The prescient genius of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network”

Recovered from the Wayback Machine, April 28, 2006

The prescient genius of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network”

Buster and I rented a 30-year old movie last night, Paddy Chayefsky’s astonishing satire, Network. Buster loved it, completely.

What a script! You have the last remnants of the ruminating “Greatest Generation” being overtaken by their restless, busy children.

You have a brittle, obsessed feminist television programmer — a boomer raised on television and unable to think outside the idiot box. (“you ARE television incarnate,” her middle-aged departing lover tells her in a staggeringly insightful speech — and it is not meant to be a compliment).

You have a network happy to exploit the ravings of a man having a mental breakdown for the ratings, and happier, still to turn its Evening News show into a weird amalgam of Jerry Springer, Fox News and the Daily Show — a network happy to give terrorists exposure for ratings. Happy to present a “Mao Zedong Hour” each week (and don’t the Communists in control of it become piggy little Capitalists!) for sensationalism and yes, ratings. Happy to be bought out by a conglomerate so vast it is nearly impossible to discover its connections to…Middle Easter Oil-Producing nations. Happy to use the services of terrorists to assassinate a stubborn problem of a man who is pulling them down.

Oh, and the terrorists? The ones the Network likes best are called the Ecumenical Liberation Army.

The powers which engage their services for the assassination? They are referred to as “one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”

Yes, it’s satire. But when you watch Ned Beatty — the affable, seemingly benign corporate head who smiles and recounts his humble days as a salesman — “people say I can sell anything. . .” it all seems way too familiar — eerily so — and you wonder if Chayefsky had a bit of “Sybil the Soothsayer’s” gift for prophecy. Then you hear him make his speech, and what seems “familiar” becomes recognizable as the sort of simplistic, happy-talk, one-world rhetoric we hear today, by attendees of things like the World Economic Forum in Davos or the Clinton Global Initiative, or folks who shill for the UN on any given day. An excerpt:

JENSEN:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations!
There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds!
There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars! Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet!
[…]
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx?
[…]
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably deter-mined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality -one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized,all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

HOWARD
(humble whisper)
Why me?

JENSEN
Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

It’s scathing. It’s brilliant. It’s hilarious. It’s chilling. It’s strikingly contemporary. If you’ve never seen the film, or haven’t watched it in 30 years, do yourself a favor and watch it again and marvel at the linguistics — the bite and snap of intelligent, fierce dialogue written by a man in love with words and supremely gifted at employing them — and at the story, which comments on everything from mob mentalities to the trivialization of life and love for an ignoble cause. The women are braless, the men are wearing wide ties, and no one has a cell phone or a computer at their desk, but the world Chayefsky presents is the one we’re in, today.