The satire Andrew Garfield called the greatest: “This is one that I revisit every year”
As an actor, he may have played his part in skewering the modern cultural and media landscape more than once, but as a cinephile, Andrew Garfield knows exactly which satire he views as the greatest ever made.
His turn in The Social Network hinged on a turning point for the internet age that would change the course of online history forever, and Mainstream examined the seedy underbelly of influencer culture and stardom in the YouTube age, but Garfield still remains stunned by the prescience of Network.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, the incisive and biting drama takes aim at the media industry and doesn’t miss, with many of its narrative and thematic elements proving themselves true long after the fact as Peter Finch’s veteran anchor Howard Beale threatens to shoot himself on live television and let rip at the way he’s being phased out of his profession, becoming a ratings juggernaut in the process.
Speaking to A.Frame, Garfield makes it clear that he’s a huge proponent of Lumet in general, but there’s something about Network that sets it apart from the rest: “The way he tells story, you never feel him as a director. You always just feel the story. That goes for Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico and everything that he’s made,” he said, “But Network stands alone in a way because of Paddy Chayefsky’s writing and the prescience and the prophecy of that film.”
Doubling down on his praise for a film that did a near-terrifying job of gauging where things were heading for the television industry, Garfield offered that “I don’t think there will ever be a satire as ingenious as Network,” explaining that “in terms of the writing and in terms of the acting and the character of Howard Beale being this classic symbol of all of our rage, and knowing about what it is to be a person in the modern world of conglomerates and commodification and commercialism and materialism.”
The two-time Academy Award nominee compares it to “a healing, soothing balm,” even if he continued struggling to wrap his head around just how accurate it turned out to be: “30 years after it had been made, for me, it was like, ‘Oh my god, how did he know this is where we were going? With how we commodify the soullessness of our culture?'” he continued. “It’s a classic film, and obviously a big influence on Aaron Sorkin when he wrote The Social Network. This is one that I revisit every year.”
Network may have gone on to win four Oscars from nine nominations – although it lost ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ to John G. Avildsen and his sports drama Rocky – but the lasting part of its legacy is how eerily in-tune it was to the seismic shifts that were coming.
