Network\u2019s <\/em>hyperbolic yet disturbingly plausible story involves the Union Broadcasting System, a struggling \u201cwhorehouse network\u201d that has just been purchased by an international conglomerate. With corporate restructuring, the news division is losing its journalistic independence and must turn a profit on its own. Profit requires <\/strong>\u201cshowmanship,\u201d and <\/strong>UBS stumbles upon a showman in Howard Beale (Peter Finch), its dyed-in-the-wool news anchor, who is about to be fired due to low ratings. <\/strong>Beale announces that he will kill himself on the air, and his ratings spike. The diabolically savvy executive Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), in between developing reality series starring terrorist groups, transforms Beale into the \u201cmad prophet of the airwaves,\u201d who rails against the \u201cbullshit\u201d of contemporary life: inflation, environmental destruction, and acts of political violence. All goes well for the network, until the \u201cbullshit\u201d Beale calls out starts to include television itself. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky keep the plot\u2019s satirical, careening delights grounded in the gritty verit\u00e9 of the New Hollywood style. Against quotidian, procedural representations of production meetings and corporate maneuverings, the star performances of its larger-than-life characters shine brightly. Finch, who received a posthumous Oscar for playing Beale, wrings a range of expression out of a persona of ragged gravitas. He seems both blazingly near and disconcertingly far away. As his crescendos of rage ebb into despondency, he is alternately a righteous prophet and a frenzied manifestation of white male grievance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, Dunaway\u2019s Diana is more textured than her bloody-minded cunning might suggest. The film feels most dated when it makes Diana\u2019s sexuality a metaphor for villainy. (By typical patriarchal logic, she is depicted as simultaneously hypersexed and frigid.) But if Diana were just a straight-up ice queen, she would be less dangerous. Dunaway (who also won an Oscar) makes Diana light up with giddy, sometimes girlish enthusiasm as she cooks up ideas for shows like \u201cThe Mao Tse-Tung Hour.\u201d Her moments of playful gusto channel the trashy-wacky siren call of reality television itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Network<\/em>\u2019s fangs could not pierce so sharply if the film had no sentiment or humanity. Its cynicism, as is often the case, is entwined with idealism. Despite its cyanide bite, Network<\/em> has an almost romantic humanism; authentic relationships and experiences are fragile, and always vulnerable to exploitation, but they still endure, shining even in tatters and fragments. We feel this most deeply in the story of Beale\u2019s producer Max Schumacher (William Holden) and the breakdown of his marriage to Louise (Beatrice Straight). Max, during a banal midlife crisis, begins an affair with Diana. When he confesses to Louise, he is fatalistic: he loves Diana, but thinks she is incapable of loving. To surrender to Diana, he knows, is to surrender to television itself \u2013 she will treat their all-too-human love triangle as if it were a made-for-TV movie. But Louise, wobbly with pain but full of righteous fury, won\u2019t easily accept her role. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAfter 25 years of building a home and raising a family, and all the senseless pain we have inflicted on each other, I\u2019ll be damned if I\u2019m going to stand here and have you tell me you\u2019re in love with somebody else!\u201d Later, raw anguish breaks through Louise\u2019s rage. \u201cI hurt badly,\u201d she sobs, her face turned away from the camera, as if refusing to allow her pain to become \u201ccontent.\u201d Straight also won an Oscar (Best Supporting Actress), for only about five minutes of screen time. It\u2019s easy to see why: in those five minutes she becomes the film\u2019s beating heart. When they agree to part, Louise, calmer, sees her philandering husband with sympathy. She smiles as she tells him he\u2019s \u201cin for some dreadful grief.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Max and Louise\u2019s shared history, the \u201csenseless pain,\u201d the rapport that means they can laugh together even in this moment of rancor, are the bits and pieces of life that can never fit a neat television narrative. Here, when these kinds of authentic bonds are most at risk, the film imbues them with a vitality and luster that shows they are worth fighting for. Network<\/em> is well worth rewatching as a master class in media satire, but it is this plaintive cry, urging us to kindle and treasure the unmediated, uncommodified moments of life, that make it enduring and essential. “Network” is currently available<\/a> for digital rental or purchase.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/network2-1024x577.jpg\")
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