Review: 'They Cloned Tyrone' (2023) and 'Network' (1976)

This summer's blaxploitation satire and 1976's Oscar-winning satire have more in common than you'd expect

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
Directed by Juel Taylor

Network (1976)
Directed by Sidney Lumet

In the neo-blaxploitation film "They Cloned Tyrone" (released in the U.S. on Netflix), Fontaine (John Boyega) is a drug dealer who meets sudden death at the hands of a competitor, then finds himself back in his abode the next day with only a vague idea that something's not right. He may not remember getting shot several times, but his friend Slick Charles -- a barely successful pimp who follows the dictum to dress for the job you want, came upon the murder scene the night before and freaks out when he sees Fontaine up and at 'em very much as usual. The plot is an investigation, Nancy Drew/Scooby Doo style, by the two men and a female employee of Charles. By female employee I mean a "ho," as Charles unabashedly and invariably refers to her. This trio -- drug dealer, pimp, prostitute -- together with a fervent chruch preacher, an 11-year-old wannabe gang soldier, the workers at nail salons and bodegas, and numerous street characters (or caricatures) with no visible means of support, populate an urban neighborhood called the Glen, which is, by any definition of the term, a ghetto.

John Boyega, who plays Fontaine, is a British actor, but here he inhabits the role of a young-middle-aged drug dealer in an American city so completely that if you only knew him from this film you would be stunned to hear him interviewed and using his real voice. The tempo and assuredness of his American speech here is flawless; he could have walked right out of a scene in "The Wire" (which itself featured an Irish actor, Dominic West, in the starring role with a faultless American accent, and which "Tyrone" nods to with minor characters with the same names as "Wire" characters Slick/Slim Charles and Frog).

But if any viewer can judge the versimilitude of Boyega's American accent, I leave it to African-American viewers to approve the film's stereotypical depiction of urban black life. Of course, this depiction is intentionally campy and satirical -- you couldn't call any film in which the main characters are a drug dealer, a pimp, and a ho, and where fried chicken and "grape drink" and hair straightener are major props, anything but a satire and a caricature. Treated with more gravity is the conspiracy into which the film dives, in which a shadowy organization (government agency?) is replacing the Glen's African-American population with mind-controlled clones very much on the order of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," but for a purpose on the order of the ultra-capitalist Jensen played by Ned Beatty in the film "Network." In his spiel to the crazed network news anchor-cum-prophet Howard Beale, Jensen reveals an over-arching truth: that nations and peoples don't exist, nor do individuals' desires and dreams matter -- except to the extent that they are instruments in the ebb and flow of capitalism and the steady stream of profits to large corporations. The corporations' names have changed since "Network" was released in 1976; instead of ITT, think Google. The message is the same.

Almost the same uber-capitalism model is revealed in "Tyrone" by a character (Kiefer Sutherland) who's in charge of the body-snatching and mind-control conspiracy that literally underlies the Glen in a labyrinth of subterranean labs. But the Glen isn't the only locale; the conspiracy has branches in every American city with a large African-American populace; in a coda, we glimpse the Los Angeles version. In Sidney Lumet's "Network" we take the nationwide expanse of network television to suggest a similar reach, though as Jensen insists, cooptation is a worldwide thing. In "Network," this effect is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the scene where the Communist and anarchist cast members of a reality TV show called The Mao Tse-Tung Hour argue over points and residuals in their contracts. "The Communist Party's not going to see a nickel out of this goddamn show until we go into syndication!" exclaims the dashiki-wearing Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield), illustrating the inadequacy of trickle-down economics when it comes to paying the workers.

But while it may have incisively analyzed the politico-economic status quo, "Network" fails in its imagination of gender relations. The news executive Schumacher leaves his wife of many years for the much younger, aggressive network programming exec Diana (Faye Dunaway). Schumacher (played by William Holden, 23 years older than Dunaway, but four years younger than Beatrice Straight, who played his character's wife; all three won Oscars) has no choice in the matter; as the film's dialogue attests: when he leaves his wife for Diana, and finally leaves her, he's following a script provided for retirement-age white men of the 1970s. For her part, Diana embodies the mid-70s version of the successful "feminist" woman: powerful, accomplished, stylish, ambitious, and threatening to the older men who realize she has her sights on their jobs.

But no woman in a 1970s movie, no matter how intentionally a film tried to portray a "liberated" woman, could have it all. Her success comes at the expense of her personal relationships; Diana is portrayed as particularly transactional in her relationships and devoid of a conscience. During sex, she runs down audience share numbers; at the film's end, she participates in a plan to kill the no-longer-useful Howard Beale. It's hard to fault screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky (he won an Oscar for this film, too) for this constricted view of men and women. Feminism that liberates women and men from the patriarchy was then mere theory. No one knew what it would look like, so in mass media we got characters such as Diana. Nonetheless, this movie passes the Bechdel test. Diana's conversation with Laureen, the revolutionary, is not about men; for that matter, Diana's monologue about audience points and shares during sex is also with a woman, namely herself.

As for the gender relations in "Tyrone," where the women are either prostitutes or salon workers, don't ask. No one's supposed to take the characters seriously about such things; they are mostly caricature, no disrespect to the actors -- the film co-stars Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris -- who fully embody these people and seem to have the time of their lives doing it. But when it comes to revolution, at least the residents of the Glen are more successful than the "Ecumenical Liberation Army" of "Network." They may have been mind-controlled, but at least they aren't co-opted.