got nominated for an Oscar that year, including Ned Beatty in a glorified, but wildly memorable, cameo where he lays down the law to Beale (as always, money talks).  It's very obvious this movie struck a nerve in the mid-70's.  And why shouldn't it have?  In a post-Vietnam and Watergate world, with major cities like New York on the verge of bankruptcy, people were pissed.  And here comes a Hollywood movie that spoke to all of that, a movie just as bitter and acidic in tone as something like TAXI DRIVER, but in a totally different direction.

And, of course, it goes without saying that I doubt NETWORK is a film that could get made today.  That gets thrown around a lot, but I think it's really true on this one (I could maybe see it becoming a limited-series prestige television event, and maybe there's a beauty in that).  In a world where there are now, like, four major studios, at least one of which having amassed its vast library through corporate consolidation (a topic which is of great importance to the story of NETWORK), I can't really imagine anything like this getting approved at a corporate level without its satire getting defanged, or at least redirected.

Yeah, I guess I am still in a bit of a cultural funk.

Maybe the only thing that holds NETWORK back just a little is the tone the movie takes with the romance between Max and Diana.  There's really nothing wrong with it on paper; Holden is fantastic as always and manages to make his character heartbreaking, even as he's the one breaking hearts (although it feels like it's from a different movie, the scene where he confesses his affair to his wife, played by Beatrice Straight, is stirring).  Dunaway is equally adept at making Diana acidic and cynical throughout the whole affair, which makes the satire still sing, the concept of "getting in bed with the devil" made literal. 

But the storyline as presented feels like it has one foot firmly planted in old Hollywood, relying on good old-fashioned star power and melodrama.  This isn't an inherently bad thing; I love that stuff!  It's just that NETWORK as a whole feels very New Hollywood to me, with a rebel spirit you didn't see much of in the decades before or since, and I remain unconvinced that the two flavors can really meld in a satisfying way (it's one of the many reasons I didn't really like Scorsese's NEW YORK, NEW YORK).  Thus, these sequences feel just a little out of step with the rest of the movie, which is often gleefully abrasive.

Anyway, look.  NETWORK is available for streaming on HBO Max right now (speaking of things that only exist due to insane corporate consolidation), which presents a prime opportunity for you to watch it for the first time if you never have, or revisit it to discover that, yes, it really does hold up after all these years; it might even be better, to be honest.  It will at least allow you to see the full context of a legendary film speech and the full, black-hearted cynicism behind it.

And isn't that what life is all about?