“It is itself very like TV, the monster it mocks”: Network reviewed in 1977

Network is a furious and infuriating tangle. Is it a brilliant/shocking/corrosive satire on America’s dwelling in screened imitations of reality, or is it a snake devouring its own tail? Is the satire cleansing or only huckster raillery, responsible anger turned into self-contempt by the cynicism that ravishes every ideal? It is a reckless but literate film, incoherent and pretentious, piercing yet evasive. It is itself very like TV, the monster it mocks. Sidney Lumet’s direction is in shelter, but Network is thunderously written and as contentious as Paddy Chayefsky’s last picture, The Hospital (1971). Every time I saw the film in America, audiences identified with its haphazard spleen and applauded at the end. Was that simply a version of the inane rabble-rousing of Beale asking his audience to get up from the set, go to the window and cry out ’I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more‘? Or was it a true lament for a culture distraught at its own reliance on TV? Is horror nullified by the assent of ‘Right on’, and is there nothing to do but bear witness to our contorted integrity?

The film is best when least sequential – bursts of impact not pondered or related. There is a feeling all through that it is preparing for a leap into comic-book caricature. Perhaps it needed William Burroughs to write the script, if only to catch the devastating interruptedness of TV. The movie needs commercials, preferably for itself. Isolated scenes are very funny – the terrorists haggling with network lawyers over subsidiary rights – or beautifully lunatic, as when Jensen bulges with his corporation gospel. But restraining this frenzied crescendo is the dull realism of the UBS offices and studios and the use of the William Holden character as a sour observer of the dementia. 

In The Hospital, the George C. Scott doctor was the more engaging because he struggled to contain both Max and Beale, sceptic and believer, rueful spectator of chaos and damaged participant in it. But in Network, Max is from the early days of TV: he sentimentalises over [American broadcaster] Ed Murrow and might have known the Chayefsky who wrote Marty (1955) and those other pieces of sentimental ‘realism’. He comes from that soft source and offers the sketchy outline of decency and humanity; his reality subsides under windy humanist speeches and the thorough implausibility of his falling for Diana. When he is fired by Hackett, he warns that he will expose UBS irresponsibility – nothing follows, except a slowly accumulating pile of manuscript for the book he plays with writing. When he leaves his wife for Diana she predicts great grief for him. But he suffers only the stuffed unhappiness of soap opera – with a little more panache, their affair might have been as wild a parody of daytime TV as Mary Hartman. As it is, it looks like padding and a narrative framework for audiences who might have been disconcerted by more fragmentation.

Max becomes a grumbling old woman who allows himself to be the recipient of Diana’s nearly instant orgasm, followed by a brief collapse – commercial break – before she resumes the frantic love talk wheedling for advice on programme problems. Diana is the only intriguing person in the film, despite the heavy-handed attempt to present her as the spirit of TV. She is akin to the medium: shimmering and hectic, all instant appeal and fended off boredom, without substance, feelings or ideas. She fidgets and blurs like a TV picture and horizontal hold probably worries her more than grasp on reality. It is a cunning use of Faye Dunaway’s frigid, nervy glamour and an accomplished performance.

The other characters are merely dumped on the film. Max’s ‘responsibility’ is a lazy pose; Robert Duvall comes as close to plainness as he is capable with a stereotype who is only foulmouthed bluster and stupid ruthlessness. Emptiest of all is Beale. The film blithely consigns him to madness and never tells us anything about the man: perhaps he only exists when he is on the air. We laugh at his grotesque messianism and reflect wistfully on his complaints. He may be right, but his rhetoric ignores the chance of action. Thus he collapses after every jeremiad – fainting fits or feigned fits? We never know, but the dramatic fall signals applause, relief and escaped responsibility.

Chayefsky is surely caught in the same dilemma. The film bristles with articulate curses against TV. It is an onslaught on trite sensation corrupting consequences. But its methods and devices are those of TV: the moving image; abrupt transitions; cheap laughs; hollow characters; activity concealing no point of view; movement as a distraction from meaning. The film is as vicious and feeble as a wasp trapped in the jam it craves, and if Network is essential viewing it is because of this chronic confusion. It is a satire without detachment, roots or hope of remedy. The whole film bellows with the cry Beale sells to viewers, but there is no pain, only the bitter-sweet irony of the Orson Welles scorpion that killed its carrier frog. Chayefsky knows we are drowning without dying in TV, but he concedes that ‘Help!’ is only a gesture in a Lichtenstein painting of a comic-book crisis.

 ► Network returns to select UK cinemas on 28 June to mark 100 years since the birth of Sidney Lumet.