My best friend came over to watch the Oscars Sunday, and he was flabbergasted to learn I had never seen Network. (Hmph. This from a man who’s never seen All About Eve or Sunset Boulevard.) So I went over there last night, and we watched Network.
Day-um. I mean – day-um. What an astonishing film. The whole timewarp element of the '70s (I graduated from college in 1976, the year this came out) – the extent to which things have changed, and the extent to which they haven’t. The sheer scary prophecy of what would happen to TV.
And then there’s the whole “Mad as hell” (and, oh, by the way, he was mad – mad as a freakin’ hatter) thing. That’s the meme that came out of the movie, the main thing I knew about it (I was like “No shit, William Holden is in this?” during the opening credits :smack: ) – I couldn’t believe that that was so early in the movie, because that’s what the movie is about, right?
No, totally not.
Day-um. Hell of a film.
The various levels and shades of emotion – the broad comedy of the scene where Wm. Holden and Faye Dunaway go away for the weekend together and she won’t. shut. up. as they’re having sex – compared with the scene between the two of them at the end.
Wow.
Thanks, M. – next time you’re over, I’ll give you your choice of Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve.
Yeah, Network is one of those films that, if it’s on, I’m almost compelled to watch. I’ve actually meant to start a thread on it several times but never got to it. It’s amazing to wrap my head around the notion that the stuff presented as programming in the movie was about as far out as Chayefsky could come up with as beyond the limits of television, knowing that within 20 years (in some cases more like within ten) we were already beyond that. Amazing performances from all concerned, especially coming out of nowhere Ned Beatty’s fire and brimstone speech to Howard Beal.
Peter Finch was nominated for Best Actor for that role, then died before the Academy Awards. He won, becoming the only actor to date to win posthumously. I remember that when the director of the film came up to accept for him he looked kind of sullen, and said “I don’t know why I was told to accept the award for this. It shouldn’t be me, it should be (Finch’s wife).” So he called her up out of the audience to take the statue.
Maybe it was thought she’d have a breakdown on stage or something? But she didn’t, she was a little teary but nothing more,
I saw this in the theater when it came out (I don’t know what my mother was thinking; I was 11) and a few times since. It was great when it came out, and it’s better now.
And I just recommended this to a co-worker yesterday, but it got me thinking. He’s 23. Will this movie carry the same satirical weight for someone who wasn’t around in the Walter-Cronkite, big-three-networks era of television? Will it look visionary or just dated?
I think as long as he’s watching it with some understanding of the priod he should get the satire just fine. A lot of it still works even in this 500-channel era. And if he looks at in the terms that I talked about, of seeing how much of it has been matched or surpassed by what’s actually happened in TV in the last decade, he should certainly be able to appreciate it as visionary.
I got my undergrad in Radio-TV-Film journalism in 1983. Network was considered a touchstone. Sadly, a lot we thought was pure comedy has since come to pass as normal.
Sigh.
Oh, somehow, I had NEVER seen Sunset Blvd. until last year when it was on TCM. Suddenly, I understood a ream of Carol Burnett skits and other pop culture references from decades past.
I was half watching these awards at work, and IIRC his wife said something like “I just wish Peter was here to get this” to which a coworker of mine replied, “if he were here, he wouldn’t be getting it!” I loffed.
I rented it from the library, but the second half was pretty badly damaged, so I’ve only seen most of it. Still, the satire is lost on me. I thought it was an amazing, gripping film, and I understand the time period, but it’s just so horrifically real. For instance, her programing with terrorists films would be funny, if it hasn’t happened to a much smaller degree with all the hooplah over Bin Laden’s tapes. So much is supposed to be “satirically beyond the pail”, but seems, to me atleast, quite capable of happening. Or it has happened.
Great film that I hope to watch the whole way through some day.
The satire lies in the fact that, at the time, no one thought any of this could ever really happen; it was the extremest hyperbolic fantasy; the ad absurdumest slippery slope Chayefsky could think of.
To watch it now, without understanding that, without understanding the context of the day–very very much pre Bin Laden–is to not get the satire.
It was too prescient for its own good; reality has left it in its dust.