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40 Years Later, 'Network' Makes This Election Look Like Old News

A well-known television personality is delivering a speech on the nightly news, and he’s gone off script. He’s saying that the country is going to hell. He’s telling the American people to break out of their complacency and get angry. And though his rant is half-crazed and fuzzy on specifics, it hits a nerve. The rage spreads across the nation like an unstoppable wave.

This is the central event in Network, the multiple-Oscar-winning media satire written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. The film opened in November 1976, and exactly 40 years later, it is impossible to watch without thinking of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump approximately once every two minutes.

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Network is about a fictional television network, UBS, that’s lagging behind in the ratings. So they hire a young, hungry programming executive, Diana (Faye Dunaway), and fire their longtime nightly news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch). When Howard learns he’s being replaced, he announces on air that he intends to kill himself during an upcoming broadcast. The next night, he returns to the show, ostensibly to apologize, but instead launches into an obscenity-laden rant about how he’s “out of bulls—.” News ratings immediately surge, and Diana decides that Howard should host his own show.

“The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them,” says Diana. She describes Beale as “a latter-day prophet, a magnificent messianic figure, inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times.” Max (William Holden), the head of the news division, objects to her characterization. “For God’s sake, Diana,” he says, “we’re talking about putting a manifestly irresponsible man on national television.”

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1976, of course, was also an election year, and in many ways, the nation was experiencing a similar crisis of faith as Gov. Jimmy Carter and Pres. Gerald Ford battled it out for the Oval Office. Technology (including the first personal computers) and culture (the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement) were evolving at an unprecedented rate. Thanks to the Vietnam War and Watergate, the moral rightness of the United States government – something on which its citizens had always relied – was being called into question. The post-war prosperity of the 1950s and the optimism of the 1960s had been replaced by cynicism and economic depression. As Howard describes it in the film’s most famous speech:

Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our TVs while some local newscaster tells us today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy.

Replace a few keywords – “homicides” with “mass shootings” or “police deaths,” for example – and this speech could be delivered today by a pundit of either party. But rather than faulting politics, Chayefsky’s screenplay lays the blame squarely at the feet of television. It is the thing keeping people complacent and allowing moral corruption to worm its way into the core of America. It is the means to the end times. “You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal… This is mass madness,” Howard cautions his audience. “You are television incarnate Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy,” Max tells the woman who emerges as the film’s villain. “War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.”

Today, it seems ridiculous that television, that ubiquitous and increasingly quaint medium, was seen as the ruin of a nation. But this same argument, that recent technology is making us complacent and unable to separate fact and fiction, has been applied countless times this year to social media. By the time Twitter goes the way of the television antennae, a “mad prophet of the airwaves” could be our President. And the satirical elements of Network — like so many Onion articles that are mistaken for real news pieces — seem less like jokes than accurate predictions.

The crux of Howard Beale’s revolution — which comes to a swift and implausible end when he questions USB’s political affiliations, and they execute him on live TV — is the idea that people need to rise up and voice their anger. At the end of that legendary speech above, he urges viewers to open their windows and scream out “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In 2016, no prodding is required to make Americans speak our anger aloud: If anything, we can’t shut up about it. But Network shows us the futility of voicing our rage while glued to a screen. Though Howard’s words thrill his audience, there is no action to accompany the outcry, no march towards justice, no organization towards a higher purpose. That’s what makes it so easy for Diana to transform Howard’s existential howl into defanged network entertainment. In the end, all the mad prophet did was inspire a lot of people to shout out of their windows, each shout drowning out the next until it was impossible to tell what anyone was even saying.

Watch the ‘mad as hell’ scene from ‘Network:’