Alan Catlin Essay

Network

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

This iconic phrase from the movie Network, resonates today, close to fifty years after it was spoken by the mad prophet Howard Beale played by the soon-to-be-dead Peter Finch.  What resonates in this statement is that it speaks the formerly unspoken, out loud Beale is voicing the frustrations, the anger, the feeling of diminishment, and dehumanization of modern man in face of an increasingly monolithic corporate entity formerly known as the United States of America.  Now the parameters have shifted, the emotions are more complicated, and the consequences of this long-suppressed anger are more dire in ways that screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky could never have anticipated.

Chayefsky understood, as well as anyone could, that television had become, may always have been, a purveyor of false images and lies. Rather than had been envisioned at the inception of programming, that TV would be used for educational purposes, it has been used more for branding, commercialization, and selling, than for providing reliable information.  Television is a passive image making medium that requires almost nothing from its viewer than to follow the little bouncing ball; that is to follow the cues, the key phrases, and inflection points, that become sound bites. These cues arouse deep seeded emotions in our lizard brains through a kind of subliminal seduction. A person with an agenda in a public forum on television can spout all kinds of heinous lies and it will seem just like regular programming because who, really, knows the difference anymore?

Movies had been the prime visual medium for nearly a century.  When Network was released, the viewer had to leave home, travel, and actively interact with others in a social setting; the movie theater. There was no streaming, pay per view option, imagine that! People laughed, cried, groaned expressed horror as a group.  As technology evolved, the access to movies changed. The viewer could buy or rent VHS tapes and take them home, play them on a machine and watch. As the technology improved further, the movies resolution became better, the movies themselves shrank in size, new machines were invented and access became nearly universal. Movie theaters for the masses was no longer a necessity.

Television followed suit. Ways of transmitting movies, original programming and pay channels were created. Hundreds of them. Now you could watch anything you wanted, even porn, especially porn, or be sold anything you wanted, in the comfort of your own home. As one-person once told me, “The shopping network is evil.  After a night out, I came home, flipped on the tube, began to relax with another brew, and watched whatever they were selling. It didn’t matter what. There is something, almost hypnotic, about the voice of the person doing the selling, almost always a good-looking woman, that is relaxing in an insistent kind of way. Especially if you are stoned. It’s as if they are talking to you. Personally.  After one of those under-the-influence viewings, I maxed out my credit card buying twelve reading lamps as Christmas gifts for my siblings. No one in my family actually reads but it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Obviously, it wasn’t. He’s a lawyer now. He still goes but he only drinks beer.

Network anticipated many changes in television, the viewing public, and our society through the lens of satire.  The Network Beale worked for was a fourth one, an almost unthinkable heresy then: a rebel channel that challenged the big three that had dominated the medium almost from the beginning. There was ABC, CBS, and NBC. Oh yeah, there was PBS but no one watched that. And some rerun channels like WOR and WPIX, whose main function was to broadcast sports and endlessly reruns of bad situation comedies and drama from bygone eras. But a whole new, actual independent, network! With news, original programming, that was profoundly radical. No matter that Beale’s network was a small, minor-league player on a field of giants. Beale, his false prophecies, and, ultimately, his madness would change all that.

Ted Turner’s bold move to create a 24-hour news network was the first real world attempt to challenge the way television was conceived. Who the hell wanted to watch 24 hours of news, anyway?  People scoffed. And was there even enough news to support such a channel?  Be serious.

Apparently, there was. And when there wasn’t enough news, you could always create news. Pseudo news, as it were. Endless talk TV shows (shows is an important word now, a distinction from news information, say. Purported news discussions, actually agenda opinionators, are referred to as shows now) that sprang from serious shows like Face the Nation eventually morphed into sideshows, rant channels, newspeak, high minded serious sounded journalism that was clearly propaganda or worse.  Big Brother would have been proud. The masses were being brainwashed and they were doing it to themselves.

There have always been hucksters and fake carny salesmen on radio and TV. Father Coughlin during WWII was a prime example of jingoistic, radical conservatism (they are always, universally conservative, reactionary mouthpieces) operating under the guise of religion, sort of like Elmer Gantry with a microphone and an audience of millions.  We have always had Joe Pines’ spewing forth all kinds of nonsense and fear mongering inanities under the guise of populism. He was forerunner of guys with syndicated shows, the Morton Downey Jr’s. of the world, the Glenn Becks, the Howard Sterns (who has enough sense to temper his message with some realistic observations about the crazy destructive pseudo conservatism of the age. Speaking about Trump he has said something to the effect of we had him on so much because he was just such a joke, all by himself. Letterman echoes his sentiment saying basically.” The man needs a pill.” The sentiment was, Trump seemed to think people were laughing with him but they were laughing at him.)

Eric Bogosian’s one man play satirizes the Downey Jr’s of the world in Talk Radio. (It became an effective movie leading toward an inevitable conclusion when people believe the kind of doom and hate and offensive nonsense that these people have a license to spew). The Beck’s. Limbaugh’s and Alex Jones’s of the world monetize the fear by selling end of the world, Armageddon products to the true believers. Former politicians like Ron Paul have their own economic package deals which feed off of these paranoid delusion themes. He is just one of many end times “economists of the future.” These world enders often have underground redoubts stacked with food, guns and water which feel like well-stocked American equivalents to Egyptian tombs well outfitted for journeys into the nonexistent afterlife.  The reality of Armageddon, say as dire as nuclear winter as envisioned in Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, suggest that all the preparation in the world won’t help because when nuclear winter comes there will be nothing left alive. Zero life. Nada. 

If nothing else these shock jocks explain why professional wrestling is so popular. The exhibition “sport” resurrected itself from the side show atmosphere of black and white televised matches in poorly lighted gyms and arenas, to huge extravaganzas with floorshows, pyrotechnics, well-built men on steroids and surgically enhanced, big busted babes, all in lurid color.  And if you know it’s fixed and don’t care, or, worse, if you don’t know that, you are dumber than you look. It’s the lowest form of entertainment with the brightest form of fireworks. A solid rule of thumb to live by is: the brighter and the bigger the light show, the less there is in content. It’s all just something you see on TV like a mad prophet or a huckster who plays a president on the tube. And if you are lucky shock jock, whose time as a populist has past, you can get a job selling cars on TV like Jerry Springer. And you thought MTV was a genius idea once upon a time; commercials for selling entertainments (songs and albums) dressed up as variety shows (videos).

Remember reading? That archaic form of information gathering (and I don’t mean on a screen, in front of a computer, in a book) Who really wanted to read books anyway? Books were something you had when you were in school and you hated school, right? All those wiseass, smart geeks, and pain-in-the-ass teachers making you do shit or showing you up. You might not be stupid per se, you just weren’t interested in that stuff like math. What was I ever going to do with that!? The geeks were, though, and you suspected they looked down on you for not getting it. 

Of course, you hated reading and school equally. Shakespeare! He was for fairies, literally. And tough to understand books like Of Mice and Men and real long ones like A Tale of Two Cities, give me a break.  You hated reading because it involved the expenditure of actual mental energy. With TV, hell you turned it on, and you watched whatever was in front of you without thinking about it. (unless it was football and you had money on the game). I’m old enough to remember when networks signed off for the day, played the national anthem, and filled the screen with a test pattern. In a certain state of mind, those were not-to-be-missed moments in TV. Sort of like      calling the 24-hour Time number on your phone and listening to the recorded voice saying,” At the tone the time will be…” Many an hour could be passed that way. In a certain, albeit, completely passive state of mind. But perpetual TV changed all of that. There was content instead of a test pattern and as anyone in the app business will tell you, “It’s all about selling content.”

No wonder Big Brother required constant video surveillance in every home on monitors that could never be turned off. It might not be a big money maker but it kept the masses docile and wary. 

Are we mad as hell about this? No, but we sure as hell should be. If we are angry, it is usually about the wrong thing. (I mean people actually believed/believe completely absurd stuff about Hillary that the tabloids supermarket rags wouldn’t print: Cannibalistic baby raping whatever, ad nauseum. Content writers actually admitted to thinking up the most ridiculous stuff they could and sending it out/posting it,  just to see if anyone would buy it. No one was more surprised than they were, that people actually believed this crap. Now, no one is surprised by this nonsense because it is obvious people will believe anything depending upon who says it, sells it, to them.)

Of course, Chayefsky, no one, could have predicted the rise of social media networks and their outsized influenced on what is laughingly called, public discourse, these days. (storming the capital and hitting politician’s husbands with hammers is considered legitimate discourse by some. Seriously!?)  Now any crank, any demented individual, malcontent, whatever, can post, tweet, Insta messages any infantile, weird thought of the day, and become today’s rallying point because they are protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.  Soon these social network platforms will be offering free downloads on How to Start Your Own Cult, a primer for spreading alternate facts, disinformation, and hate speech.

Everyone has their own reality now. “Facts, facts, facts”, as Dickens has Gradgrind say at the beginning of his novel Hard Time.  Imagine that today in our fact free world. Right. Good luck with that.

Apparently, the fear of missing out, of not seeing the next big thing, is more important than actual thinking and doing. Yes, this is scary, we have become, as Howard Beale recognized in his waning days of popularity, as he went from exciting, conscious raising madman to depressing prophet of doom,

“What’s finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to
the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual
that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being who’s finished.
It’s every single one of you out there’s that finished. Because this
is no longer a nation of independent individuals. This is a nation of
two hundred-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white,
steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable
as piston rods…the whole world Is becoming humanoid, creatures that
look human but aren’t. The whole world, not just us.”

Body snatchers anyone?  The allegory in the black and white movie was to the threat of communism but Chayefsky has taken one step beyond that.  Beyond even 1984 to something equally as dystopian and beyond satire to Reality Based Life; a kind of television script without an actual author; reality the ultimate improvisation. Wow.  (to riff on an inspired Robin Williams improvisation)

What really stands out for me in the script now, is not so much the mad as hell refrain but the question asked by the corporate television executive who is body and mind snatching the new, break away fourth network, “Oh for God’s sake, are you suggesting we put that lunatic (Beale) back on the air yelling bullshit?”

The answer, of course, is “Yes. Have you seen the ratings?”

In the pre-social media age, newscasters were revered, respected, and listened to. As the omnipresence of the networks, the news for profit industry, the invention of omnipresent communications sites like Facebook, Instagram and you can get anything you want at Google with a click, debased information to the level of advertising. There are lots of stories, lots of newsy stuff, and truthy stuff, as Colbert said, but there is absolutely no discrimination between truth and illusion. (remember the republicans invited Colbert to one of their high-powered dinners because they thought he was a conservative TV “journalist”. Boy, were they surprised when the joke was on him. That is one event co-ordinator looking for a new profession.) The great accomplishment for the Trump time is debasing information to such a level that no one can possibly know “the truth” anymore. Or so the thinking goes. Plausible deniability is everything. Never say anything directly like inciting a riot or instigating a “Big Storm” just imply it. (And shit will happen. Like Field on Dreams Through the Looking Glass).  Everyone will get the implications but it isn’t a chargeable offense. So sayeth The Don.

In Network, Beale loses his cache when he loses his gravitas, the veneer of respectability, and reliability. Following a series of devastatingpersonal setbacks: the death of his wife, a loss of his audience share, poor ratings, the behind the scenes taking over of the network, installing corporate think as the rule of the bottom line, and Beale’s increased, job-effecting alcohol intake, making him a liability. The bottom line was clear, he had to go.

But he wasn’t going to go quietly. After his notice was given Howard and his good buddy from the Ed Morrow days, Max Schumacher, another old guard voice of integrity and reason, hit the bars. In a state of near comatose drunkenness Howard says he going to commit suicide on air in a week which should give the publicity boys plenty of time to work on advertising. Max thinks he is kidding and says sure it will be the start of new trend in programming, “I loved it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, murder in the barbershop, human sacrifices in witches’ covens, automobile smashups, The Death Hour!” (Little does Max know in a few weeks there will be a Mao Tse Tung Hour, following the mad prophet Beale, revolutionaries airing their robbing banks and the like followed by a made for TV show. The programmer in charge flat out says, “I don’t care about the content.” Give me ratings baby and you can say whatever you want.) What is lost in time, from Max’s drunken rejoinder to Howard’s seemingly outlandish suggestion, is that every citation Max makes that precedes the Death Hour! is a summary of news headlines from the day.  And most important of all is the fact that a news anchor in Florida actually did blow her brains out on TV.

On the morning of July 15, 1974, viewers of WXLT-TV 40 in
Sarasota, Florida watched as Christine Chubbuck, the auburn-haired
twenty-nine-year-old host of the morning show Suncoast Digest,
appeared to be wrapping up a brief news report. Instead, Chubbuck looked into the camera and said,” In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of
bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color, you are going
to see another first-an attempted suicide.” She then drew a .38-claiber
Smith and Wesson pistol from a shopping bag behind her desk and shot
herself behind the right ear.” From Dave Itzkoff, Mad as Hell

What that did for Channel 40’s ratings is unclear.

What follows their time in the bar, is increasingly more satiric. Chayefsky outlines a series of what he thinks (in 1976) are completely over the top programs. The Howard Beale Mad as Hell show is the foundational program all else is built on. No longer do we see him behind a microphone in a closed set, reading from a text the way newscasters have since the News was codified. Now it is an entertainment venue. There is an elaborate set, the audience chants “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore” after the lead, then Beale begins his rant of the day. This is the next level of “news.” This is News as entertainment. In the waning days of the disgraced, twice impeached ex-president’s doomed campaign he says as I recall, “Vote for me or you won’t be entertained anymore.”

You won’t be entertained anymore. Think about that. Think about his whole presidency. The way he throws out some outlandish pronouncement at the end of a daily news cycle. It is almost always later in the cycle because he doesn’t like to work too much. Mornings are for watching Fox in the A.M. and night are for watching talk shows.  In between he systematically undoes (with someone telling him what President Obama did) everything that Obama tried to do, for what he saw, as the betterment of the nation. What Trump did was to dominate the news cycle.  The whole presidency was like a soap opera he made up as he went along, just as he famously goes into meetings without a folder or a briefing. He stirs the pot by moving from one invented crisis to the next. When that one plays out or he gets bored, attention span and retaining actual information are not his strong suits, he creates something new. The man’s brain is a perfect sieve. And it was all pure TV, plain and simple.

In one of his monologues, Beale asserts that the children of today (1976 again) have been brought up and weaned on television and no longer know anything but what television tell us. And TV is all a lie.  Add forty-five years or so of improved technology, assaultive social media, and contrived newsy content, think Fox News, News Max and the like, whose sole purpose is to feed the audience what they want to hear, true or not, and maintain their ratings.  The liberal stations are no better, except what they are selling is different content with an attempt to be objective in ways while the other networks don’t even pretend to try. The result is a conglomeration of Noise that is essentially, entertainment content.  Add in a toxic measure of decreased funding for education, lowering of standards, programming to keep the masses stupid, and you have Network primed. (Remember it is Trump who famously says, “I love uneducated people.” Of course, he does. They are just like him.)  How many of you can complete the advertising slogan, “Football, apple pie and…”

Are you ready for some football?

The resolution of Network is inevitable.  Howard’s rantings slip into the realm of uncomfortable (for the powers that be) monologues about corporate responsibility. Who actually runs the corporations that run the networks? What is their agenda? Who puts up the money (in this case the Arabs. Sound familiar?) What are their goals? Even after his sermon on the mount moment with the head of corporate where Howard is convinced, he has seen God and hears His word delivered, incarnate form, from this man. And this man wants to keep Howard regardless of the ratings.

The ratings people, behind the scenes, the actual nuts and bolts management people, feel differently.  Ratings are everything and Beale has to go but how do we get rid of him? I guess we have to kill him, Network boss Hackett says (brilliantly played by and over the top Robert Duvall.) Basically, they brainstorm the death of Beale as a ratings event. The head programmer, a sexy bitch, described succinctly in the script as having the nicest ass on a programmer ever, is totally devoid of feeling, and played pitch perfectly by Faye Dunaway, thinks she can arrange it. An assassination that is. The death on screen will be the perfect lead in for the Mao hour. (Homophonic, no?) Besides, the radicals are getting pissed because they are losing market share and residuals because of Howard’s decreased popularity. They are willing to play ball. Ratings are everything. Content is king. Howard becomes the first person killed on live TV because of poor ratings.

The rise of made for TV politicians seems inevitable given this background of news becoming entrainment.  Formats of network news shows began to follow a familiar pattern as Roger Mudd, heir apparent to Walter Cronkite, who was passed over for semi-comatose looking, Dan Rather, noted on PBS: you have ten minutes of hard news in the first block. And the rest is basically “general interest” filler.   It may be a little better now but only by degrees.

I was exposed to an episode of Reality TV way back when Survivor (I think the last network show I watched was the last episode of Cheers and before that it was the episode when MacLean Stevens left MASH) was a new thing. I listened to one of the contestants, because that’s what they were, deliver a long monologue of his survival strategy broadcast as a voiceover while he sat by a fire looking dreamy and thoughtful. This was not a real thing; this is someone reading a script. It was television reality, not reality reality.  Was that obvious to the average viewer?  I don’t know but one wonders. I don’t know if he was voted off the island or not, but the show survived.

Then there are these increasingly absurd “Reality Show” shows like, say, The Osbornes. These things and their multitude of spinoffs seem to exist for the principles to abase themselves, make you feel as if they are real people, you could actually know, be friends with, in a Facebook sort of way. Which is not really a friend friend at all. Instant celebrity. You too can become and influencer and a quasi-famous person known only for being famous. I guess there is serious money in this but that’s someone else’s problem, not mine.

Chayefsky saw the movies Network and The Hospital as an example of the diminishment of the individual in a world dominated by corporations. Laugh out loud moments in Network are few and far between but the satire is biting and real, humorous in the extent that people find irony humorous. It has been my contention that American don’t do either irony or farce because they require a level of sophistication that most American aren’t suited for. Americans are, basically, an adolescent society. As one executive has said, “You can never go wrong underestimating the intelligence of the American viewing public.” In fact, most programming is geared to a third-grade education level with adult content thrown in to make it seem appropriate for an older audience.

There are laugh out loud moments in The Hospital where nurses are too busy with paper work to actually work with patients, where vital information is not relayed at shift change so that a person can be given another person’s identity bracelet, and administered drugs to a person who has passed away, after a series of misdiagnoses and inappropriate medical care. A series of such deaths, each perfectly executed suggest the patients, literally are in charge of the asylum, and one of them is a completely insane serial killer. 

Was Chayefsky being glib or naïve when he suggested that his movies were not meant as a takedown of the medical industry, though blistering accurate in many ways given the impossible working conditions of understaffed, over worked urban hospitals? Was this his true intent TV industry also?  He has an insider’s view of TV having written numerous, award-winning TV drama when actual serious plays were performed live. His demanding and challenging work that became less in demand as time went on and people’s taste were for quizzy things and talk/variety shows. Throw in his command personality that called people to task for not performing his work as written and you are headed out the door. There is no room on TV for thought provoking, serious people, with a vision as opposed to an agenda.  A money-making agenda that is.

The ultimate, pre-Trump, reality politicians has to be Sarah Palin. She combined all the necessary attributes of a TV star: relatively good lucks and youth, the ability to present well on TV, to energize an audience with platitudes and non-sequiturs. She could real off memorable one liners, that could be confused with content, that were perfect 20 second or less spots on a news cast. Sarah actively resisted learning about world affairs. Issues, we don’t need no stinkin’ issues. What does a Mama Bear need to know about the situation in the Middle East for? Why indeed. One heartbeat away from the president, maybe and she couldn’t; find Afghanistan on a map. Whatever. This is a person whose daughter has two out of wedlock children and becomes a spokesperson for chastity and a mom who is against abortion. Duh! Hypocrisy anyone?  No shame is a trait for people who are all surface with no substance. They are Made for TV semi-humanoids. Obviously, we have become a society that no longer can understand unintentional irony. Needless to say, Sarah has had her own reality TV show(s). And sometimes she is filmed shooting living things with a high-powered rifle from a helicopter.  Whatever.

Jump ahead a decade or so and we live in a cancel culture. Whole segments of America (better armed than previous generations and masses raised on generations of gene changing drug intake) is afraid that their 50’s values, their Christian morality is being cancelled by ultra-leftist communist (how 50’s is that?) sympathizers.  They are being cancelled. What cancel culture means to Trump is that the network he worked for on The Apprentice said, “You’re fired.”

Cancelled as president meant the loss of his daily teleview platform that waits breathlessly for his next proclamation, no matter how deranged (as Max, Howard’s friend says in an impassioned speech regarding Beale, “The man is insane. He’s no longer responsible for himself. He needs care and treatment. And all you gravedigger’s care about is if he’s a hit.”) (Sound familiar post-election 2020, 2022?) Cancelled also means a loss of income generating publicity. Not that he didn’t figure out a way to get around that loss.

We won’t mention the doomed social network enterprise, the aptly Orwellian named Truth Social. The best thing to come of that is Devin Nunes is no longer a congressman but a CEO of a worthless information network. 

Chayefsky could not have foreseen the ultimate Reality Show: four years of rampant self-interest, corruption of the highest order and internal chaos verging on state sponsored terrorism (not to be confused with The Truman Show though it was filmed in viral supporter Matt Gaetz’s parent’s home), The Trump Show. Despite a clear-cut mandate that showed him the biggest loser (whiner. Remember the third-grade education programming goal?) of all time. He stubbornly refused to be cancelled. Part of that refusal was an attempted coup filmed for the whole world to see and aided and abetted by power hungry supporters in both the house of representatives and the senate.  Obviously, this was a man who would stop at nothing to avoid being cancelled (though how his supports view cancel culture is at odds with reality) again and started a grassroots organization to make a return to the airwaves as Head of State. Governing the nation is of no importance, it is being the CEO of the Reality Show, his made-up version of himself, is all.

Basically, though, it was a fund-raising opportunity, a scheme that if nothing else would sell you content. After all this is the president who said in a preelection interview extolling the virtues of eminent domain (liker taking homesteads of little old ladies that stood in the way of one of his projects), was “a beautiful thing.” But most of all what he said that should have been noted was he planned to monetize the presidency. And monetize it he did. All it cost us was the democratic process and the rule of law. And he still owes billions of personally guaranteed dollars. How’s that for deal making, business savvy?

And just when we thoguht we had dodged the bullet of his presidency we learn he has stored thousands upon thousands of classified materials on his various properties. Stored them in such a way that any minor league, enterprising spy, could find a way to access the nation’s most secret information.

What exactly did he have in mind when he stole those documents? There are various explanations but one can reasonably assume, the man who swore to monetize the presidency, took documents that he could sell to interested parties. Like offering a manuscript of his memories for publishers to bid on only different. That most of these interested parties were not publishers but are enemies of the state should not be a surprise. The highest bidder, is the highest bidder, in a dog-eat-dog world. After all, at the end of the game, he who has the most toys wins. That the end could have a nuclear winter as part of the final reckoning doesn’t seem to have factored into the decision-making process.

At the end of Network, Howard Beale’s is cancelled in a rain of bullets. At the end of Dr. Strangelove, the Doomsday machine triggers an end of the world event, (and it’s not like the Rapture Sarah and co. envision for their deliverance to the happy hunting grounds) just the end. Finito.

The complete cancellation of Mr. Trump seems inevitable. Time will tell of it is through legal means, a prospect that seems more and more likely with the passage of time, ( natural causes, or a rain for bullets, can’t be ruled out . Remember All the King’s Men, Huey Long….) If he isn’t legally held accoutnable, and is returned to power, his ascent will be accompanied by mass casualties events. Count on it. Remember, as Rick Wilson former republican strategist and co-founder of Lincoln Project has said, “Everything Trump touches dies.” That could include the United States.

What stands out for me, now, in the “text” of Trump’s 1-6 “speech” is the line, “and we’re not going to take it anymore.” He didn’t have to say mad as hell because it was implicit in everything said and done, before and after this neo-Nazi rally.

Regardless of what happens his legacy will live on. Hopefully, the coda to this movie, The Trump Show, does not include mushrooms clouds and a chorus signing “Until we meet again, who know when…”. More likely, given the age of TV references, the final moment will be Porky Pig signing off Looney Tunes, “That’s all folks!”