David Von Drehle, the author of this fanboy love letter to Glenn Beck in TIME, is another in a long line of media people who really ought to watch Network again before they comment on it. Watch it and absorb it.
Network isn't about people who are pissed off about "the rotten vibe of the early 1970s," as Von Drehle writes. It's a wickedly dark satire about the disintegration and corporatization of the American news media.
And Howard Beale isn't just a guy who's pissed off about the status quo. As I've written numerous times, Beale was a tragic, suicidal character who was suffering from an epic nervous breakdown and, in his unstable condition, he's exploited and eventually killed because of "lowsy ratings."
Goddamn. You'd think people who are actually in the field would have a slightly better understanding of perhaps the most prescient media film of our time. This superficial view of Network is not unlike saying that Animal Farm is a lighthearted movie about adorable barnyard livestock.
And by the way, the TIME article is dramatically flawed in many other ways. Jamison Foser documents the awfulness.