As of this week my ranting, non-sensical and semi-coherant views on retro movies are being inflicted on the population as a whole via Source Radio. If you have no regard for your sanity, you can catch my retro movie reviews live and in living sound-o-rama every other Wednesday. If you fancy, you can catch up (Retro-retro-reviews, anyone?) on this weeks review here
I'll be following each one up with a written version which replace banal mutterings with banal scribblings, but will still be a damn sight better than Radio 1's.
Thanks for listening, enjoy the film.
NETWORK.
The 1960's and 70's saw society lurch forwards into a new age of enlightenment, fighting the trends that had restricted and restrained society, popular culture and embittered people's lives. The sexual revolution, drug counter-culture, black rights, women's rights and the rise of populist television made for a molotov cocktail of conflicting and emboldening viewpoints, especially in the United States, where an increasingly enraged public fought a war on intellectual frontiers.
For the baby boomers, their war wasn't on the battlefield. They paid no homage to those who returned from World War II and opposed the anti-communist strategy in Vietnam. Their rage, fear and mistrust of the government was growing as was a sense of disenfranchisement. Hollywood was becoming a melting pot of political and social agendas and with a government isolated and mistrusted and television media outlets compromised, it was Hollywood who held a prism up to society, at once reflecting and refracting the concerns of the populace.
Set in the world of a fictional 4th television network within the American broadcasting system, Network was born out of these concerns and used both satire and realism to create a grand allegorical parable, warning this enraged generation that their rage and their desire for change could be manipulated and redirected by the one tool that was bringing them all together: television.
In the fictional network UBS, television news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) becomes increasingly morose as the measure of his success becomes reduced to ratings rather than factual content, until the time comes when his boss and great friend Max Schumacher (William Holden) is forced to fire Howard to appease the new owners of the Network, CCS. It's only when Howard returns to give one of his last shows as news anchor that he informs the public, live on air, that he intends to shoot himself on camera and quips that the ratings will soar.
At first, all hell breaks loose and Howard agrees to apologise, only to embark on a live, on air rant against the 'Bullshit' society that allows the hypocrisy of the world to continue unchecked. This public meltdown creates huge controversy, but at the same time, manipulative bosses played by Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall conspire to turn the news into an entertainment show, placing Howard's rants as the centrepiece and 'articulate the public rage' all for a larger share of the ratings.
As Howard's sanity gives way, his speeches become more and more alarming, culminating with his furious bellowing of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" in a barnstorming performance from Peter Finch. The audience, finding in Howard, someone to represent their isolation and anger, lap it up and the machine of the corporation turns this disturbed man into the biggest thing on television. In doing so, the producers make rage mainstream, fury primetime and the exciting banal. The 'whorehouse' network which has solicited ratings from every possible source can now use the counterculture movement to distract and placate the population whilst at the same time insulating the public from the horrors of the age.
Part of the genius of Sidney Lumet's direction lies in how the details of the film were designed to reflect the central corruption by the networks, who streamline feelings into ratings. The film itself manipulates the audience into compliance through the lighting set up, which at the start of the film is whitewashed and grey, gradually improving throughout until the final scenes are as glossy and 'television' as possible.
The film is also strangely prophetic, as eventually Fox became the 4th US Network and their News programme is often little more than table thumping rhetoric designed to entertain and editorialise rather than impartially relay current events. The anchors on Fox News sometimes make Howard Beale's enraged rabble rousing seem positively tame in comparison, seeming more like a call to arms than a factual programme.
Following Max's sacking when he opposes the exploitation of Howard, he embarks on an affair with one of the bosses responsible for keeping Howard on the air. Faye Dunaway's depiction of a woman in a man's world, sees her strip her character of emotion, feeling and sexuality. She explains to Max that she loves like a man, "Arousing quickly, consummating prematurely", while Max retains his humanity as he is in the twilight of his years, seeing death as real with 'definable features' and wrestling with the guilt of leaving his family for a person who reduces human life to "the rubble of banality". The story itself becomes melodrama, moving between emotive afternoon play sentimentality to the stark reality of modern living. The film Network takes on a new life, aping the affectations of TV and reflecting how it reduces the human experience into soundbites, seconds and ratings.
As Howard becomes increasingly unhinged, he eventually directs a tirade against the network bosses for a proposed deal with Saudi Arabia, to the great displeasure of the head of the corporate machine Mr. Jenson (Ned Beatty). He is summonsed into the grand boardroom of CCS and stands before Jenson who, in the most memorable section of the film, sells his philosphy. In explaining to Howard that there are no peoples, there are no freedoms, there are no democracies, there is only a system of businesses and money that unite the world, he foretells the future of both television and delivers a pointed warning to politics that it is corporations not elected officials that control our lives and, far from informing us, television is there to insulate and alienate us from the machinations of a world we don't understand.
The philosophy of Jenson is where the film is at it's most terrifyingly prophetic. The financial crisis gave us an insight into how faceless banks and corporations affect us, right down to our jobs, our food and shelter and our health, yet we were totally unaware. As television news struggled to explain the intricacies of how this all worked, to a public starved of transparency for so long, we can see how ill-equiped the instrument of television is to inform us. Its forgotten how to.
Where Network fails is that there are so many targets, so many sub-plots, so many issues to uncover. The danger with this is, although all are valid, the arrows of satire can sometimes miss the mark, simply because there are too many to hit such a small bullseye, perhaps a reason Sidney Lumet missed out on the Best Director Academy Award that year, as he struggled to reign in the strands of the film.
However, this is a minor issue that should not distract from the importance of this film as a prophetic and satirical miracle that is so relevant today, it actually makes you wonder just how many of the problems we have could have been avoided if Hollywood, TV and our media could only continue to be so brave.
And it's bloody entertaining. The greatest show on Earth.
Sametimenextweeksamebattimesamebatchannel.
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