decent

You’re on television, dummy.

I. I saw Network for the first time. I need to think.

II. This is a big, messy movie with big, messy veins that writhe out of its head in apoplexy. A movie with spittle and tears and sweat. It’s a movie that delivers its rousing, Old Testament jeremiads with a cross-country amplifier that, naturally, blows its flaws up to a Godzilla-size and makes it a thudding, hefty target for snideness and sneering and ironic condescension.

III. Because the politics are heavy-handed. The drama is heavy handed. Also, did I mention, you know. The jeremiads? The pitch is at a kettle’s, the entire contraption careens around the bends, wheels skirting the road.

IV. But fuck the haters. Because. Seriously. Network takes the risks: big, ballsy self-immolating risks that are absolutely jaw-dropping. It’s not an easy movie to decode. It’s a goddam particle accelerator, theories and philosophies and motivations all whizzing around at atomic speeds and bashing into eachother with explosive results.

V. Explosive, thorny results. There’s not one single thread you can easily wiggle out of Network, no trailer-ready take-home message. This is not a doggy-bag movie. And really, Network must act like a Rorschach test with a million explanations projected onto its monumental, Promethean frame: it’s about the soul-eroding banality and misery of day-to-day life so easily fogged over by a few meagre, scant amusements; it’s about the cauterizing effects of mass-exposure, be it television or any other form of media, its ability to calcify our capabilities for empathy and decency and emotion; it’s about our awesome, quicksand capacity for selling out our big, unattractive, unsexy, heart-felt philosophies; and our equally awesome capacity for justifying the sale; it’s about the corruptability of all things; it’s about the eclipsing of our traditional allegiances - mom, country, apple-pie - by the shadowy and nebulous yet somehow more real cult of venality; it’s about how goddammed hard it is to do the right thing, much less name it.

VI. Finally? Network’s got to be a miracle. That this movie - this anti-corporate, anti-Communist, anti-media, anti-people movie - with its red-faced, pop-veined, hystrionic, last-gasp message could ever be made.

As. A. Movie - with backers and studio support and the whole Hollywood rigamarole is absolutely astounding.

VII. I’m still not done thinking about it.

VIII. You should really watch it.