Patreon Letter: 21st August 2019 (Patreon)

Hey, Jackson here, with a Patreon Letter, continuing to chip away at my backlog. The last few weeks, with my sister's wedding and the many podcasts have left very little time for Letter Writing, so the backlog continues to grow. But I've watched a couple movies and I'm going to write about them right now!! 

Network (1976)

I've never seen Network, despite being extremely into both 70s movies and Sidney Lumet, mostly because of its reputation as this genius, ahead of its time satire of television. There were a bunch of headlines about how Network "predicted trump" from the most insufferable corners of the internet, and such a rapturous legacy from centrist political strongholds has me thinking emoji at best. But last night, on a complete and total whim, I decided to watch it and: folks it's pretty good! It's pretty good. It's not my favourite Lumet by any means but we'll get into that.

Perhaps its biggest problem is that the first fifteen minutes stand head and shoulders above the rest of the film. The scene where Howard Beale announces that he's going to kill himself as almost everyone in the booth completely ignores him is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and it gets almost all the points the film wants to make about television, capitalism, alienation and progress across in a single joke. Which has the unfortunate side effect of rendering the movie's slide into darkness a little moot, but not entirely so. It just can't reach the propulsive heights of its first act.

This is because the movie splits into two around the time of Howard's famous "mad as hell" speech, a satirical farce about the backrooms of a television network, and an earnest relationship drama between Diana and Max, the movie's two real main characters. Max is a man of honour and integrity, who remembers the old days dammit, when we cared about people, and won't let his news division be subsumed into the corporate machine because this is america and we have morals!! Diana on the other hand is "television incarnate," a young woman rising up the corporate ranks who sees everyone and everything as a vehicle for ratings. She's thinking about ratings so much she even cums talking about them. No I am not making that up. Aaron Sorkin loves this movie btw.

It's easy to extrapolate the ways the movie does and doesn't hold up just from that description. As an examination of the inevitable, unstoppable death that capitalist structures and profit motive brings to everything it touches, it's good. Things really be like that. But it also brings a whole bunch of Gender to go along with that, and choosing Diana as their representation of the moral rot at the heart of society is thinking emoji at best. 

It's a shame because I think there's a way the movie could marry these two halves without too much reworking but it never gets there. Diana is the embodiment of the 80s, an independent business woman who is leaning in, taking hold of her sexuality and scaring every man in the boardroom. She is in many ways the aspirational figure sold to women by 80s corporate feminism, and the movie feels like the birth of the 80s. There are scenes in pubs, in run down alleys and night-time in New York that are as 70s as it gets, but her being this leading figure in a plastic, corporate environment makes every scene inside the UBS building seem like it's 1983. I'm young, and my only exposure to those decades is through pop culture, through semiotics and tones and signals and Network perfectly captures the dichotomy of cultural signals for both decades throughout its various scenes. And while the movie does position Diana as this figurehead for the new era, it doesn't portray her as the hollow figurehead that she is. It doesn't say "this is what corporate feminism wants women to be," it says "girls be taking too many selfies these days (sic)," in the form of the 60 year old man who left his wife to fuck her lecturing her and leaving her alone, pathetic and begging for his love.

Meanwhile in one of the movie's other classic scenes, Network carries its themes and politics much more confidently, as Howard's rantings start to tip from vague and unthreatening anti-authoritarianism that is calling on his viewers to get mad as hell and not take it anymore but not really saying what they should be mad as hell about or what not taking it means, into unhinged nationalist rantings about the arabs taking our jobs and globalism coming to destroy the american spirit. This leads into the fantastic scene where the CEO of the company gives a basically religious sermon to Howard, about how his nationalistic view is stupid and petty and that capitalism is a system that is much more vast and all encompassing than his reactionary nonsense. He - a CEO, so duh - says this joyously, capitalism is a force of nature and capitalism is the truth, and so chooses Howard to spread this gospel. And when Howard gets on TV the next night, he is broken, his reactionary anger displayed by having actually got some damn ideology, and it's at this moment that people stop paying attention.

This leads into his ratings declining and his getting murdered, which I think is a little too farcical of an easy out; that's not how any of the systems of power the movie is critiquing operate, they don't gun you down on live television. They don't need to. But during that sequence where the film is tackling with ideas of how any kind of empty reactionary stance will instantly fill with a vicious, racist subtext that is just really the status quo of power unless you read a fucking book and learn how the world works, is still powerful and it still works. Which just makes the part where the movie does this in its own Gender blindspots that much more frustrating.

Anyway I mostly enjoyed it. It's very funny, it's better than I expected. Another one filled in, I suppose. Before I go I just want to say that my personal favourite Lumet is still Dog Day Afternoon, and that please everyone go watch Dog Day Afternoon, I haven't seen it in a while but I remember watching it being one of the most electric experiences I've had. It rules.

Alright that's it from me for now, hopefully I'll be back before long, continuing to make this backlog disappear, I know Em's doing the same. Please enjoy the content!!

-Jackson