Network is a seething, passionate satire on the television industry from 1976 which was regarded as a brilliant, paranoid exaggeration at the time but has come to be seen as a dark oracle into our aggressively banal current state at the hands of media manipulation and programming. Dave Itzkoff's clear-sighted, thoroughly researched book has a hero in Network's writer Paddy Chayefsky. A difficult, conflicted man who's outspoken views could not fit into any tidy ideology or rhetoric, he was a non-conformist in his cynicism, had his own vision of truth but was afraid of youthful changes or leftist reform.The book also benefits from the other integral players surrounding the Network. Sidney Lumet, the hard-working, equally strong-minded director who humanised Chayefsky's strident ideas in his knowledge of how to draw emotion from his actors. William Holden and Peter Finch, two booze-soaked, charismatic veteran actors who like Chayefsky were near the end of their lives. The Finchy wallet-pinching anecdote is a classic. Then there is Faye Dunaway with her self-absorbed, starry independence, asserting herself on and off screen in the old boys club. Tremendous detail.
Also, if you haven't read Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, be prepared. Challenging, harrowing with some of the lean tone of Beckett.
Today I visited the Chris Marker retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery. Humorous with it's cats, thought-provoking in it's balance of futurism and political examination, visually stunning.
