We're All Mad as Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Anymore: Finding Hope in "Network"
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The most obvious thing to write about Network – Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's 1976 filmic evisceration of American media culture – is that its dour vision of our nation is still entirely relevant today. But that's not what I'm here to write about.
Who in America isn't mad as hell in 2022? Who in America doesn't feel like they can't take it anymore? Who doesn't want to throw open their window and scream this at the world, particularly if we imagine that window as the electronic one provided to us by the internet?
Our situation, friends, is bleak. There's no use denying it. Chaos is upon us. Each day seems to bring a fresh bit of unraveling, the accelerating anguish of which is only compounded by the inability of our popular culture to respond to it.
The smallest tokens of this are perhaps the best ones. Several weeks ago, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and then fled to India. A trifling thing, a bit of Hollywood nonsense. And yet it carried a feeling, did it not? As if some acidic, boiling energy beneath the surface of things had found a vent and pushed a single, small bubble upwards to burst in our faces. As if this mounting awareness that everyone is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore had found a miniature symbolic expression, the more startling because of its banality.
And then two weeks ago a man burned himself to death in front of the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. in a kind of horrific clarion call about the destruction of our climate; and this week a man free-climbed a thousand-foot building in San Francisco to protest abortion; and the following day a man attacked the comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at a show in Los Angeles and was beaten and had his arm broken by security; and in all of these human-sized actions of despair lies the sensation that all around us things are cracking up.
And this is not to mention the massive, ponderous blocks of our society that rapidly seem to be coming loose from their foundations. From the leak at the Supreme Court signaling the future of abortion in this country to the rampant inflation that is overwhelming us, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the riotous debates over "cancel culture" and what should be taught in our schools, from Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter to the neverending tidal wave of mass shootings, battles over "fake news" and the nature of reality, horrific dispatches about the climate, and reminders that given our current course, the average young person may never make enough money to buy a house – from here to there and everywhere, the news is not good.
Yes, the vision and despair and outrage of Network is still very much relevant today. That's the obvious thing to note.
The less obvious thing to note is that every movie like this must, by definition, provide a remedy, a balm for the soul, a small but bright beacon in the darkness. And those elements of the film are also still relevant. That's what I'm here to write about.
So cheer up, fellow film-lovers. This piece is not going to be a jeremiad about the horrors of the world. It's going to be about the fact that great satire, and great art more broadly, is never, and can never be, simply negative. It's always also about hope and the overcoming of despair, and it always throws us these ropes to hold onto when the going gets rough.
The story of the film goes like this. There's an aging news anchor at a network called UBS, named Howard Beale (Peter Finch). At the opening, it's announced that Beale is going to be fired because of poor ratings. But instead of making a graceful exit, Beale declares to his audience that he's going to kill himself on the air.
Chaos descends on the network, which the news division president (and Beale's best friend) Max Schumacher (William Holden) struggles to control. But a funny thing also happens: Beale's announcement of his impending suicide drives ratings through the roof. This attracts the attention of the corporate arm of the company that owns the network, led by one Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), as well as an ambitious young programming chief, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway).
Although Beale is clearly descending into a state that lies somewhere between insanity and religious fervor, Christensen and Hackett make the decision to keep him on the air. He begins to inveigh against the horrors of the world, declaring that he, like everyone else, is sick of all the bullshit surrounding us and urging his viewers to stick their heads out of their windows and scream that they're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. The viewers do. The ratings get better and better. Christensen turns the nightly news show centered on Beale into a kind of bizarre variety show, featuring a soothsayer and a radical domestic terror group, among other things. Soon, it's the number one show on television.
When the old-school Schumacher protests, worried that his now-crazy friend Beale is being taken advantage of, he's summarily fired. But the catch is that he has begun an affair with Christensen and left his wife. So he watches from the sidelines as the nightly news show he used to run is turned into something like the front page of the National Enquirer.
At the end, the worm turns, as it always does. Beale takes to preaching against a corporate merger involving the company that owns UBS. This is a bridge too far, and he's called in before the chairman of the company, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), who browbeats him into accepting a kind of business-as-the-foundational-force-in-the-universe cosmology. Beale begins to preach this new gospel on the air, and the ratings plummet. Desperate that their hit show is dying, Christensen and Hackett decide that the only option is to have someone assassinate Beale on live television. They do, and the film ends with the narrator announcing that this has been the story of Howard Beale, the first man ever killed because of lousy ratings.
There is a deep and perceptive critique of American culture in the film. Even in the mid-1970s, it was obvious to the screenwriter Chayefsky that our obsession with infotainment was a threat. It was clear that a medium driven by popularity and ratings would sooner or later be unable to perform the function of actually informing the public about the serious issues they should be informed about. And it was clear that at least a large part of the problem would come from the absorption of news-reporting services into the enveloping folds of massive corporations for which there is no other gospel than the bottom line.
We could, were this a different piece of writing, spend a good chunk of our afternoon talking about how this relates to our own contemporary culture – substituting the internet for the television – and the lack of civic education endemic to it, or the inherent divisiveness of the profit motive (for it's always more profitable to make people angry than it is to make them informed), or the problems facing us by corporate control of information, be that by Facebook, Google, Apple, News Corp., the Comcast Corporation or any of the other godlike entities that spend their days pulling our strings so that their executives can order people around and buy yachts and pontificate about their own cosmic importance.
However, as I noted at the top, the point I'm interested in making about all of this is not, or not only, related to this critique. Instead, I'd like to start by making an assertion about satire.
What differentiates satire from sarcasm, and from the kind of hollow "irony" that permeates our internet discourse with its memes and subtweets and TikTok videos, is that satire is, in the words of the literary critic Northrop Frye, "militant irony." Which is to say that satire has, at base, a purpose. It is being used for something or in support of a cause.
Put differently, the precondition of true satire is belief. To engage in it, one must be operating from a position, much in the same way that if one is going to move the world with Archimedes' lever, one must have a place to stand.
So then, there are two questions for us regarding Network. What does it believe, or what is the position from which its satire is operating? And how can we apply those beliefs to our own moment, or perhaps even stand in that same place if we want to move our moment in a certain direction?
I will not pretend to be able to fully answer these questions in one sitting, but here are a couple of preliminary possibilities.
First, the film believes strongly in the possibility of rational, adult discourse about the events of the world. The satirical plot line in which a news show is turned into an entertainment-oriented variety show featuring the mad prophet Howard Beale is only possible because the film insists – through its characters, tone, and implications (for satire continually asks us to be attuned to implication) – that another mode of mass communication is feasible. In other words, if this madness of infotainment were the only possibility then it would not be open to satire, because it would simply be the way things were, a fact of the world, like a mountain, or gravity, or evolution. And a mountain cannot be satirized.
The same goes for the film's belief about the corrosive forces of corporate control and the profit principle. When Ned Beatty's character delivers onto Howard Beale his thundering oration about how the "world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business...One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused…" what makes us laugh and/or grimace is that we sense both that this is an extant viewpoint, under the sway of which we have too often fallen, and that there is somehow terribly, horrifyingly wrong with it.
There is another way, our hearts and souls cry out. There must be another way. This is the belief that undergirds all true satire.
There are other elements here as well. The film believes in camaraderie. It believes in wisdom. It believes in the vitality and occasional tragedy of love, and in the notion that people are shaped for better and worse by the media they consume, the implication being that to change the world one must change the media through which we access it.
But beneath all of this runs the film's deepest validation, which is that our sense of outrage at what the world has become is justified, and worth voicing, and necessary.
When Howard Beale cries to his viewers that he just can't take the bullshit any longer, or that what they ought to do is throw open the window and holler into the night "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" we feel the resonance. The moment stirs a response in our chests. Yes, the world is messed up. And yes, we are right to voice that. And yes, there is solidarity to be found in joining with each other to proclaim it.
So where does that leave us in our benighted 2022?
In some areas, it suggests things we should be wary of. We might do well, for example, to remember that the vast majority of sources through which we access information – from cable news networks to social media sites – are at the very minimum operating under a double imperative. The best of them do want to inform us, it's true; and yet they also must do everything in their power to convince us to keep watching them, so they can sell advertising, hold onto their market share, and turn a profit. The pressure this creates is for them to push us in the direction of titillation. In Network, this direction is the carnival-like atmosphere that overwhelms the UBS nightly news broadcast; in our own moment, this direction seems clearly to be the atmosphere of continual, moralistic wrath that consumes so much of our airwaves.
We would do well, then, to be wary of the moralistic bombast these sources offer, because moralism is as powerful a drug as methamphetamine: a puff makes you feel powerful and elated, and several puffs make you feel like nothing so much as going back for more.
Are all of us going to agree about ideas, policies, solutions, the way the world ought to be? No. But we should all be able to agree, I think, that there is such a thing as an adult way of discussing things. This does not simply mean a retreat to civil, non-rabid discourse, although I think it does mean that. It also means acknowledging, remembering, and holding in mind the fact that other human beings are other human beings. They are precisely as flawed as you. Like you, they have their blind spots and their biases, their moments of brilliance and their moments of idiocy.
But to be an adult, in the mode of William Holden's character in Network, is to hold to the possibility of a mature view of the world. This is a view in which no one gets everything they want, one in which differences can be settled, one in which compromise in a democratic society is necessary, because only children – and consumers of mass infotainment – feel as though they're right about everything all the time and that they should get every last thing they're convinced they deserve.
Am I arguing that the belief lying behind something like Network is one of a kind of mealy-mouthed centrist politics, a life lived without deep-seated, passionate views, a giving up of our ardent notions of the way the world should be? I am not.
Because the most fundamental element of the film is its outrage at the lunacies with which we too often find ourselves surrounded. One of the places where the film is absolutely not being satirical is in its most famous lines about being mad as hell and not taking it anymore. This is a pure expression of fury at the indignities heaped onto us, and a clear call for a refusal to give in to those indignities.
But it is also a call for, above all else, a solidarity in the face of those indignities. And this reveals the film's deepest belief: that solidarity is not only possible, but a precondition for attacking the ailments of the world. And it is this – solidarity – that we ought to be trying to forge.
The most important element in the "I'm mad as hell" scene is that the people across the country who stick their heads out their windows and holler find that this act joins them together with their neighbors, while the corporate types – Christensen and Hackett and the rest – who watch it happen are able only to process it in terms of the money it's going to make them.
The distinction between these groups of people is vital. It reveals the baseline of hope inherent in the film.
Network does not claim, I don't think, that engaging with its ideas – about maintaining our wariness about the threats of corporate (or any) power, or its conviction that interacting with one another in a mature way is possible – will necessarily bring political agreement. But it does believe that engaging with these ideas will reveal the truth of the matter at hand.
And this truth is that disagreement is not the problem. The problem is that there is a class of people out there, those Frank Hacketts and Diana Christensens and Arthur Jensens, who profit on our discord, who work to keep us uneducated, titillated, benumbed by the very idiocies that make them money.
To confront this, to be able to discuss it in an rational way, would be a mighty first step in addressing what ails us. And this is exactly what the film is urging us to do through its satire.
So keep the faith, friends. And when the world gets you down, go see a movie, preferably one that treats you as the thinking being you are.
Enjoy this piece? If you’d like to read more of my writing, my dystopic noir novel “The Committers” is now available in paperback and e-book format here. Read the first chapter for free here. My book on the 1969 cult classic film Mr. Freedom will also be available soon for on Amazon and elsewhere.