Episode 57: "Network" & the Current State of Tabloid Culture

For me, Network predicts the rise of tabloid "news," corporate-controlled media, and the use of propaganda to pacify and distract people. It also shows us the death of democracy and the whole world as one giant web of corporations. 

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)

https://neilchughes.com/2014/07/15/im-mad-as-hell-speech-from-network-1976/

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/03/awards-insider-network-got-it-right-the-legacy-of-a-scorching-satire

https://newlinesmag.com/review/the-film-network-darkly-predicted-our-paranoid-politics/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125110/13830922

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Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Network, Sidney Lumet, tabloid news, Howard Beale, ratings, commercialization, propaganda, corporate greed, media manipulation, democracy, outrage, reality TV, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, 1970s.

 Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about Sidney Lumet's 1976 film network, and how, for better or worse, it really seems to predict the rise of controversial, tabloid esque, commercially driven news, and I'm using news in big, massive air quotes here. Sidney Lumet also directed 1964's fail safe, which I talked about in a previous episode. Spoilers abound. If you have not watched network but you want to, you plan to download this or bookmark it and come back to it later, because there's no way for me to cover details about the film without spoiling it. So if you stick with me, I'm going to assume that spoilers are fine with you. Now, let's settle up and take this ride in the introduction to the film. We're told that reporter Howard Beale had been the grand old man of news, but has lost ratings and will be fired. While Howard is out getting drunk with his boss, Howard threatens to commit suicide on the air, his boss starts talking about what a great idea it would be to have a suicide of the week, pop pops, Mafia hit men, mad bombers, something every Sunday night that's good entertainment for the whole family, and he actually says we'd wipe that fucking Disney right off the air. On the air, Howard announces, in one week, he will kill himself on the air. Half the people in the newsroom didn't even hear it. However, once they get up to speed, the announcement causes a huge stir, and it becomes news all over the place. In a meeting about how to handle it, how to do damage control, about what Howard has said on the air, I noticed a book on a bookshelf with a swastika on it, and I'm like, this is probably not a coincidence. I don't know if Sidney lumey was as dialed in intentional as somebody like Stanley Kubrick, but I'm like, I find it hard to believe that nobody else would have seen this. One obvious bit of funniness about all of this is that Howard is being fired because his ratings had slipped, but yet, now that he's made his announcement, there are camera crews all over the place that want to talk to him, and he's big news. The network has a video of the ecumenical Liberation Army performing a bank heist, and they filmed it themselves. Is this a foreshadowing of reality TV Faye Dunaway, who works in the news department, I think she becomes like a VP of programming, something like that. She is positively giddy at the idea that this group might commit more crimes and film themselves doing it. She says she wants angry shows counter culture, anti establishment. Meanwhile, Howard's boss Max is humiliated at a stockholders meeting. When he gets back, he tells the camera crew to keep rolling, while Howard has another on air meltdown. Max is told by his bosses to tender his resignation. Meanwhile, Howard still yet is a media sensation. Faye dunaway's character, Diana, tries to paint Howard as a modern day prophet, and she wants to produce his show. His rant about bullshit, everything is bullshit, has caused the network to get a huge ratings boost. Robert Duvall, meanwhile, whose character is hack it, he calls the network a whorehouse, which offends the network president, but all these years later, we know it's true. I don't think nowadays, if somebody called a new station, a glorified whorehouse, anybody would do anything but laugh. Diana comes up with a segment involving a psychic every Friday to make predictions for the coming week, and then Howard needs to become a prophet of doom. Max thinks that Howard has gone crazy and needs to see a psychiatrist. He really feels like the network is exploiting Howard, like Howard has gone mad, and instead of being able to get appropriate psychological treatment, he's being exploited for the sake of ratings. Howard has been staying with Max and his wife on the couch. Howard slips out in the night, one night and vanishes. Robert Duvall character, Hackett fires Max and demands they find Howard, because he's become a network sensation. As I said, Max feels that Howard has gone crazy and the network is just exploiting his insanity, and he even threatens to hire a psychiatrist and take the whole matter to court. How. Howard turns up in his pajamas and a raincoat. The show, now being produced by Diana, lets him on, and this is when he gives the famous mad as hell speech over on his blog. Neil C Hughes has done a great job of documenting this monolog, so I will read it for you now. This is what Howard Beale says on the air the famous I'm mad as hell monolog. 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 nickels 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 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly, the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I leave you alone. I want you to get mad. 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, you've got to say, I'm a human being. God damn it, my life has value. So I want you to get up now. I want all of you 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 mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore. And I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them, stick your head out and yell, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. Things have got to change, but first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out and yell and say, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore, and people follow Howard's advice, open the windows and screen all over the country. Diana wants to produce a show with the leader from the Communist Party and the ecumenical Liberation Army. She goes to Los Angeles to work out the details. It seems everyone is willing to sell out for a television audience, including this leader from the Communist Party, Diana, has turned the nightly news into a three ring circus, complete with a psychic. Howard warns his audience that television is nothing more than an amusement park. And Howard actually says you're never going to get any truth from us after an impassioned speech, he collapses. The network, meanwhile, has gone from debt to solvency because of Howard's show Max, who had been Howard's boss before he was fired, Max and Diana strike up an affair. Diana talks incessantly about business while they're in the bed, she pitches Max the idea of a soap opera where a woman is hopelessly in love with her husband's mistress. I'm like, what kind of love affair is this? You can't stop talking about work even long enough to do the deed. Max confesses the affair to his wife, and she throws him out on Howard's show. He talks about Arabic control of the US, including the parent company of his own network. He urges his audience to bombard the White House with telegrams to prevent Arabs from buying the network's parent company in a closed door meeting. Hackett admits that CCA, which is the parent company of this network, needs money from Saudi Arabia to keep going. Howard meets with Mr. Jensen, who runs the network's parent company. Jensen screams at Howard for meddling in deals he didn't even understand. Jensen tells him, let's focus it on this for a minute. Jensen tells him, there is no America, there is no democracy. It's all corporations. Howard goes back on his show and announces that democracy is dead. He says the whole world's people are becoming mass produced. Think about this. Think about this. Think about the control that corporations have over gestures, broadly everything, not just America, but the whole entire world. Then you think about transhumanism and brain chips going into people. Human beings are being mass produced. Maybe this film was a hell of a lot more precision than people realize. And not just about tabloid news. As Howard's tone gets increasingly depressed, the show's ratings drop and Diana flies into a rage. Max feels guilty over leaving his wife and feels like Diana wants her life to follow a television script instead of reality, Howard's show steadily declines. Diana comes to the conclusion that Howard needs to be fired. Hackett protests that Jensen has taken an interest in Howard and may not want him fired. Max and Diana split up. Max says everything the institution of television touches gets destroyed. This definitely made me think of people who go out to Hollywood, seeking fame and fortune, thinking that becoming an actor, an actress, a musician, whatever, becoming famous, is going to solve all of their problems. And then they get out there, and it's just one horror story after another after another. When Max said, everything the institution of television touches gets destroyed, that was one of the thoughts that occurred to me. Jensen wants Howard kept on the air, even though Howard is losing viewers and the network wants him gone. Jensen, who's the head of the parent company, wants Howard to stay so a Hackett says Howard needs to die. Diana comes up with a plan to have people from the ecumenical Liberation Army murder Howard on the air. Howard is indeed murdered, and we're told that he was the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings. I think for me, network not only foretells the rise of tabloid news, and I'm using news in giant air quotes here, tabloid news networks, television shows, websites, etc, it also talks about the commercialization of news so that it can't just be a journalist, saying the who, what, when, where and why, and then leaving the audience to make up their own minds about what has happened, trying to be objective, trying to give just the facts. Was it ever really truly that way? Maybe, maybe not. When we look at the origins of things like Operation Mockingbird and the relationship that has gone on between the media and the Charlie India alpha for years, maybe in the past, it was just more subtle and not as blatant as it is now, but it seems like in modernity, people are pushed into bread and circus, and I like football. I enjoy watching things for entertainment. It's not always about having to do something that's high brow and intellectual. I think what troubles me are people that never do anything highbrow and intellectual. They don't want to read. Some people still occasionally might read for pleasure, especially if it's something tabloid and trashy. But as far as reading about history, politics, economics, something that might really spark a light bulb to go off over their brain. They don't want to do that. They don't want to watch educational programming. And then what the hell does that even mean nowadays anyway? And we're living in a time of fact checkers that are going to tell you what it's okay to believe and what it's not okay to believe for me, network is not only satirizing the tabloid, sensationalist aspect of news programming, but it's also pointing out how commercialized it is, because that's one of the things that Diana and Hackett talk about at various times. We're going to be able to sell advertising for this amount of money, we're now out of debt and back on solid ground because of the advertisers and the ratings that we're getting in it's like completely fine with them to exploit somebody that might be clinically insane, so long as they're getting enough money out of it. But then Howard's cardinal sin is to try to blow the deal that's going to happen between Saudi Arabia and the network's parent company. Well, now you've screwed up the money train for us. As long as you keep the money train rolling, then you're fine and we'll support you. But the minute that the money train stops rolling, you're dead to us. Like Kevin O'Leary on Shark Tank. You're dead. To me, go behind the barn and dispose of you because you're dead. To me, that's really how they treat Howard. And then, to top it all off, as soon as Howard is no longer useful to them, and they feel like they can't get rid of him because he's become a puppet of the network president, or, I should say, the. Parent company's president, they just decide to dispense with him by murdering him. And hey, why not let him go out with a big bang? Pun intended, pun not intended by having him murdered on national television. Can you imagine the ratings we'll get? I want to read now from an article that was published in Vanity Fair, March 17 of 2022 titled network got it right the legacy of a scorching satire at a time when another civil war has become a familiar phrase in American news reports. How do we grasp the prescience of a 46 year old movie in which the protagonist proclaims that at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept writhing in its final pain. The speaker is, of course, Howard Beale, Peter Finch, news anchor of the fictional UBS TV in network the ostensible target of screenwriter Patty Chayefsky excoriating 1976 satire was the monolithic broadcasters bastardizing the news in their rabid pursuit of ratings and market share, but it was their corporate overlords, oblivious to basic human values, who Most Enraged Chayefsky after rejuvenating his nightly show by threatening to blow his brains out on camera. Howard morphs into the demagogue who encourages viewers to shout, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore, not that he, or anyone else in the movie with a beef actually does anything as its director, Sidney lumey Riley acknowledged, network won four Oscars and spawned a school of softer films and series about the ethos and excitement of TV news production, including broadcast news, the newsroom, back to you and the morning show. Current Oscar contender don't look up a thinly veiled storm warning about climate change. Spoofs cable news as glib purveyors of fake show biz news anxious not to trouble their viewers with the imminent destruction of the planet, network also bequeathed its critique of power and its most ingenious plot device to a movie in a completely different genre. Last summer's crime caper, no sudden move the same way Bruce Springsteen's ruffle, born in the USA, lyrics were jingoistically referenced by Ronald Reagan Beals Cree de cour has been most frequently co opted by conservative figures like Mitt Romney and Monica Crowley and their braying media champions. You can watch poorly perform knock off versions of Howard Beale's mad as hell speech every night nowadays on any number of cable networks, says CNN Anderson Cooper and I believe Howard Beal's emotion when he gave that speech. I don't believe those who now attempt to stir anger and outrage every night because it is popular. It becomes shtick, which is what happened to Beals outrage as well. Chase target wasn't Howard or his boss, Max Schumacher, who's played by William Holden, respected Murrow era newsmen and worn down cornerstones at UBS, but the blithe corruptors of journalistic integrity, the film's pioneering sponsor of fake news is Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway, the Hot Shot program exec who beds married Max while usurping his news division power craze, Diana enlists the news forecasting psychic Sybil the soothed Sara for Bill's program, as well as the black radicals of the ecumenical Liberation Army for her proto reality show, the Mao Tse Tung hour. The movie is far more applicable to television news today than it was at the time. No question says Cooper. When network was made, it was seen as a dark satire, but many of its characters and events don't seem that far fetched anymore. All. But in it say, not at all. They don't seem far fetched at all. There were only three commercial broadcast networks in 1976 their news divisions and the content they put on air is unrecognizable to what it once was. End Quote, of course, it is funny. You know, quoting from CNN, because there have been more than a few people that have pointed out ties of certain individuals at that network with the Charlie India Alpha. I'll leave that alone for the moment. I'm gonna hop over now to new lines magazine in their post. The film network darkly predicted our paranoid politics. The film brilliantly satirizes the TV industry in the context of the turbulent 1970s Vietnam inflation, the oil crisis, Watergate, airplane hijackings, militant leftism, a failing nightly news show exploits its washed up anchors threats of suicide by rebranding him as a network sensation, a mad prophet of the airwaves who speaks truth to power, but the truth is much darker, feeding people's outrage. In fact, serves corporate greed, the new evangel, gospel that structures the world, instead of nations or races. And quote, yeah, I want to butt in here and say I think that the point that's being made. Here is a good one, feeding people's outrage. In fact, serves corporate greed. I feel like Howard, especially in that monolog that I quoted, he's making some really excellent points about inflation and unemployment, and you know, we're expected to swallow all of this down, write to your congressman and say, What? What good would it even do? Mean, all of these things are still so incredibly relevant today, which I mean, on the one hand, it's like, here we go. We're talking about a movie that was made in the 1970s and all these years later, we could say, contextually, it still makes sense now. The more things change, the more they stay the same, which apparently is on a downhill slide. I don't think that somebody waking up to this reality like that, in and of itself, feeds corporate greed. I think what we have to be careful of here are people that I would consider, and this is just my opinion, and it could be wrong, but people that I would consider to be controlled opposition, the same ones that they get up and they tell you, it's horrible, all of this is awful. The world has gone to hell in a hand basket. But don't worry, we're winning. We're beating the New World Order. We're beating the globalists. John and Jane Q Public are really going to sock it to him. Lord Elon is on our side, even though he's got government contracts out the wazoo and he's making a fucking brain chip. He's on our side, whatever. What the even side does that mean? He's on our side, meaning what? I don't even understand what that means. I feel like people that are trying to draw these lines, red, blue, Democrat, Republican, donkey, elephant, all of these people are evil. All of these people are good, yeah, I believe those people absolutely do serve the powers of corporate greed. I think that kind of outrage absolutely serves corporate greed. I remember years ago seeing Salman Rushdie in an interview saying, we live in a time of outrage for its own sake. It's like people want to walk around and be perpetually, perpetually pissed off about something. Man gestures broadly. Look at the world now that's been years ago that I saw him say that now people want to get offended and mad constantly. 24/7 mad and never angry about anything of substance, though. They want to get angry about identity politics. They want to get angry about some cause du jour that won't impact them at all. But when they get lied to about the unemployment rate, they get lied to about the murder of a president in broad daylight, who, in my opinion, was actually trying to challenge the system and do something decent for John and Jane Q Public, a coup d'etat on American soil, us getting dragged into forever wars for no purpose, printing up reams and reams and reams of fiat currency and then acting surprised when that causes inflation, locking everybody down. Now the conglomerates can stay open because they're important, but the mom and pop shops have to close down. They don't. They don't ever get outraged about that. They just get outraged about silly nonsense that's so petty. I absolutely believe that that feeds corporate greed. It's it does nothing for John and Jane Q Public. It is serving a higher purpose. I'll read just a little bit more from new lines magazine. The film's lesson for our time, often linked in terms of bitter polarization, to the 1970s couldn't be clearer. No longer TV conglomerates, but rather tech giants, traffic and scandal with clicks and retweets, politicians and Tiktok influencers that provoke fear and anger, overloading databases to the point where no one knows what's real, in the words of Howard Beale, the disgraced anchor slash profit of network, and masterfully played by Peter Finch, when the 12th largest company in the whole world controls the most awesome God damned propaganda force in the whole godless world. Who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network, who indeed end quote, so this is another good point. It's not even just television anymore. It's also about the internet. It's about social media. When you have these huge companies that control these amazing forces for propaganda, who knows what kind of shit that you'll be spoon fed and expected to believe as truth. I recorded an episode over on my daytime podcast before I started this secondary personal endeavor about understanding the purposes of propaganda. The title. Of it was Fahrenheit 451, and misunderstanding propagandas purposes. And I released that on November 16 of 2023 I'll drop a link to that podcast episode, so if you want to check it out, you can in the write up. Here's what I wrote. Have you ever heard commentators say that propaganda is necessary because the other side, whatever that even means isn't guaranteed to win. To me, this either misunderstands or intentionally obfuscates an important purpose of propaganda. Key topics. You get hyped up and wild when you're supposed to, you sit down and watch the boob tube when you're supposed to, you ignore conflicts and problems when you're supposed to, the emotionally react. The emotional reactions are carefully orchestrated. If you lobotomize yourself, the fat cats and their cronies can do whatever they want without interference. Mm, hmm. Ray Bradbury explores this concept in his novel Fahrenheit 451 in my opinion, one function of controlled oppo is to convince you that even if things are bad and it appears the hyper elites are plotting something nefarious. Fear not. People are waking up. The power brokers are shaking in their boots, right? One of the purposes of propaganda is to keep people pacified, to keep people quiet. Sit down, shut up. Watch the boob tube be entertained if you lobotomize yourself and stay the hell out of our way, and you're not paying attention to anything that's really important in the world. You're focused on who some celebrity is dating. This couple is splitting up. Where is some member of the royal family? What kind of dress is that if you're worried about these petty, stupid little things, then you're not focused on things that really matter. And I would argue that these tabloid type news shows and the websites and their social media accounts they feed into, that it's part of the distraction, because if you're watching a television show like that, and you're slowly losing IQ points by the second, you're not reading or consuming content that you might actually learn from you're not paying attention to things in current events that really impact your life, what is the Fed doing? Are they going to raise or lower interest rates? Are we going to print up more fiat currency and go further into debt? Are we going to have to drag troops into some hot, kinetic war, and God knows where for god knows what purpose is the unemployment rate high as the sky and people are getting laid off, hither thither, and yon if you're worried about tabloid bull crap news, you're not paying attention to the things that really matter. So I think, for me, network not only prognosticates tabloid style news and commercial style news, but also the amount of distraction that we have nowadays, just venture off into the boob tube, or, as Harari says, go into virtual reality, because it will be better than your pitiful, useless eat or little life anyway, and just live in VR just hush your mouth. Little pee on, sit down, shut up and be quiet. So what do you think? Do you think that Howard Beale has a point? Has democracy died? Are we just living in a commercialized world? Can we trust anybody on television to tell us the truth? Should we go scream from the window that we're mad as hell, or is that pointless now too? Judge for yourself. Stay a little bit crazy and I will see you in the next episode. 

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