“Network” at 50: Now We’re All Mad as Hell

I want you all to get up out of your chairs; 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 gonna take this anymore!’

With these words, Australian actor Peter Finch cemented his place in American cinematic history. Soaked and bedraggled in a raincoat and pyjamas, steaming rage shouted into a television camera, Finch’s interpretation of Howard Beale—a network news anchor gone around the twist—is as immortal as it is widely misunderstood.

On one YouTube video of the famous scene, the top comment reads, “We all watch this, get a dopamine boost and think ‘we can take this world back’ then immediately go on to another video and continue our day.” It’s one of countless readings that treat Beale’s rant as a call to action, rather than what it truly was in the film: a moment ripe for exploitation by TV executives desperate for a hit. In a man who’s “articulating the popular rage,” in the words of Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the VP of Programming who’s made the insane anchor her pet project, they found it.

Christensen wanted her network to make “angry shows! I want counterculture, I want anti-establishment!” Her first project was “The Mao Tse-tung Hour,” a show built around authentic footage from the communist Ecumenical Liberation Army as they engage in acts of terror around America. Just as in Network’s contemporary The Parallax View, those who think they are ripping down the system are really just cogs in the machine playing their intended part. 

In the fifty years since Network’s release, the acid of Paddy Chayefsky’s script seems to have rendered it immune to age. The 1976 setting feels uncannily near, as if viewed through a car’s side mirror: whatever distance remains is an illusion. The film, charting how a fictional American television network exploits its lead news anchor’s descent into a mental health crisis hits on virality, populism, horizontalist protest, neoliberalism, commodified activism, and more. The medium is the message, and the message is that we’re trapped in a telecommunicative prison of our own making.

Put another way, Chayefsky had a lot to say about television, and he said it with an unflattering, searing bite—and it’s all the more relevant in an age when we each carry a television studio in our pockets and all dream of becoming a hit.

Writing a retrospective of his own in 2000, the late Roger Ebert effused, “Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?” But to quote from the wisdom of television’s successor technology, you are like a little baby, watch this.

Shock jocks feel quaint now, but they were always an imperfect analogy to Network anyway, and the WWF now parses as a charming soap opera in sweaty spandex. By contrast, what made Network’s plot resonate was that it was about a political movement to nowhere. What Diana Christensen wanted was a show, or preferably a stable of shows, that channelled the spirit of an age: a spirit that was both politically febrile yet utterly exhausted by politicians.

Consider one of Christensen’s speeches, describing her audience studies: 

The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they fuck themselves limp, and nothing helps. So, this concept analysis report concludes: the American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them. … I want angry shows; I don’t want conventional programming on this network; I want counterculture, I want anti-establishment!

Her exploitation of the Ecumenical Liberation Army is her first foray into this kind of programming, and the excitement she and other execs share over footage of the communists’ bank robbery feels like the first hints of how we’d all come to slaver over ‘authentic,’ ‘found footage’-style vertical video, now ubiquitous on social media. But it’s out of Howard Beale, their venerable “grand old man of news,” who snaps when he’s fired for poor ratings, that Christensen carves her masterpiece. She exploits his outbursts, turning them from cries for help into what we’d now call content. 

The cynical zeitgeist was, she saw, so much dry tinder made of splintered American dreams and just looking for a spark like Beale.

Fox News and its kin throughout Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire have come close to this vision. But News Corp, as its staid name implies, never quite escaped the smartly-suited establishment taint. You needed social media to really refine the commodification of authenticity to a fine point. Somehow Network saw it coming.

Somehow, so did “Terminal Boredom.” Izumi Suzuki’s pathbreaking 1984 short story about a world of lost souls ensnared by television was only recently translated into English, but this was also speculative fiction using TV as an imperfect metaphor for what social media would ultimately become. Where Chayefsky’s Network is famous for its speeches where characters verge on preaching the screenwriter’s own gospel, Suzuki’s work is more subtle, letting the horrors speak for themselves.

In this world of a near-future Japan, deadened by prosperity into a society of Last Men, we see the universe through the eyes of an indolent couple who descend into willing delirium when they see a man beat a woman to death in a café. The young man in the couple, described only as HIM, captures the horror on film and ends up replaying it endlessly, distributing copies of the tape. It’s a common practise in this world: elsewhere, a man commits suicide and makes a video of it to help his family pay off debts. 

The story ends in a murder, with this viral videographer telling the narrator that she should help him kill his pregnant girlfriend. “Think of it as a TV show,” he tells her. “Pretend you’re an actor.” Of course, he adds, “I’m going to tape it, too.”

The ubiquity of television in “Terminal Boredom” and the masses’ enthrallment to its hyperreality, the way it induced a quest for ever more extreme novelty, and—in particular—the way its dissociative effects leaked out into the ‘real world,’ causing people to interact with reality as if it were just more entertainment on the screen, predicted a world Suzuki would never live to see. She committed suicide the year I was born, in 1986.

To compare Chayefsky’s screenplay to this prophecy in spare prose is a compliment to him, and Network was nothing if not a story about the dissociative mirror that we’d come to simply call “the screen.”

Like Suzuki, Network was in search of what came after television. And it caught on to the idea that telecommunication could bring the Colosseum to your living room with ever-escalating horrors to deaden one’s delighted senses. Chayefsky was searching for the uninvented ingredients that would comprise social media, and substituted an extreme and parodic version of television for it, television where murder was filmed and broadcast unexpurgated and its creators were behind it all, for the sole purpose of improving ratings. 

It would—and did—seem thudding until an age where Facebook lit the flames of a literal genocide. Much love to the late Roger Ebert, but Jerry Springer would never.

To leave it there, however, misses some of what makes Network powerfully predictive. More than any other work of its era, it illustrates the dawn of a cultural and political moment we’re still living in. For a political movie made in 1976 that co-stars a coterie of communists, it was profoundly uninterested in the Cold War. Instead it captured what Jimmy Carter would with fatal accuracy call the “malaise” of the time.

To return to Howard Beale’s (in)famous speech, he says: 

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

I don’t want you to protest, I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. 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!

I quote it in full because it’s this cold reading of politics that misdirects people so frequently about the speech. To listeners in 1986, 1996, 2006, and so on, it feels like he’s talking about what it feels like to live in our hyperaware universe of screens. A world of precarity where we live under escalating bombardment from bad news, so generically described that it can map onto the particulars of any decade’s myriad diseases. Geopolitical strife, economies slouching towards Dis, crime real and perceived, loneliness and purposelessness. It’s the seductive allure of a mentalist, relying on you to fill in the blanks of their charismatic vagaries. 

Demagogues do the same thing.

But this particular demagoguery was something that—though it has clear ancestors in the radio charlatans of the 1920s and ’30s—had changed state by the 1970s. The nature of geopolitics and economics had changed. What sociologist Ulrich Beck called “the causes of our affliction” became ever more abstract and complex, impersonal and apocalyptic all at once. Pollution, radiation, inflation: invisible killers all.

So, what do we do about it? The answer has been the same since the late 1970s.

The most important part of Beale’s speech is the part that is almost never quoted: it’s the part where he explicitly eschews any kind of direct political action. Instead, the culmination of this scene is everyone performing a meme. Yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” out their windows. Success for Diane Christensen was measured by whether people were yelling in far-flung affiliate cities like Sandusky and Baton Rouge. It was, in many ways, TikTok before the person who dreamed the idea had even been born. 

Network has another famous speech—one so good it earned an Academy Award nomination for Ned Beatty, whose character, the chairman of the Communications Corporation of America, speaks only in this one scene. He excoriates Beale for the one time he tried to mobilise his vast audience to something more than a diffuse, omnidirectional rage: he had told them to flood the White House with telegrams to stop the Saudi Investment Fund from buying CCA. (Notably, there Beale had descended into the inevitable xenophobia of his archetype, inveighing that “the Arabs are buying us!”)

So, Mr. Jensen, the chairman of the company that owns Beale’s network, upbraids him with his ‘corporate cosmology.’ The term ‘neoliberalism’ is oft abused as a meaningless pejorative, but Jensen comes close to defining it here in terms equally utopian and sinister.

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate multinational dominion of dollars. … That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things to-day!

The world, he says, is a business. Thrumming in invisible lines beneath the visible globe was ecumenical capitalism, the real source of power in the world and the only future worth having. Jensen then tells Beale exactly where he stands in that system:

“You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy,” Jensen says. “There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T…those are the nations of the world today.” We then get the movie’s sole reference to the Soviet Union, in a remark that eerily predicts where China was headed almost inexorably by the late 1970s: “What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.”

It is a particularly septic, hopeless distortion of The End of History, one that abjures ideals of citizenship and democracy and treats government of, by, and for the people as an anachronistic inconvenience. Jensen, in his three-piece suit, standing before an empty conference table lit only by banker’s lamps, seems an avatar of corporatism gone by, but he speaks like a more eloquent version of the tech barons who seek to usurp democracy today. 

Worse, it is all a corruption of the ideals of free trade that once took flight across the globe, with their humanistic, pacifistic, and democratic aspirations (see my forthcoming review of Pax Economica!). But Jensen was right about one thing: it is the structure of things today. 

The Ecumenical Liberation Army that Christensen recruits for her “Mao Tse-Tung Hour” becomes corrupted by the allure of negotiating distribution charges in their contract; Howard Beale himself becomes a morose commentator parroting Jensen’s brushed-aluminium libertarianism to an increasingly sullen audience, and the people who created him plot his death as a way to salvage the network’s fortunes. 

Ideology lurks in the reeds despite our every attempt to banish it even as metrics call to us with a voice shriller than all music. Content for the Content God. Meanwhile we wallow in a world that channels our malaise into omnidirectional outrage that can destroy so much while building so little, all while serving only to provide yet more pulp for the money-printing machines of the world’s largest tech corporations. 

Today we are surrounded by a million “mad prophet” Howard Beales now served up customized and personalized to your exact demographic ideological aesthetic micropreference on screens of every size telling us that they don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. 

All they know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.

Featured Image is A man and a woman watching film footage of the Vietnam war on a television in their living room, by Warren K. Leffler