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Looking at our world today, amidst Brexit, fear of the future, plunging stock markets, banks on the brink of being dethroned, people who can no longer even muster the capacity to get angry, disappointment, and the deceit of television, "Network" by Sidney Lumet is a film of grotesque reality that hurts more than many tragedies that have reached cinemas in recent times.
In the personal madness of Howard Beale (a monumental Peter Finch), there is the attachment of an "alienated" individual to work. There is no life beyond that, beyond the screen, beyond the nonsense to be aired on TV. In the gray monotony of Max (William Holden), there is the fragility of marriage and the awareness of living in the reality that surrounds us, the one where Diana (a splendid Faye Dunaway) cannot exist except behind the figures of audience, ratings, and money, the only true objective of Frank (Robert Duvall), a symbol of the "climb to power," the individualistic selfishness of business society.
Lumet takes the microcosm of television and transforms it into the macroworld of the '70s United States, coming out of counterculture, Watergate, the Vietnam disaster, and the 1973 oil crisis. Television is illusionary, it doesn't inform and has no desire to, and when it can, it sensationalizes every event, because above all else, "TV is showbiz." This Godless America, in the grip of panic and poverty, no longer has the strength to get angry and Howard is the emblem of a country now insane, confused, devoid of any identity. Behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the game, exploiting an unstable Howard solely for audience feedback, are the executives of UBS, slick beings who look at statistics and percentages like the last drop of water in the desert, living in a fictional reality as a mere extension of the equally fictitious television reality.
In "Network" (original title), the sense of the grotesque becomes unhealthy realism, and every word spoken seems almost like a prophecy about the future of our world: from Howard's monologues in his "Mao Tse Tung show" to Arthur's (Ned Beatty) explosive speech about the non-existence of America and democracy, because the world is business, deals, and submission to the great dollar system. A propaganda of the "single thought" that we have seen firmly establish itself in the following decades. "You sit there, inching along on your 21-inch screen and squeeze and fumble and wallow, saying: 'America and Democracy'... There is no America, there is no democracy! There is only IBM, ITT, AT&T, Dupont, DOW, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today."
Today, we are in the internet era, and fortunately, TV is beginning to lose some of its propagandistic force, but not before having, for decades, brainwashed part of the population, convincing unsuspecting users that right is wrong and vice versa. Manipulation and triumph of the corporatist system based on the ultimate goal of business, money that can do all and dominates everything.
"Quinto potere" is one of the many masterpieces by Lumet, a gigantic director who spanned over 50 years of American cinema, denouncing the distortions of a country less sparkling than what was told by the great national and international vulgate. The film may be excessively verbose in some of its digressions, but 40 years after its release, it still exudes a prophetic force that makes it piercingly relevant.
“We have a crisis. Many are out of work, and those who have a job live in fear of losing it. The purchasing power of the dollar is zero. Banks are failing, shopkeepers have rifles hidden under the counter, hooligans roam the streets, and no one knows what to do, and there's no end in sight. We know the air is unbreathable and our food is inedible. We sit watching TV while our local newscaster tells us that today there were 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if all this is just the way it is, we know things are bad, worse than bad. It’s crazy, it’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we stay inside. We sit in our houses, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and we say only: 'Please, leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'"
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