Network: Install with Ease

On Warren Zevon’s 1989 dystopian concept album Transverse City, there is a song called “Networking.” The chorus goes:

Networking, I’m user friendly.
Networking, I install with ease.
Data processed, truly Basic.
I will upload you, you can download me.

Thirteen years earlier, MGM released Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), a satire of the US television industry in which an Edward R. Murrow-esque new anchor ages his way into latter-day prophethood. His show excoriating the decadence and paltriness of late 70s America earns him a top spot in the ratings. Conflicts of interest—and murder—ensue.

At first glance, the two bear out no relation. Zevon’s song is, as with many of his works, a cheeky dig at human social relations. In this case, he trains his scope on LA’s gabbing executives amidst technology’s rapid and dehumanizing development. Lumet’s film is about the logic of television, its delivery into our homes and mental horizons, rotting our brains. They share only seven letters.

But the truth is that Lumet’s masterpiece works so well because it’s about both the rottenness of our media ecosystem and the ways in which a vast, dystopian network dominates our lives. When multinational corporate exec Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) screeches about the death of all nations and the rightful reign of Mammon to bring twentieth-century Moses, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), onside, he announces the network to end all networks. His is a world of blathering social relations ruled, manipulated, and obeisant to a web of corporate mergers and buyouts popularly associated with the 1980s (Lumet is calling his shot early here).

Zevon’s dystopian leer haunts the film. Take, for instance, a later verse:

There’s a prayer each night that I always pray:
Let the data guide me through every day
And every pulse and every code.
Deliver me from the bypass mode.

How much of Network’s comedy derives from the fluency with which everyone involved can enter into contract negotiations? In one hilarious scene, members of the left-wing Ecumenical Liberation Army haggle with studio execs over minor details in a TV-show agreement. They yell “fascist” at each other not because of their politics but because of disagreements over potential syndication earnings. The big wigs at UBS, the fake studio where the main characters work, constantly discuss ratings, viewership share, and the fine points of advertising revenue. The data guides them, as it now guides us.

That’s ultimately what makes Network such lovely viewing. For how timebound its tale of TV addiction feels, its basic critique anticipates what our society has become—digital imprisonment, a lack of rigorous thought, degradation, and, of course, the network itself.