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 Paddy Chayefsky’s 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 Lumet, wryly 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 shows as glib purveyors of fake showbiz 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 rueful “Born in the USA” lyrics were jingoistically referenced by Ronald Reagan, Beale’s cri de coeur has most frequently been co-opted by conservative figures like Mitt Romney and Monica Crowley and their braying media champions. “You can watch poorly performed knockoff versions of Howard Beale’s ‘mad as hell’ speech every night nowadays on any number of cable networks,” says CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Except I believed Howard Beale’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 Beale’s outrage as well.”
It seems unlikely that Network would be instructive for an organized-crime film set in 1950s Detroit. But when director Steven Soderbergh was seeking a way to introduce the corrupt auto tycoon (Matt Damon) who calls the shots in No Sudden Move, he and screenwriter Ed Solomon looked to Howard Beale’s dressing down by the belligerent corporate “god” Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty). “I had the full script beaten out,” Solomon says of the movie, which stars Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro. “And Steven says, ‘You know what we should do? We should have a new character [like Ned Beatty’s in Network] who suddenly shows up and delivers a seven-page monologue that changes the entire context of the story.’ I walked away and thought, Do I watch Network now? Because if I do, I’ll spend six months frozen at my desk because of how great that movie is.”
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