On the fortieth anniversary of 'Network'

Marion Daily Republican, October 18, 2016

Forty years later, it looks more and more like a documentary. When the movie Network was released in the fall of 1976, it was an instant success, winning Academy Awards for screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, lead actors Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway, and supporting actress Beatrice Straight. But even many of the movie’s fans felt the satire of network news strained credulity.

The story concerns the mental breakdown of veteran news anchor Howard Beale (Finch) and the network’s willingness to exploit his illness in order to turn him into a “messianic figure inveighing against the hypocrisies of our time.”

As the network’s news division is subsumed under its programming division, Beale’s “mad prophet” persona sends ratings soaring. His jeremiads strike a responsive chord, none more so than when he says, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad…. We sit and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tells us today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. . . So we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms.”

Beale then urges his viewers “go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,… ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!’” As people across the nation take up the cry, Chayefsky wrote in his screenplay notes, it becomes an “indistinguishable roar of rage like the thunder of a Nuremburg rally.”

Chayefsky, though, makes clear the transition from news to entertainment is not sudden. As programming director Diana Christenson (Dunaway) says to veteran news man Max Schumacher (William Holden), “I watched your 6:00 news today. It’s straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park. On the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news.”

The power of television is so overwhelming, in Chayefsky’s view, it absorbs even its most radical challenges. When a small revolutionary group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, records itself robbing a bank, Christenson signs the group to do a weekly series, filming themselves engaging in terrorist acts.

Beale’s tirades often bite the hand that feeds him. “Less than three percent of you people read books.… Less than 15 percent of you read newspapers…. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.”

For Chayefsky, the pseudo-reality of television stultifies empathy and individualism in its incessant commodification of life. As Max tells Diana, “You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays.”

The more Beale assaults his audience the higher his ratings go. But increasingly Beale connects his cultural criticism to the system of corporate capitalism. After the network is taken over by a large conglomerate, he warns, “when the twelfth-largest company in the world controls the most awesome … propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what … will be peddled for truth on this network!”

When his attacks on the global economy grow too pointed, Beale is summoned for a meeting with the corporate CEO, who informs him, “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale…. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples…. There is no America. There is no democracy.…. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.”

In the four decades since Network, America has witnessed the intensified power of global capitalism as well as the rise of cable news programs, and entire networks, whose market success is based on stoking fear and anger to a fever pitch, culminating in a reality show presidential candidate leading a party featuring a platform with little more coherence than “We’re mad as hell.”

Chayefsky was our Cassandra. His warning entertained us. But we learned nothing.

Now that should make us mad as hell.