I almost feel like I’ve been on a kick of watching satirical films from the 70’s at this point. Admittedly two movies does not a trend make, but I wonder if my subconscious has been leading me in this direction for a while. With my recent ranting about the internet and my general feelings about the isolation and near-celebration of stupidity I feel is becoming epidemic among everyone and everything, how funny is it that I am watching films from 30 years ago that cast a harsh light on all these things?

That paragraph confuses even me.

Network and Being There are both long, slow, and subtly hilarious films about one joke. Network’s joke is that you can mock the degenerate nature of television endlessly and insult people directly through the medium itself and they will eat it up. Being There’s joke is that you can put someone completely and unabashedly retarded within important political and financial institutions and the people within them, and outside of them, wont know the difference.

Being There: In director Hal Ashby’s Oscar-winning satire, illiterate gardener Chance (Peter Sellers) is run over by wealthy Eve (Shirley MacLaine) and suddenly becomes educated gent Chauncey Gardiner, thanks to Eve’s misunderstanding of his mumbled introduction. Taken in by Eve’s family, Chance simply regurgitates what he’s heard on TV — from gardening instructions to economic predictions — and Washington’s political elite hail him as their next star.

Being There succeeds where Network fails, as Being There doesn’t try to reach outside of what it meant to achieve. Being There is comfortable with its one joke and it doesn’t try to elaborate. Sure, the situations “Chauncey Gardiner” get himself into become more and more important, but as a character, and as a message, he never changes. Being There doesn’t even try to make itself out to be a film with a message, as its heart it is just a subtle comedy executed flawlessly. You can read into it all you want, but you’re going to come up with a lot of dead ends. There’s no real message in Being There, there doesn’t need to be, because as a film it is simply enjoyable.

Peter Sellers, whose work I am unfortunately almost entirely unfamiliar with, is amazing in his role, and you only come to understand why he nails it so perfectly when the credits roll and there is an unexpected “blooper” sequence of him, as Chauncey, trying to repeat a message given to him by a young black man. He can crack up, laughing hysterically, and within seconds he is back within the skin of Chauncey Gardiner. Right at the end he delivers it flawlessly, and the entire set cracks up. People in the background double over in laughter, the camera shakes with the laughter of the camera man, and Sellers himself wipes tears from his eyes. Sellers, in this somewhat brief moment, taken out of character for the first time out of the two hour run time of Being There, retroactively causes you to realize how fantastic, and hilarious, the film really was.

Also, as a side note, the ending is brilliant and warrants a couple paragraphs all on its own, but I wont tackle it here. I think I get it, and maybe the novel fleshes out the reason for it a little more and can tell me whether or not I’m right. I’ll find out, and maybe write about the novel.

Network: Paddy Chayefsky predicted today’s rash of trash television and shock-laden news broadcasts. The writer of Marty created network news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who loses his mind on the air. Unfortunately, his outrageous rants boost the ratings and intrigue cutthroat network executives Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. William Holden contrasts their avarice as an old-school TV journalist hopelessly out of step.

Network, on the other hand, starts out very strong, but then dwindles into something that isn’t funny or biting anymore, just unsettling and confusing. Roger Ebert covers this. The first hour of Network is excellent, and could have stood as a film all on its own, but then it gets into some weighty subject matter. Where the protagonist of the film starts off as a likable, understandable, and even powerful character, it becomes clear that there is something seriously wrong underneath the surface and by the near-end he is no longer the protagonist but a just pawn being relentlessly molested by a group of people composed almost entirely of unlikable characters.

The almost intolerable state the film finds itself in after the halfway point is summed up by the “romance sequence” that occurs between Faye Dunaway and William Holden where all throughout the course of their torrid love affair, she never stops speaking of work. Not once does she ever relent in her constant dialog about her job, even while undressing and making love. Network itself is kind of like that, in that it never relents, not once, in trying to convey to you just how corrupt and broken the television industry really is.

Network kind of winds along this sad path where at the beginning you saw hope for a film bent on tearing into the television industry, but by the end you realize the film is actually waving the white flag, saying, fine, you know what, television is the future and it is a sick sad future that is completely unavoidable. The reason the end of Network is biting is the exact reason the film itself is so sad: it depresses us, and by the end of it we, too, just want to shut it off and walk away.