OP/ED: MAD AS HELL
“We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller….
…I don’t know what to do about the depression, and the inflation, and the Russians, and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad…
So, I want you to get up now… I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’”
Believe it or not, that’s not an incendiary call to action heard along the 2024 campaign trail, nor is it the cry of a contemporary late-night cable news politico.
It’s from Network. Released almost 50 years ago, in 1976. Directed by Sidney Lumet, and written by Paddy Chayefsky. Won an Oscar, or four.
I had heard of Network, prior to its assigned screening by Lunch this past weekend. My mother is, like Faye Dunaway’s unscrupulous character Diana Christensen in the film, a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. She recalled that during finals week of her freshman year, the same year that Network hit theaters, burnt out classmates had unfurled graffiti’d bedsheets from their dorm room windows that proclaimed, in jest: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” An ode to the film, and a poke at the industry to which they were about to enter.
But, recalls my mother, Network was parody back then.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the bare bones: Anchorman, Howard Beale (who delivers the afore-quoted monologue, and is portrayed by Peter Finch), is being put out to pasture by his network, UBS—a fictional conglomerate in the same league as an ABC, NBC, or CBS but with poorer ratings. Old pal and news division president, Max Schumacher (William Holden) delivers the blow. So what does Beale do? He announces to the millions of Americans watching that he’s gonna kill himself on a live broadcast, the following week.
Ratings skyrocket.
And despite Schumacher’s dissent—good friend that he is—the network is convinced by Christensen, head of the entertainment division, to exploit Beale’s traction for every cent and piece of market share it’s worth. Turns out, viewers love Beale’s rendition of populism—that all of life is “bullshit,” that the news is nothing more than an illusion, and so on. Beale is a man unraveling, after all. And he’s received by a country that, itself, has begun to fray.
Beale’s evangelizing—in front of a stained glass set piece, a live studio audience, and without a teleprompter or fact-checker in sight—reminds of today’s megachurches and moneyed, multi-hyphenate religious leaders and entertainers. Or, more accurately, it prophesizes them.
And all the while, protagonist, Schumacher, and femme fatale, Christensen, are involved in an illicit affair. It’s a thinly-veiled but cunning mechanism by which to convey the film’s central messaging. Christensen—young, heartless, and shrewd—represents the new generation in media. The one that combines “showmanship” with journalism. She’s the foil to Schumacher—a devout yet corruptible American moralist. Their entanglement, tumultuous as it is, is Chayefsky’s not-so-subtle way of adapting the generation war of 20th century American news to a 120-minute runtime.
In the name of good fun and viewing pleasure, I won’t completely spoil the end. But suffice to say, when Beale takes one tirade too far and inflames Saudi interests backing UBS, it doesn’t bode well for him, or the rest of the miscreant cast. And whether the American public knows it or not, it doesn’t bode well for them either. By film’s end, a God- and fact-fearing nation has given itself over to a conglomerate less concerned with the breadth of its own disseminated truth than the depth of its pockets.
My favorite image in the whole movie? The Howard Beale Show comes to a tragic, and violent end. The reel of it plays, over and over, spliced with advertisements for air travel, club soda, and Life Cereal.
America. The goddamn beautiful.
In 1976, Network was hyperbolic, worst-case-scenario stage traffic to entertain a country aware that it was slipping, but assured that it could right itself the moment its chips were really down. It was a nation theretofore confident in its institutions. Confident in the integrity that buoyed those institutions. Confident that the center would always hold.
But to understand how prescient Network really was, it’s important to first understand the history that informed Chayefsky’s screenplay. After two hours of rigorous Google searching, here’s my expert brief:
Max Schumacher—the voice of reason in the film, and what we might consider a poor man’s Walter Cronkite—is understood to have come of age during the early days of broadcast journalism.
Post-World War II, the fictional Schumacher and a very real American public was kept informed by the 3 major networks, previously mentioned and parodied by UBS. These networks, along with the nation’s newspapers of equal stature, were monoliths and on the whole, nonpartisan.
Then came the Fairness Doctrine—a policy of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated in 1949 which regarded TV networks as public trustees on behalf of the government.
“The policy had been intended to foster a full and fair debate,” writes Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer in a perspective published by The Washington Post. “In practice, it led networks … to play most issues down the middle.”
Still, conservatives of the post-war generation believed that the standard of “objectivity” was a masqueraded privilege for the liberal establishment, given that the major networks were mostly run and anchored by Democrats. In 1969, the constitutionality of the FCC’s doctrine was upheld in the landmark case, Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. v. FCC. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment was ‘the right of the viewers and listeners, not the broadcasters.”
But just over a decade later came the Reagan Administration and with it, the belief that the government should give more leeway in the regulation of political media. By 1987, the FCC had rolled back the Fairness Doctrine and the news landscape was re-sodded. Enter the rise of cable news. The proliferation of talk radio. Here, MSNBC and Fox News slant left and right.
And in the past few years, especially, we’ve seen a media that is performing a metaphysical criticism upon itself. Op-ed sections and high-profile essays tout the belief that the major news outlets—paradoxically, the same news outlets that often publish these opinions—have become complacent with a low standard of ethics. Stumble upon a reporter that is dedicated to the antiquated system of journalistic integrity—to paraphrase Joan Didion in an essay she wrote at 22, what used to be called character—and I’d advise that you pinch yourself. You have reached an oasis in the desert.
(And I don’t know. I’m all about calling a spade a spade—i.e., the news sucks, its audience prioritizes shock value over substance, etc. But what if we used that spade to actually dig ourselves out of the information hole; in other words, to stop lamenting and start reporting?)
Anyway.
I think the reason Network resonates today is because it’s a satire on the news system. And in criticizing the system, it implies the complicit attitudes of both the networks and their viewers. Network, while focused with the view behind the anchorman’s desk, doesn’t limit itself to calling out those tasked with producing the news. Nor does it assign blame, entirely, on the undue burden of commercial and corporate pressures in the industry. It doesn’t pretend as though the laziness and corruption of journalists and writers and anchors and shareholders was/is an effect without cause.
Network, I think, is just as concerned with the laziness and corruption of the news’s audience as it is with its arbiters. It’s about an America that has made itself so susceptible to showmanship, so easily aroused by a half-decent homily, that those responsible for curating the news throw their hands up in the air and stuff full with opium those pipes for the masses.
Because during any one of Beale’s ramblings, the camera will pan to his captive audience—a bunch of gap-mouthed, bell bottom-clad yuppies. The only time they react to what Beale is saying is to chant how truly mad they are. And then, they’re transfixed again. Buying into the system of pseudo-information hook, line, and sinker. Keeping it on the air.
What Network conceived as satire 50 years ago, and what has been received as truth in its wake, is that news has become entertainment—a glittering sieve by which we can filter out those facts we do not like, and cling to the ones we do in pursuit of catharsis. As predicted by the film, the news is no longer a sound stage for objectivity, but rather, an echo chamber for emotionally motivated diatribes.
The characters in Network are deplorable. Most news outlets today are deplorable in their biases and bifurcated lenses. But theirs has been an evolution precipitated out of positive reinforcement by we, the consumer. That makes us deplorable, too.
One last thing. Toward film’s end, Schumacher and Christensen’s relationship takes a nosedive at around the same time the network does. Schumacher spends a good 5 minutes of screentime chastising his mistress, a shaking tea saucer in her hand. He pins all the ills and evils of modern television on Christensen. Calls her a humanoid. Devoid of human decency, and strangely at home outside the nucleus. But still, he admits to loving her—this summation of everything he hates. Everything he stands against.
And so, in the film’s final minutes is an unhappy prophecy: We love the thing that will kill us. And then, a question. Might we love it, because it keeps from us all those straight-edged and inconvenient truths?
