"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!"
Newscaster Howard Beale is mad. Stark raving mad, that is. But don't tell that to UBS VP of Developement Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), who sees Beale and his unprecedented Nielsen ratings success as a "full-fledged messiah" for the ailing network. Or to network president Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), who needs Beale in order to impress his imperious boss, UBS parent company CEO Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty); who himself has designs on molding Beale's on-air rants into a propaganda tool for his corporation-centric worldview. Beale's longtime friend and UBS news division president Max Schumacher voices his opposition to the madness, but what can one man hope to do against the might of a vicious, culture-dominating machine?
These are the characters of director Sidney Lumet's 1976 satire of the television industry, Network. It is both a howlingly funny and discomfortingly accurate depiction of what Beale calls a "goddamned amusement park," though one in which the only ride is a gaudily decorated rollercoaster. Christensen's idea for a new "reality-based" show ("suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: The Death Hour") seems a logical extension of modern fare like COPS and even much of what passes for news on 24-hour networks such as CNN and Fox News. In an business driven by ratings above all, even the film's shocking finale doesn't veer too far outside the realm of possibility.
Originally fired due to failing market share, Beale's fantastic success comes as he reinvents himself as the "Mad Prophet of the Airwaves", shouting his message as if to ingrain its contents in his viewers through sheer force of will. His practice of fainting — or perhaps something more, given his questionable physical health — is especially intriguing in light of his claims to have heard "the voice of God" in a dream one night. God delivers his message and then is gone, and it is easy to think that he might never awaken from his slumber under the glare of dozens of dazzlingly brilliant lights. His slickly produced segments only highlight the glitziness of the medium: at first attractive, and then repulsive once we realize how hollow the whole thing is.
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
How about a mention for Paddy Chayefsky, who won an Oscar for his screenplay? The line you open your article with was written by him. I would submit that it was his criticism and not Lumet's.