REVIEW: Network (dir. Sidney Lumet)

Cast: Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunawaye, Robert Duvall

“You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even ‘think’ like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, YOU people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...”

I hate television. I’ve thought long and hard about it and I can’t see any other way of describing my on-off relationship with that fickle and transitory creature, TV. She promised us so much at the beginning of our relationship: information, education, and entertainment. She persuaded us that we no longer needed literature, art, public discourse, or any other activity that, for centuries, had formed the basis of human social and mechanical intelligence.

And so we became dependent upon her. We allowed our young to suckle on that cathode-ray tube in the corner of the living room. No more Scouts, no more debating societies, no more Classics, no more camping trips with Dad… just the box.

But television has proved to be a venomous and disloyal harlot. She teases us with the greatness we knew she could achieve: awe-inspiring nature documentaries, gritty and damning social dramas, carefully plotted and intricately decorated period pieces.

But the passion of those early years has crumbled into a cold and calculated abuse of our unquestioning love for her. We are forced to stomach any vacuous tripe that Simon Cowell or Endemol decide to throw at us.

The relationship is stale; we just don’t have the courage or independence to end it. I only hope that, eventually, mankind will realise this poisonous relationship with television is not a marriage but a brief, regrettable affair; and we will someday return to Hemingway and Proust with our heads hung in shame.

One man who, I am confident, shares my feelings towards television is Paddy Chayefsky, the writer of ‘Network’. The rants, like the one above, that Chayefsky stuffs into the mouth of his hero Howard Beale (an Oscar-winning performance by Peter Finch) are angry and bitter and raw, and yet so beautifully paced and honest.

At one point in the film – when Beale orders his millions of viewers to go to their window, open it, and scream “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” – I had a tear of passion in my eye. Just imagining that many people achieving momentary unity through their unvoiced confusion and rage, I was so overwhelmed with that odd, transcendental love for humanity that I literally welled up.

The story concerns news anchorman Howard Beale, who has been laid off due to dipping ratings. On his penultimate broadcast, he announces that he will kill himself live on TV during his final broadcast. He persuades his bosses to allow him back on air to apologise for his momentary loss of sanity, but then proceeds to excuse himself by explaining, to his millions of viewers, that he just ran out of bullshit to tell them. His career, and the future of the entire news team, seems ruined. But when his broadcast achieves a record jump in ratings, the powers-that-be decide to use the mentally frail Beale as a ‘raging prophet’.

The script is far from perfect. At times it feels as if the story has been stuffed in between the powerful monologues just to fill the time. This is not the case, although the film might be better if it were. The real problem here is that the film tries to deal with too much. The damning critique of network television is complete enough without the examination of extremist politics and multi-national companies.

The relationship between Faye Dunaway and William Holden is a perfect representation of the dangers of a humanoid, TV generation that Beale espouses on his show. Dunaway is one of the first generations to be “brought up on Bugs Bunny.”

She is a ruthless career woman, but what is truly tragic is that she really does see her life through the kaleidoscopic lens of television. She is incapable of connecting with any thing in her life – love, sex, family, etc – without comparing it to the simplified and intentionally warped three act structures that she has been brought up on.

This is not the perfect film. But if anybody reading this has ever wanted to have their niggling discontentment with television, corporatism, and the general state of malaise that seems to exist across every strata of our struggling and careless species voiced by an enigmatic news anchorman with millions of viewers and nothing to lose… watch this film.