Two Bits

The difference between a work of genius and a travesty is how the viewer is able to interpret every scene. In a bad movie, such as Anaconda, the scenes exist to move the plot along. They have no message and no purpose other than to fill in the required 90 minutes of space in between catching introduction and tense climax.

In a good movie, every scene is significant. Few scenes, if any, are simply expository scenes. Often, this leads to scenes that seem out of place – irrelevant. Of course, they aren’t irrelevant. They’re key to understanding the messages behind the film.

At one point during Network, the narrative turns from the story of a raving lunatic taking top ratings to an extended montage about a romance between two of the lead characters. The montage came without warning and the romance seemed to happen for no reason. At first, my reaction to the scenes was, “What is this nonsense?” Then, as they continued, I realized what Paddy Chayefsky was doing. He was showing us two people whose entire relationship exists only in the context of a script, only in the context of profit share. It was at this point that I understood Network was a work of genius.

The basic idea behind Network is that we have created, through the empire of television (and now Internet) an essentially dehumanized world. Our experiences have been reduced to primetime shows, to the nightly news – to Youtube shorts and liveblogs.

The message is simple. So simple that it takes a real genius to communicate it effectively. Anyone can say, “TV is soulless.” It takes a purposeful mind to say what is said in Network. The movie is filled with sublime, pointed speeches. It is a series of scenes of people just talking, punctuated by the short bits of action that inevitably result from all that talking. In this way, I find myself wanting to draw comparisons to The Dark Knight, which is, thematically, a very different film. But both movies have a thesis they are driving for (or, in Network’s case, theses), and both go at it through dialogue.

Ultimately, you will either find a movie like Network to be pointless rubbish or thoughtful genius. I side with the latter. To risk cliche, I would also point out that the movie is as pertinent now, if not more, than it was in 1976.

There’s another key to the genius in this film, and it is the characterization. The bad example is easy to make, again, with Anaconda. That movie had one interesting character (the villain) who was only interesting because Jon Voight did something different with him.  But every other character in the movie is flat and simplistic and unreal. Contrast this to Network, who offers a few candidates for villains but then bothers to show us enough of them that by the end of the movie,  we sympathize with everybody – save the flattest secondary characters (and not all of the secondary characters are).

You cannot help but take an interest in Beale, the retiring news anchor who has said the same shit for fifteen years but finally has the courage (or alcohol intake) to say what we always pretend we wished our news anchors would say. You must also like Max, the “middle-aged” (if old is middle-aged – can one have a midlife crisis at 60?)  and very human producer who is also very fake. We feel, as we watch, that he is a TV show character and knows it. So then there is also Diana, the cutthroat TV producer who is also a TV show character but doesn’t know it. Even the corporate CEO, Jensen, who has only one scene, is so dramatic, so televised, that we almost don’t buy it. But we have to, because by then we want to. We want to hear what these men and women have to say, because we sense it will be a kind of truth. But we’re terrified of what that truth might be, sure, but we must hear it nonetheless.

When you fill your movie with a half dozen characters who are all interesting and are all real, it is almost impossible to write a scene that will not be meaningful. And of course, the movie has blood. It knows itself very well, and so it very well knows it cannot end without blood. And so, it doesn’t.

Perfect.