Insomnia. It is a bitch.

Network is an amazing film. My only critique is the aesthetics of the dialog. You can tell Chayefsky was a playwright because all the really “important” scenes are essentially monologues, including one sex scene. That’s just a matter taste though, and it’s well-camouflaged in every scene except one, where traded argument-monologues hammer home the themes of the film — forgivable.

The film uses image and sound very well. Here’s how Chayefsky builds the fictional network “UBS”:

MONTAGE — THE NETWORKS

– The facade of the CBS building.

– The facade of the NBC building.

– The facade of the ABC building.

– The facade of the UBS building.

END MONTAGE

Simple, no? That is visual writing.

The characters are total plums, all well-realized, and the plot arises naturally from their actions. Faye Dunaway plays Diana, a high-powered creative-executive uberfrau more-than-equal to the men around her. She spends an early scene rejecting scripts with female characters she doesn’t like, and the rest of the movie trying to fit men into stereotypical roles.

The male lead, Diana’s love interest, is an older man who worries that neither of them are real people (remember: they aren’t). He spends a good portion of the story trying to escape from what he perceives as “the script” of his life, which Diana is trying to plot out. But of course he’s a character in a movie, so that’s impossible, and provides a couple of well-done winks at the fourth wall.

Then there’s the cell of Black Maoist terrorists called the Ecumenical Liberation Army (modeled after the SLA), run by another uberfrau. Here’s Faye’s greeting:

Diana: Hi, I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.
Laureen: I’m Laureen Hobbs, a bad-ass commie nigger.
Diana: Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship.

Laureen ends up producing an ultraviolent political show called “The Mao Zedong Hour” and gets a fantastic scene where she rapidly code-switches between Militant Socialist and Television Producer while shouting at a room full of lawyers and terrorists. “I’m not giving this pseudo-insurrectionary sectarian a piece of my show, I’m not giving him script approval, and I sure-as-shit ain’t cutting him in on my distribution charges!”

Great dialog: All the terminology rapid-fire, undefined, and secondary to understanding the plot. Masterful.

In the end you’re left with a now-classic idea on this blog: The System co-opts and corrupts all dissent. More than that, the film’s about metanarratives and the detached inhumanity of the Media. And the last scene is one of those truly rare Hollywood endings — A depressing one.