NETWORK
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Nothing written by Pauline Kael during her reign as America's bitch supreme is more embarrassingly lacking of her usual perception and foresight than her review of 1976's NETWORK entitled "Hot Air," which can be found in her collections "When the Lights Go Down" and "For Keeps." The expected salient observations are made: that the movie has a crummy, hurried-up look, that the late Paddy Chayefsky's prophetic screenplay is scatterbrained, and that William Holden's a marvellous camera subject once he decided that he didn't need movie goddess tricks to cover up his age. (Panicky Warren Beatty should follow suit.) You can't fault personal taste either: if a movie doesn't appeal to her, it just doesn't appeal. However, as readers of her criticism are well aware, Kael never let simplicity get in the way of her "crow bar" examinations. "Hot Air" is an excoriation of Chayefsky's supposed case of the N.Y. hates, with the boob tube used as his central metaphor. As you read the first paragraph of this lengthie, your radar is swirling: My God, how can she miss what's so obvious? She discerns the author's rant on television, then blows it by using his hatred-warning against him. Crashing blindly into her own rhetoric, she berates, "Television, he says, is turning us into morons and humanoids." Not buying what has come to fruition, she asks, thousands of words later, what is inherently answered in her question: when Howard Beale tells viewers to scream, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any longer," she reduns: "Is the viewers' obedience proof of their sheeplike response to TV or is it evidence that the Prophet has struck a nerve - that the public is as fed up as he is?" Kael somehow missed that it's both. She commits her own coup de grace when foaming about this: "Chayefsky, it seems, can be indignant about people becoming humanoids, and then turn a somersault and say it's inevitable and only a fool wouldn't recognize that. And he's wrong on both counts. There are a lot of changes in the society that can be laid at television's door, but soullessness isn't one of them. TV may have altered family life and social intercourse; it may have turned children at school into entertainment seekers. But it hasn't taken our souls, any more than movies did, or the theatre and novels before them." Attacking Chayefsky for exactly what television has done -- for being the very instrument that has robbed us of our collective soul. Movies, theatre and books rarely alter a nation's psyche because they require discrimination of purchase and effort in assimilating. If not the omnipresent box, what then could have mugged us? Corrupt politics? Pervasive amorality and violence? The contemptible phoniness and hate of God squads? Not without the power of television. Years ago, in "Movies on Television," the second article she penned for The New Yorker before becoming one of its critics, Kael enunciated the stunningly false principle that all we get from the box is television. The piece a failure for the same reason "Hot Air" is -- her love of movies (and books, jazz, classical music and theatre in descending order) had, for too long, prevented her from acknowledging what so many recognized even before NETWORK: that television is IT. You can't reject or fight TV's promiscuous invasiveness by denying its power, which is in devouring all. It's the black hole of Earth -- nothing escapes. The sad fact is, we've all become little Dianas. Only our hots aren't generated by ratings, like Diana's, but by trash, scandal and hate. Psycho Dan Rather wrote years ago that "the camera never lies." In spite of wanting to believe the truism as safeguard against ever lowering thresholds of standards, today we ask: does the camera ever tell the truth?
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