Sidelined from his position at UBS after the station is acquired by the Communications Corporation of America—a large, profit-maximizing company—Max is struggling to find some purpose as he enters the final chapters of his life. Diana, fully aligned with CCA, sees the news as little more than organized spectacle. Whether it informs is less important than whether it entertains, and Diana wants to bring the most absurd and bombastic material possible to television.
“Look, we’ve got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks,” she quips at one point, brainstorming her next idea. “We’d open each week’s segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we’ve got ourselves a series.”
Or, as she says to Max as she pitches her plan to make Beale a bona fide star, “TV is showbiz, and even the news has to have a little showmanship.”
Diana—cold, ruthless, and seemingly indifferent to old standards of decency and propriety—carries Chayefsky’s most bitter critiques of American society. She, herself, embodies what he clearly sees as a kind of nihilism. “I’m not sure she’s capable of any real feelings,” says Max, acting as author insert. “She’s the television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny. The only reality she knows is what comes over her TV set.” It is to her tremendous credit that Dunaway does not try to soften Diana whatsoever. She is as hard as she’s written. What Dunaway does is show the subtle cracks in the facade—and Diana’s decision to patch them back up, to stay the course for the sake of her ambition.
Diana is the next generation of American leaders, Chayefsky is screaming, a creature whose entire experience of the world is mediated by screens and broadcasts—who struggles to understand sincere human emotion and whose apparent cosmopolitanism simply enables her to appropriate and commodify an ever-growing set of materials. To that point, we see Diana try to hash out a deal with the Ecumenical Liberation Army, in a farcical scene of hard-nosed negotiation between a television producer and a group of communist radicals painted in such broad strokes that it reads as outright satire (with not a small amount of contempt for the style and posturing of the far left in that historical moment). The message, however, is clear enough: however much they might kill and steal, what matters most for Diana and the people she represents is that they can titillate and excite an audience.
A core argument of the film, in fact, concerns the power of capital to capture and co-opt any message, regardless of sincerity or original intent. There is a reason that the most memorable part of the film is Howard Beale’s famous cry, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” This is remembered as a statement of populist frustration. (And accordingly, the entire speech is a distinctly American brew of both reactionary anger at social disorder and open contempt for political action.) But what’s critical, in the film, is that Beale’s anger is quickly transformed into yet another product to sell to an audience, this one in the form of the Network News Hour, featuring Sybil the Soothsayer. Viewers can tune in to hear one of Beale’s jeremiads and then turn back to their lives, made fresh through secondhand catharsis.
Nothing in the world of Network—nor, it seems, in the real world—can overcome the power of market forces. This observation forms the basis of the film’s second most memorable moment: the confrontation between Beale and Beatty’s Arthur Jensen, chairman of CCA. Possessed of the delusion that he was truly independent, Beale had begun ranting against the financial interests of the company upon learning that it was to be acquired by a Saudi conglomerate. Beatty, in a commanding monologue performed with Old Testament authority, explains to Beale that he is meddling “with the primal forces of nature.”
“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples! There are no nations! There are no peoples!” Jensen roars. “You get up on your little twenty-one-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”
This, too, feels as if Chayefsky is speaking directly to his audience. That their sense of nationhood—their sense of racial or ethnic or religious identity—is nothing in the face of the relentless and all-consuming demands of capital accumulation. And that we’re heading toward a world where, in Chayefsky’s words as spoken by Jensen, “all men will work to serve a common profit” and where “all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”
You could even say that in Jensen’s monologue we are seeing a vision of what scholars would come to call the neoliberal order, the rise of a creed that, as the historian Gary Gerstle writes, “prizes free trade and the free movement of capital, goods, and people” and “calls explicitly for unleashing capitalism’s power.”
This gets to what is remarkable about Network and Chayefsky’s vision. With little more than a simple extrapolation of existing trends—the growing corporate ownership of news—he was able to capture something true and still-recognizable about the way American society would develop, about the way we would respond to the collapse of the old order. Not, as Harrington hoped, with a renewed solidarity but with the total collapse of standards, both for our institutions and for ourselves.
