Jim Hanas

I contributed a little piece to the latest installment of The Rumpus’ ongoing “Readers Report Back From …” series. The topic was “Running Away,” so I wrote about the summer I avoided writing by playing golf. They gave it a terrific illustration, as you can see. Thanks to Susan Clements for including me.

As an amateur Paddy Chayefsky scholar and a huge fan of Network, this scrawled programming grid for the fictional UBS network is as good as it gets. (Thanks, Carlos!)

My favorite line in the Times article is when Chayefsky wonders: “All this is Strangelove-y as hell. Can we make it work?” Chayefsky is one of my top influences as a writer, period, and it’s because he did make it work. He managed to be both a naturalist and an absurdist.

Network begins in the mundane world of television news, but ends far away, carried by Howard Beale’s insanity/vision. It’s a neat trick if, like me, you are attracted to both narrative convention and stylized language. (Can it be any wonder that Aaron Sorkin is a devoted Chayefsky fan?) And Chayefsky’s language is incredibly stylized as the film gets going, even beyond Howard Beale’s famous rants. Faye Dunaway’s character calls Beale “processed instant God”—and it actually works!—while Robert Duvall’s declares that he was recently a “sun god” at the network’s parent company.

I don’t care for stories that fail to crack open the everyday with the absurd, yet I don’t like stories that take place in a world I cannot immediately understand, either—stories that are experimentally alienating. Network avoids both perils by masterfully ushering the viewer across the bridge from the everyday to the absurd, and not a month goes by that I don’t mull over how, exactly, Chayefsky did that.