Yesterday, I watched two movies from the 1970s—The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Network. Network was a rewatch, as I think the first time I saw it was in film school, and Eddie Coyle was a recent Criterion Collection acquisition that I’d had my eye on for some time. It’s difficult to overstate how influential 1970s US cinema was on what we’ve gotten these last few decades.
The Town (2010), like Eddie Coyle, is set in an economically and emotionally depressed Boston, and this idea of the embedded-ness of criminal conspiracy in the neighborhood, well, poor Eddie Fingers cuts a much more tragic figure than anybody in the Affleck flick, and I like the cop character in Eddie Coyle much better, even if the characters’ accents render their speech nigh-impenetrable. Hell, there’s even a big sports set-piece, a Bruins game providing cover for crime things while, in The Town, it’s Fenway that plays host to a kinetic, highly entertaining, climactic robbery-shootout. Eddie Coyle’s got a much darker, personal cast, as the protag’s down-and-out-ness and unglamorized squalor wallows in stark contrast to the aspirationally active “not fuckin’ around crew” of 2010s Dorchester. It’s also not hard to see Michael Mann’s fingerprints on the latter. Heat does feature American cinema’s most talked-about shootout sequence.
There’s always a knife-twist of longing in my heart whenever I watch Network. A “they don’t make movies like this anymore” type of deal that you might feel any time you pop in a Blu-Ray of Dog Day Afternoon or The Deer Hunter or even The Godfather. Products of their times, all of them, and you can hear Oil Crisis and Inflation and Vietnam as undercurrent in almost all of the dialogue. Our current state of omnishambles can feel uniquely catastrophic, but involvement in faraway military campaigns coinciding with corporate consolidation and a precipitous drop in purchasing power is pretty much the American Way. Network is hilarious, though. Darkly so. But also ridiculously literate. That slightly British, Transatlantic accent that mid-century American actors all had can be a distraction from just how Written that movie is.
“This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage?” one character shouts at her philandering husband.
Then there’s Arthur Jensen’s magnificent jeremiad1 on how capitalism makes the world go ‘round:
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no third worlds, there is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! AND YOU WILL ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
There’s more in there. So much more, but you get the point. The man says immane for goodness’s sake! MULTIVARIATE! Give a script with the word “debouches” in the stage direction to your agent, ask them what they can do with it, and watch them turn into the human Buffering Icon.
There’s a plot point involving the Saudis ultimately buying the network, which is side-splittingly funny given the PGA-LIV of it all and that there’s now speculation that petrodollars could buy an NFL team. Maybe some Emirati sovereign wealth fund is our way out of the current Entertainment Crisis. Is Qatar turning poor embattled CNN into another al Jazeera such a bad thing?
I joke, I kid.
But really, “public ownership” in the United States is a misnomer. According to a May 24 piece by Gallup, 61% of Americans claim they own stock. However:
In 2023, the percentages owning stock range from highs of 84% of adults in households earning $100,000 or more and about eight in 10 college graduates and postgraduates to a low of 29% of those in households earning less than $40,000.
I mentioned the Entertainment Crisis earlier. What I’m referring to is the state of affairs that precipitated the current Writers Guild of America strike2 and that has SAG-AFTRA members voting 97.91 percent to authorize a work stoppage in the event a deal is not reached in their contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).3 Much ink has been spilled about how the techbro mindset of creative disregard, of “move fast and break things,” that supposedly set off the Streaming Wars is to blame, that times were different before Apple and Amazon entered the ring, that our new villain was Reed Hastings the Computer Scientist rather than the more traditional legacy media titan. It’s such a pervasive reading of things because we’ve seen the “techbro mindset” hollow out so much of our experiences, not merely as consumers, but as human beings. It brings to mind Howard Beale’s screed against “the tube” during one of his particularly haunting sermons. And there is something to be said about corporate organizations for whom streaming is their primary modus operandi as opposed to legacy media corporations for whom streaming platforms are an increasingly necessary appendage.4 But I think the temporal bounds of “tech bro” as a descriptor are too limiting. I think the true villain, the one who pops up at the top of Act Three in a Rush Hour movie, is The Management Consultant.5 It’s those McKinsey/Bain mf’ers who don’t know about a thing, go in and tell people who do that thing how they can make more money faster doing that thing, Red Wedding-ing their way through an organization, and collect ungodly consulting fees in the process.
You don’t have to have a history as a Consultant to be of the Consultant mindset. Business school or law school is a good enough substitute, especially if, after law school, you did some time at a white shoe law firm maybe based out of New York City. Think George Clooney’s character from Up in the Air minus the charm, the good looks, the redemption arc and plus some swagger, industrial amounts of insufferability, and a penchant for dry goods.6 These consultancy firms swoop in and poach Ivy League undergrads with the promise of enough money to pay off their student loans in about 2-3 years, and back in my day, pre Financial Crisis, pre resurgence of labor, these were the only dudes with jobs coming out of college. The people who made it their business that other people lost theirs.
We talk about a “profit at all costs” mentality and that myopia that measures existence in financial quarters, wherein the meaning of life is found in making sure one makes more money and faster than one did during the last three-month period, and I can’t help but hear the nasal overconfidence of the management consultant with his PowerPoint presentations and his amorality. It used to be that if you ran a company that made a thing—cars, television—you knew a thing or two about the making of that thing. You cared about its quality. You took pride in knowing it was the best of the bunch and not just the one with the largest market share. But now, the people negotiating with the creatives are “labor lawyers and business affairs execs.” The guy who decided the HBO brand was actually too prestigious for the glut on his new Frankenstein monster of a streamer is busy, in the meantime, aping Graydon Carter.
Network is a 70’s movie, and it’s a now movie the way every cinematic statement on the commodification of the human soul is a now movie. History echoes. Every behind-the-scenes show set in a network has tried to replicate in one personnage or another the coruscating chaos-agent energy of Faye Dunaway’s character. And every crime movie set in Boston is depressing af. Maybe what we call Consultants now will be replaced by something even more avaricious and bloodless. There’s probably already an algorithm for that. (But, then, who’s going to be on hand to moon over movie stars at Cannes?!)
Shareholder fealty is a thing; indeed, it is the thing. But if I’ve learned nothing so far from my time as an American, it’s that the true expendables live in the C-Suite. The effort to MCU-ify DC, to give Billions the Yellowstone treatment, to disrespect and diminish labor, to consolidate the entertainment complex and smooth out any and all wrinkles in its brain, may continue in its present form all the way to the next presidential administration, or we might find ourselves before Election Day with a whole new set of business execs and consultants with their own thinning cows to place at the altar of the shareholder.
Or, best case scenario, the Saudis buy us out.
I kid, I think.
Currently reading: The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Currently listening: Overnight - Desiigner
“jeremiad” is a word spoken by an actual character in this movie. As is “Savonarola” and so many beautiful others.
Disclaimer: I’m a WGA member and stand in complete and total solidarity with my comrades in the Guild. It’s been pencils down since the strike was called, though my book work remains unaffected. (Ah, if only novelists and memoirists had collective bargaining power of their own! A man can dream.)
N.B.: Whenever I link to a Wikipedia page, my recommendation is for readers to scroll down to “References” and read through the sources for verification. If law school taught me nothing else, it taught me that gold is best dug for in the footnotes.
Like, is anyone really evangelical about CNN’s future being in the digital space?
Or “The Consultant” for short.
I’m talking about cocaine.