On the career of Sidney Lumet and what he represents in American cinema.

Lumet directed 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and Prince of the City — all in the same decade. This is among the most consistent runs of excellence in American cinema, and it was accomplished entirely in the mode of social realism: films about how institutions work and fail.

Lumet is not a visual auteur in the way that Kubrick or Welles or Coppola are auteurs. His films don't have a distinctive visual signature. What they have is a commitment to the performance of the script: Lumet believed that if the script was honest and the actors were honest, the camera's job was to be present and stay out of the way.

Network is the film where this commitment produces its most uncomfortable result: a film that predicted cable news, reality television, and the entertainment logic of political content with such precision that watching it now is like watching a documentary about the present.

Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay has the quality of rage made structural: every scene is building the same argument from a different angle, and the argument — that entertainment has displaced everything, including politics, journalism, and human connection — is made with a completeness that leaves no exit.

Lumet's direction is invisible in the best sense: the film is the argument, not the technique.