Review of Network (1976) by Walter B — 04 Jun 2011

Peter Finch's Oscar that was awarded to him posthumously was well deserved. Atop his performance comes the likes of Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and Robert Duvall. Chayefsky enjoys making satires that are cruel, toeing the line of the absurd to nearly jading the audience.

They are also apocalyptic. In a tv world today where Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, and the WWF rule the waves, it is becoming more and more of a scary prophecy. The satire also tackles radicals of Communism and terrorists (parody of the Symbionese Liberation Army called the "Ecumenical Liberation Army").

There's the Mao Tse Tung hour which covers an hour long program of terrorists and their ideaology spilling over the air waves. Then there's Howard Beale (Peter Finch), giving the performance of his life as an insane man who goes further and further down the rabbit hole.

He begins this spiral with announcing he will commit suicide on the next Tuesday broadcast. The heads of UBS (a fictional tv station) decide to cynically exploit him for their own purposes to gain more and more ratings.

The satire then jumps from an angry man to look like a prophet along the lines of the book of Job who feels like he has been "wronged" and urges his audience (i.e., us, the American people who buy into "trash tv") to become mad as hell and not take this anymore! It finally ends on a further absurd note, where the terrorists are told to kill Howard after he loses ratings and becomes less interesting to the public for the depressing information he tells them.

As it closes out, we hear the narrator say, "This was the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.".