Just watched the restored version of NETWORK last night, Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant story of a mad teevee news anchor and the “programming” of the news around a terrorist group. It’s one of my five favorite movies (ALSO: Dr. Strangelove, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Repo Man and L.A. Confidential), and the color of the newly restored version is dazzling.
Where do I start with the brilliant dialogue in the film? The scene where members of the terrorist group — the ban-robbing and heiress kidnapping Ecumenical Liberation Army, led by the Great Ahmed Khan — and a chief operative of the U.S. Communist Party negotiate a royalty contract with a group of Hollywood lawyers is desperately funny, but largely unprintable here. And then there’s the whole premise — that a programming executive would create regaular “entertainment” based on the activities of an urban terrorist group.
(Lest anyone think 9/11 changed much, terrorism was on the mind of most Americans in the mid 1970s. A joke from the pilot of Barney Miller had a newscaster report “a Japanese terrorist group hijacked an Italian airliner… in retaliation, an Italian terrorist group blew up a Japanese restaurant.” The plot of a later episode involved someone planting bombs in government offices, and when officers asked who might be angry enough to bomb government buildings, the punch line was “who wouldn’t be?”)
After seeing a number of the comments from yesterday about the CNN interview with Michael Berg (I read the interview myself), this last bit from Max Schumacher (played by William Holden) to mistress and programming vice-president Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway) describes what teevee is, and has always been:
Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You’re television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. [Emphasis mine.] You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain… and love.
Teevee takes real life and replaces it with a simulation — a fake life, fake ideas, fake feelings, all acted out by fake people and watched by people who have given themselves over to fake. You do that long enough, and you can no longer tell what is fake. And what is real.
6:05 am on June 9, 2006
