Network

Whenever you hear the word “network”, one invariably thinks of Peter Finch shouting out that well-known call to arms. I just watched Network again recently, and was struck by how ahead of its time it was, and my friend Will (himself a media studies graduate) refers to this as “a very important movie”. Here and now in 2006 and raised in a much more open-minded environment than my parents’ generation was, I’m naturally a lot more open and accepting to various ideas that may have been more taboo in previous generations. That said, when watching Network and seeing so many parallels to modern-day society, it’s very important to remember that this movie was made in 1976—a full 30 years ago. (And if we’re appalled by it now, I shudder to think how it was received in 1976!)

In this era of reality TV (which, for the record, I can’t stand), it’s still shocking to see Faye Dunaway negotiating with a left-wing group leader about a syndicated TV show based on their group’s bank robberies, or about starting a homosexual soap opera or the “Mao Tse-Tung Hour”. It’s like today’s reality TV on crack—and this was made 30 years ago! Long before anyone had ever conceived of “Survivor”.

The idea of TV as propaganda machine was quite a fascinating one, an area touched on somewhat in Good Night and Good Luck. In Network, you had Peter Finch serving as the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves”, raving about how people have become so numb to the world that they believe anything they’re fed via the tube—and he’s exactly right in everything he says. We live our lives according to what we see on TV (only in this day and age, by what pop culture dictates as well). Finch even fed that very notion of TV as propaganda by telling everyone to publicly lobby against the proposed business deal at that network—and when the telegrams started pouring in to Washington to stop the deal, he showed just how powerful a propaganda machine the television could be!

What does it say about the common viewer, though? It says we believe anything and everything we hear, that we don’t think for ourselves, that (without question) we swallow every bit of information we’re fed through the TV and mass media, and each time I see his rant where he tells everyone to turn off the TV, right in the middle of this sentence . . . I’m very inclined to do just that!



I think what amazes me the most about Network is the blatant capitalistic manipulation of the common man. As Faye Dunaway so perfectly exemplifies by putting a post-breakdown Peter Finch on TV as the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves”, human beings are treated as non-thinking robots. When Peter Finch begins to have his breakdown, starting with his announcement of on-the-air suicide, the network execs don’t try to help him—they give him his own show to rant and rave about the downfall of society. Though his character doesn’t call it madness; he calls it a vision, clarity! And if you listen real carefully, everything he says makes terrifying sense. The one line that sums it up perfectly, early on in the movie when he tries to justify why he said he’d commit on-the-air suicide, is when he says, “I just ran out of bullshit!”

The romantic subplot between William Holden and Faye Dunaway could have been left out, I think. I didn’t feel it contributed to the story very much, except for certain degrees of character development—portraying Dunaway’s Diana Christiansen as a hard-core executive who has little ability to feel true emotions for other human beings. Don’t get me wrong—Dunaway was pretty standout, though I think her character could have been developed differently, showing her total corporate side without the romantic subplot. Robert Duvall was spectacular as the ruthless executive who took over the network and fired William Holden. And William Holden served well as the aging executive trying to do the right thing but failing miserably.

There’s still a lot of raised eyebrows regarding the Supporting Actress Oscar win of Beatrice Straight. She played William Holden’s wife, and had only two speaking scenes: one was simply to say, “Time to get up”; the other was an emotional breakdown at the news of William Holden leaving her for Faye Dunaway. Her long rant in that scene won her an Oscar, which has gone down in the annals of Oscar history as one of the biggest W-T-F moments since Marisa Tomei’s win for My Cousin Vinny. Me, personally, I think she did a respectable job in that scene, but hardly enough to warrant an Academy Award. I say that because her vocabulary in that scene was a little too sophisticated (read, a little too scripted) for such an emotional moment, and her rapidly changing emotions just didn’t strike me as believable. First she seems calm but uneasy, then boom! She’s angry and hurt. Then boom! She’s accepting and understanding. All in under five minutes. I just didn’t buy it.

I guess the same argument could be made for Ned Beatty’s boardroom scene, at least with respect to the brevity of screen-time and the sophistication of vocabulary. I mean, do you know anybody who walks about talking about the “holistic system of systems”? The “vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars”? Beatty was also Oscar-nominated for his one scene (didn’t win), but I found his character to be more believable than Straight's.

Being the cynic that I am, Network spoke to me in much the same way Syriana did. That kind of brutal honesty I commend, and at the same time it makes me wonder just how much I myself am falling victim to the numbness that Peter Finch warns us about, even though I hardly watch any syndicated TV anymore—obviously choosing movies instead—and a lot of the news I get through the web and the Washington Post. And if I really want an objective newscast that will tell me what’s honestly happening in the world, I’ll watch the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer”. Like many others, though, I’d love to get a peak into screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s mind to know what inspired him to write Network, what vision he had to see not only into the 1976 world of television but also into today’s world! I give this a 9 out of 10.