Network: the impossibility of avoiding light entertainment

 

For much of its two-hour duration, Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) was very different to usual Hollywood fare. It was genuinely engaged with contemporary society. The opening was riveting, with TV anchor Howard Beale announcing he intends to commit suicide on air. What makes the scene remarkable is that although we are in the control room while the live announcement is taking place, none of the executives notice what is being said. The truth is that they aren’t really bothered about what he is saying. That irony sets the scene for a remarkable, if not quite unique, movie. Once they are told about Beale’s rantings, instead of dismissing him, the executives use him to attempt to improve their ratings. 

There is a tradition of biting satire directed at television in Hollywood, not surprisingly, and other sharply satirical treatments of the media include Sweet Smell of Success (1956). But this film is, for the most part, a sharper satire than most. I say for the most part, because while Howard Beale (a remarkable portrait by Peter Finch) goes steadily mad, the film turns its attention to the most unlikely of love affairs, in the most hackneyed Hollywood style. Max Schumacher, head of the news division, has a torrid affair with another senior executive, Diana Christensen (who looks twenty years younger). The affair is highly unlikely. Christensen is a woman on the make, who would stop at nothing to reach the top  - so why should she bother with a recently sacked veteran who has no continuing influence in the organisation? I couldn’t help thinking that the bitterest irony was her denunciation of news bulletins as just the same as the entertainment shows (“I watched your 6 o’clock news today; it’s straight tabloid.”). That denunciation loses much of its power in a movie that sags alarmingly in the middle to depict the same kind of love affair we had been watching for years: an old man and a young woman, who suddenly seems to lose all her self-possession in the arms of a man who could almost be her father. For several minutes, the lovers, now ex-lovers, denounce each other with grand statements from the pen of Paddy Chayefsky that sound just like every other sitcom on TV. The trick is to create an impressive-sounding statement with an air of finality, which is then followed by an equally impressive-sounding statement, and so on. This is not dialogue, it’s successive one-liners, and it sounds dreadfully stilted. For example: 

Max Schumacher: I’m the man you presumably love. I’m a part of your life. I live here. I’m real. You can’t switch to another station.

Diana Christensen: I was married for four years, and pretended to be happy; and I had six years of analysis, and pretended to be sane.

These remarks are not really part of a conversation. They are set pieces, as shallow as the TV attitudes condemned by the rest of the film. They don’t belong here (see, I’m learning to use the style myself). Network would be an even greater achievement if it had managed not to go soft in the middle.