"NETWORK"

Good lord. This film is huge. HUGE. The scale of it blows the mind. It manages to be both a fairy tale and a compelling study of realistic characters. It is both an outlandish satire and a searing expose. But then again that’s the point: in this day and age of television, fiction (and its forms and narrative structures) has fully fused with reality, such that the two are indistinguishable. In the post-modern world, nothing is “real” and nothing is “fake.” TV fiction feeds off of real people, who feed off of TV fiction.
One doesn’t really realize how deep-rooted this theme is in the film until the very end. The movie’s scale seems small at first. Its slow burn pace might not work for everyone. The beginning-- we take the serious voice of the narrator to be merely a way to introduce us to the characters. We notice nothing shocking about the workings of the network, and think Peter Finch’s character really is nuts. Enter Faye Dunaway, her scheme for a terrorist sitcom, and the high ratings that Finch’s character gets after Billy Holden lets him stay on the air, and the scope widens a bit. It’s now a satire. Then Dunaway’s takeover of Finch’s show, dressing the production up with a soothsayer, some stain-glass windows, and an audience that cheers with gusto as Finch faints at the end of every show, and the movie now becomes absurdist. Cue the romance between Dunaway and Holden, borne of his fear of death and her need for some attachment to someone who isn’t as lifeless as she is, and the film grounds itself to a certain extent. The overarching metaphor becomes clear. Media needs real people need media. Humanoids need humans. But the film doesn’t stop there. Finch meets the head of the corporate conglomerate, and his booming rhetoric and the way he’s shot convince us as well as Finch that he more or less is God. And so Finch’s character doesn’t seem quite so crazy. The film circles back on itself once again; it strays from the real pathos of the scenes between Holden and Dunaway for the sake of the ultimate in surreal—a corporate God and his news anchor messiah.
Here we notice how far the film can push irony. Finch previously ranted and raved against modern media’s dehumanization, as the men at the network gleefully reaped the benefits of his sky-high ratings. Then, touched by Ned Beatty’s God figure, he flips and preaches strictly the corporate agenda of dehumanization, to be met with piss-poor ratings.
The mad genius figure of Beatty’s character, which stretches satire so far that it stops mocking something real and becomes its own fictional form, brings enlightenment to the viewer. That narrator, heard at the beginning and occasionally throughout, is not just a narrator. He is meant to be reading the story of the film to you as if it was a fairy tale. Because it is. It transcends satire by not pretending like it is smarter than what it is satirizing. In fact it is what it is satirizing; it is another fictional form through which we are absorbing “reality.” But the difference is that Paddy Chayefsky’s characters, due to their profession, are always self-conscious that they are equal parts human and media, always conscious of their roles in the script they’re playing out. “I’m supposed to be the romantic; you’re supposed to be the hard-bitten realist!” Holden yells at Dunaway at one point. In this film, lines like that oddly don’t put you off; in fact you laugh at them.
One can probably guess from my description of the plot that the aforementioned gradual widening of scope, the oscillating ways that the movie works, don’t always come off as neatly as hoped. As the viewer is constantly reevaluating what the movie is, the pace can feel start and stop. But Lumet deserves credit for packing scenes with more dramatic and relevant punches to the stomach than many a film. And sometime in the last 30 years, the fairy tale became even more true, such that the brilliance of the film will be appreciated now more than before.
But make no mistake; this is Paddy Chayefsky’s movie all the way. He nails it. This film isn’t about TV or the news. It’s about his characters, and how they got to be the way they are. But you don’t need me to tell you that. They’ll tell you themselves. That that actually works here is a credit both to Chayefsky and Lumet. The film is titanic.