If you’ve seen Network, you undoubtedly remember the climax of the famous “mad as hell” scene, when Max Schumacher (William Holden) leans out his window and we observe, with him, people shouting out of their rain-soaked tenements as a thunderstorm rumbles overhead. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Having not seen the film in more than a decade, what struck me with the force of a thunderclap in that moment was that those shots are a direct precursor to Twitter.
You can imagine it, can’t you? #madashell
It surprised me a bit to learn that Paddy Chayefsky—who had negotiated final cut authority into his contract in order to protect the integrity of his script—was always a bit tetchy at how that line became an instant meme (as we now might call it). To him, it was just another line of dialogue. To me, rewatching this film in the context of 2019, it illuminates the difference between his priorities as a screenwriter and the directorial vision of Sidney Lumet. Chayefsky protected his dialogue obsessively, but he was also totally immersed in the holistic critique of his story, of which Peter Finch’s Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves, is only one component, and that speech one component of that component.
Lumet must have understood how apocalyptic that scene needed to be in order to underscore the elation of Faye Dunaway’s sociopathic producer, Diana Christensen, who is delighted to hear that people are shouting in cities across the country. Lumet also must have understood that he needed to underscore the Schumacher’s baffled resignation. It’s a big moment, perfectly realized. The camera closes in on Finch, making him tower over us as he builds to his rapturously indignant call to arms. But as he stalks toward the studio camera, repeating the line, Lumet traces the impact of it through Diana and Max. She bustles through UBS HQ, making cross-country phone calls and cackling with delight without ever poking her head outside to see the people who have roused themselves from their sofas to answer Beale’s call. Max, surrounded by a family from whom he will depart, momentarily, into Diana’s cold embrace, is the one who experiences firsthand the resounding peel of emotional thunder that responds to Beale’s lightning flash of prophetic anger.
Diana quickly, efficiently harnesses that moment and transforms it into a mass-produced echo chamber. The next time we hear the line is from the crowd in Beale’s revamped news studio. They’re mad as hell, all right. And they are riveted to the spectacle of cyclical denunciation.
In his book, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, Dave Itzkoff quotes Chayefsky telling the New York Times, “Television is democracy at its ugliest.” The screenwriter was taken aback by how virulently many of his colleagues in the TV industry reacted to Network; in his mind, he was attacking the institutionalized corporate networks—the impersonal system—that reduced humanity to exploitable, expendable numbers and the immense power that mass media commanded in enabling that process. To them, he has attacking their individual good will and professionalism. Then as now, I think that people who put mass or social media to good use fail to appreciate the degree to which we enable our worst impulses.
Because I spend a moderate chunk of time reading think pieces about the dangers inherent in our uncritical dependence on our telecommunications technologies and the digital platforms which allow us to use them (and which allow them to use us), I’m often shocked by how many people—many of them younger, but plenty who are my age or older—regard them as fundamentally democratic. They enjoy their memes, they enjoy being able to connect with friends, and they attach great value both to #activism and the ability of traditionally under-acknowledged stories to get traction with the public. (The institutional racism of law enforcement and its often deadly consequences being a prime example.) When I mention the ugly side of our telecom technologies, they’re quick to acknowledge it, but it never occurs to them that, on balance, such technologies may be more harmful than helpful, especially given who ultimately controls and profits from them.
At best, they assume that tools are neutral. Jaron Lanier himself probably couldn’t disabuse them of that notion. Or, like Max Schumacher, we might all acknowledge how toxic these platforms might be, and we embrace them regardless.
It’s a real testament to Lumet that he balances the visible and near-invisible ways that we are absorbed by our media. On the one hand, there’s the hideously outré decor of Beale’s studio once he becomes the mad prophet of the airwaves. We’re meant to notice and cluck ruefully at how any audience could get suckered in by such gaudy audacity.
But then there’s the degree to which the costuming of the characters forces them to blend into their surroundings. Almost every character in this film always looks like a part of the furniture, whether it’s at the office or home. Lumet’s deliberate cuts in Arthur Jensen’s showstopping speech to Beale draw us—like Beale—closer and closer to identification with Ned Beatty’s commanding performance. And when he finally disappears into a voice emanating from the shadows, it’s easy to feel that we, too, have witnessed a revelation of cosmic truth. The only time Lumet really gives us an outside perspective is in the opening and closing shots of the film, when multiple television screens remind us of the artificial realities constructed by the mass media and how completely they can control how we view events affecting us. Even if we’re active participants, the form of our participation is controlled, as when Beale’s audience parrots his meme-ified catch phrase.
Chayefsky’s genius was to recognize that corporate mass media in the 1970s, however centralized into a few national networks, was in part of democracy’s fabric, and often a platform for democracy’s worst impulses. In 2019, I don’t think our situation has changed, save for one fundamental shift. In 1976, Chayefsky allegorically targeted the transnational networks by portraying them as characters like Max, Diana, Beale, etc. The audience was just the undifferentiated audience. Now? Our platforms have made us the network. We are all Diana, Max, and Beale. ☕️
Catecinem 