Satire as Fortune Telling

Sidney Lumet's Network was released in a new DVD edition this week. Written by Paddy Chayefsky, it was an audacious, over-the-top movie when it came out thirty years ago. Vincent Canby in The New York Times (registration required) called Network's humor "about as stern and apocalyptic as it's possible to be without alienating the very audience for which it is intended." Discussing the "wickedly distorted views of the way television looks, sounds, and, indeed, is," Canby worries, "I expect that a lot of people will sniff at the film on the ground that a number of the absurdities Mr. Chayefsky and Mr. Lumet chronicle so carefully couldn't happen." Variety described "how Chayefsky takes a good idea, pushes it relentlessly past discretion and through the barrier of intellectual credulity, making it so outrageous that it comes across as brilliant."

But the film may not be quite so outrageous for a person seeing it for the first time today. Since it features greedy, ratings-obsessed TV network execs and news shows far more interested in producing spectacle than journalism, today's viewer might well wonder, "And the outrageous, audacious part would be . . . ?" To a jaded, cynical modern audience, it might look terribly run of the mill.

Paddy Chayefsky was just too clever for his own good. Except for the climax (which I won't reveal here in case anyone reading does see it for the first time), pretty much everything suggested in the film has already come to pass or barely seems a stretch. Chayefsky saw the trends and extrapolated. He may have gone much farther than even he thought was realistic, but real life overtook him very quickly. I'd highly recommend Network to anyone, but if at all possible, try to remember that this was when Walter Cronkite still anchored the CBS news and that it--and most all nightly network news--was still worthy of trust. If you can wait a couple of weeks, Good Night, and Good Luck will be coming out on DVD, as well. The two films might make an interesting double feature.

While we're on the subject of prescient satirists, take a look at this post from Tom Tomorrow. He features a strip he did almost three years ago whose final panel was his attempt "to portray what seemed like a ludicrously over-the-top worst case scenario." It might've been ridiculous then (and I remember this strip--it was over the top, but still vaguely disquieting), but now it's not even particularly funny. I'm tired of today's news being yesterday's silly, unrealistic satire.