Mad as Hell by Dave Itzkoff

Author:Dave Itzkoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

6

PRIMAL FORCES AND PHANTASMAGORIA

By the time 1976 drew to a close, American movie theaters had offered eager audiences countless forms of paranoia and despair to choose from. A cinematic calendar of futility, confrontation, and retribution had opened in the winter with the release of Taxi Driver and Travis Bickle’s vow that “someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” By the spring, this message came clad in a more polished wardrobe, with All the President’s Men and its stylized, Redford-eyed treatment of the Washington Post’s investigations into Watergate; and it spent the summer dressed in the genre garb of Westerns such as The Outlaw Josey Wales and horror movies such as The Omen. The cycle reached its zenith in the fall, when screens were spattered with the blood and sweat of Marathon Man and Carrie, and the air was choked with the expended lead and urban decay of King Kong, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Enforcer, the latest trigger-pulling escapade of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” Callahan. You want inspiration and uplift? Go watch Rocky Balboa beat up a side of beef.

The “cheapjack cynicism” that Network satirized, Vincent Canby wrote in a New York Times essay proclaiming the arrival of the new “cynical cinema,” “is now almost the entire point of what virtually amounts to a whole new subcategory of contemporary suspense melodrama—the film that deals with a dread, unnamed and unnameable conspiracy that the film’s hero-victim goes through the picture like someone who has awakened to find himself in a public place without his pants. It’s a bad dream but it’s all true.”

Network, which began its wide release in December, fit perfectly into this motion picture landscape of helplessness and mistrust. Attuned to a national mood that seemed to be turning increasingly hostile, the movie put forward a wide array of institutions and organizations to vilify, and a unique prescription to this plague of frustration. It said the answer to your problems wasn’t in government or in the media, in dogged newspaper reporters or rogue cops, but in you, the viewer. You didn’t need to raise a fist or draw a gun to subdue your enemies; you just had to get mad. The teachings of Network resounded not in bullet wounds or spent shell casings but in the loud and articulate language of its characters. The film was hardly bloodless, but with the exception of a couple of key scenes, at least it kept its vital fluids on the insides of its characters.

Network was also a financial success, on its way to grossing more than $20 million in its original theatrical release and becoming one of the most lucrative movies of the year. Paddy Chayefsky’s film was a widely mentioned candidate for Academy Awards and other end-of-the-year honors, but securing its nominations and victories meant keeping the movie and its stars in the public eye, and that in turn meant more promotion.

Barely one month after the movie’s premiere in New York, the number of key players who could be counted on to support Network in the press had dwindled.

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