Network is a film with a sterling reputation. It is on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, it is generally deemed a culturally significant film that foretold the rise of ratings-driven, sensationalistic cable news, and it won a number of Academy Awards in 1976, including three of the acting awards. Upon my initial viewing I disliked the film, then came to like it, and now I find it to be rather grating. Here's my take on this "classic" movie.
Network is a movie of nearly incomparable prestige and esteem in the current day and age--a film that is still referenced in popular culture, that is often cited as having been extraordinarily predictive of how the news media developed in America, and so on. Blah. The movie, truth be told, is terrible. Terrible. If only there was some English word that could fully encompass the awfulness--it would be necessary to employ some twenty-syllable German word to do the trick. Suffice it to say, it's bad. The much-vaunted acting is overamped and atrocious, the characters are thinly-written and fall into the Randian ideal of sentient position papers as characters rather than real people, the satire is self-righteous and hamfisted, and the story is so ludicrous and unbelievable that it doesn't even really work as allegory. It doesn't work on its own merits, either, and the result is a turgid piece of crap that has been exalted largely because eminences grises like to namecheck the film as shorthand for its vision of a corporate-owned, profit-driven media that was, truth be told, not all that hard to see coming to pass. In short, Network is a waste of space whose cleverness is appreciated only by people whose own cleverness is, like the film's, entirely superficial.
For one thing, the characters are a profoundly uninteresting lot, and can each be summarized with one sentence: there's the mad news anchor, there's the young network executive who has no problem destroying lives (including her own) for ratings and is "television incarnate", there's the old newsman who finds himself muscled out in the new order and has a midlife crisis, and so on. None of them have any subtext or nuance: it's all right there on the screen, and what you see is what you get. They all come off as less than human: they're all chess pieces, allegorical personages meant to make a point about what is going on in the media, and they're supposed to be extreme. Or so we might think. The film otherwise tries to cultivate an intense sense of "you are there" realism which is undercut by the broadness of the caricatures that anchor this film. They're not real people, and as allegories they're not particularly artful. It's not quite as much of a sledgehammer production as your typical Oliver Stone film, but it's in that ballpark. I suppose it is possible that the characters are so intentionally shallow in the film to make a point about how the media creates hollow people (in other words, to go meta), but one never senses an indictment of any sort of the film industry (of course) and even if the point is not meta--that is to say, if the movie is trying to show that exposure to the television industry has the same hollowing effects as television itself--it doesn't make sense to make the hero of the film (the old-school newsman) as hollow and uninteresting as the villain (the new-school executive). There just isn't enough of a contrast between the characterizations here--they're both pretty cliched and uninteresting, and although their worldviews diverge the lack of nuance in these characters seems less like an artistic decision and more like the work of a limited imagination.
And as for the plot: it can be neatly summarized as follows. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is a depressed, suicidal anchorman who, after promising to kill himself on the air, instead becomes a "mad prophet" of the airwaves and tries to channel the frustration and anger of the public into a ratings booster for a network exec (played by Faye Dunaway). Bill Holden plays another exec who is ambivalent about the stunt, gets fired, then starts having an affair with Dunaway. In the end, Beale turns against his masters, starts losing ratings, and is assassinated by network fiat at the end of the movie. Aside from one or two minor subplots, this is the film. It's rather high-concept, as one can see. One can easily extract the main ideas of the film from this outline: that Dunaway's executive is a cynical, stop-at-nothing-for-ratings executive that typifies the new generation of the media, that Holden is the old-school newsman who actually cares about other people, and that Finch is just caught in the middle. And if you didn't get the point from this summary, you would get them from the endless speeches that the movie contains to try to reinforce these points. It's a film that is constantly shaking you and yelling, "GET IT?!" There is a tension between the idea of satirically undercutting the very foundation of new media by showing the most extreme case of how this model of media stewardship plays out on the one hand, and on the other trying to be good old-fashioned agitprop to try to rouse the people into action. The first necessarily needs to be tongue in cheek, observational, witty, subtle, and funny in a biting way. The second needs to be bombastic, loud, angry, and totally unambiguous. Network does not seem to get that there is a tension between these approaches, and instead tries to have it both ways. The tone of the movie, unsurprisingly, is rather schizophrenic. On balance, the movie leans more toward the first approach and tries to satirize new media, but the bits in which it tries to summon righteous outrage are by far more effective. After all, agitprop needn't be artful or clever, it just needs to arouse the people. Had the movie been straight-up agitprop many of its faults would have been forgivable. Then again, it probably would not be held in nearly the esteem it currently holds.
The acting of the film is often (unjustly) praised--Peter Finch's Oscar-winning performance is an exercise in excess--his version of a raving madman is pretty much everyone's idea of a raving madman. He doesn't really show us anything new. Faye Dunaway's performance is better, but still pretty bad. It doesn't help that her character is so abstract, so high-concept that it seems that all she does is hit her marks. She doesn't really delve deep into the character's consciousness because the character really isn't that deep, and the performance, like Finch's, eventually becomes an exercise in trying to make the character as ostentatiously insane (albeit in a slightly different fashion) as possible. The standards for acting have fallen, although it is common knowledge that Dunaway's Oscar was merely past due for her great performance in Chinatown. The third Oscar winner, Beatrice Straight, appears in the film for about three minutes. Literally. This is obviously an aberration, and the less said about it the better. Robert Duvall's character, which has gone heretofore unmentioned, can be summarized as "ladder-climbing yuppie scum" and is similar in tone to the rest of the performances mentioned here. About the only saving grace here is the performance of Bill Holden, whose unaffected and naturalistic performance does show us a little something about the man he portrays that the rest of the operatic pretensions of the rest of the cast. It is surprising that so many talented actors all managed to produce such dreadful performances, especially since the director, Sidney Lumet, has a reasonably good track record with directing actors. It makes more sense to blame the source material: just how much substance can you bring to a character whose only purpose is to represent TELEVISION INCARNATE? And this is the problem: by setting up the film's central allegory, writer Paddy Chayevsky created characters that didn't really work as people, but since he was unable to commit to setting the action in a tweaked universe the movie really isn't an allegory. It doesn't work as drama intrinsically or as allegory. In the end, the film is kneecapped by its anything-but-protean cast of characters, as well as the rest of the things that have been discussed.
Still, few people praise the movie for any of this stuff: it's always about how the movie is so prophetic, man! It totally got all that stuff about the media down, man! Ultimately, though, it is hard to see how a media that focuses more on profits (and uses sensationalism to generate them) than on correctly reporting the news counts as a profound notion in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. The scandal was very lucrative for the Washington Post, and corporations tend to like to make money. Woodward and Bernstein managed to make the news into a profitable industry. In any event, the idea of large news corporations dominating the news market is not a new one--William Randolph Hearst had his empire, after all. What the film posits that hadn't really been posited before isn't that big corporations would take control of the media--indeed, the TV station within the movie is owned by a large conglomerate. The film basically asserts that news will become more sensationalistic since the corporations that own the news media will see a new cash cow in their midst. Considering the nature of the corporation and the lessons learned from Watergate, this is not much different from predicting that adding two apples to an existing two apples will produce four apples. That the film turned out to be generally correct is incidental--a small child might select the correct answer on a multiple-choice test of quantum mechanics without understanding a word. It's called a lucky guess, and considering the lack of knowledge of the real world that characterizes the rest of the film I'm not inclined to give the production team the benefit of the doubt.
All in all, Network is a movie that we need to stop exalting. We need to stop recommending it, we need to stop buying it, and we need to stop talking about it. It is a didactic turd that exists for no other reason than to be alluded to every time a writer wants to evoke explosive anger about the state of the nation with respect to the media. We all know the problems we face with today's media, and this movie does not do a damn thing to illuminate them. I didn't like the movie, and I didn't like it when they remade it to be about race relations and called it Crash.
