In penning the 1976 iconic film, Network, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky anticipated Rupert Murdoch
and Roger Ailes, the two founders of the Fox News network, personified in the
film as Arthur Jensen—the “man behind the curtain” turning the news department
over to programming (i.e., marketing). Chayefsky’s observations in broadcast
newsrooms were sufficient to reveal the trajectory, then only in its infancy,
that would eventually fuse tabloid “news” and political ideology together at
24/7 news networks. Astonishingly, Chayefsky anticipated even Glenn Beck and
Pat O’Reilly of Fox News. In the mid-1970s in which the film takes place, the
two media stars are prefigured or personified as Howard Beale, a news anchor
who goes crazy.[1] Thirty
years later, Beck and O’Reilly (as well as Keith Oberman on MSNBC) would enjoy
years proselytizing on air before the American public finally realized that the
three men behind the curtain “had issues.” Glenn Beck self-destructed, having hanged
himself by the verbal freedom he had given himself to spout his dire apocalyptic
predictions, and Keith Oberman had “authority issues” with bosses. Meanwhile,
the public allowed O’Reilly to go on as if he were the kooky uncle who raves
after a few drinks yet is all too clever and calculating (i.e., self-serving)
underneath.
Generally speaking,
Chayefsky saw the future of broadcast “journalism” as something rather more
baleful than a Glenn Beck self-remade as a bespectacled pseudo-intellectual in
tweed. The screenwriter had an innate
sense of just how news personalities would arouse the silent majority into
living vicariously through the 24/7 news-cycle slanted gravitationally by the
sheer mass of corporate and political capital.
Similar to how Neal is a threat to the machines who operate
the matrix, Beale
becomes a threat to the vested powerful interests in business and
government as soon as his preachments turn against them. Beale the prophet
tells his viewers that they have fallen into a stupefied daze as “programmed
humanoids,” creatures who are unknowingly manipulated even as they think they
have free-will and are individuals whose lives are not scripted or
pre-programmed. Democracy is a fraud perpetuated by corporate interests that
really pull the strings, both in terms of what the viewers see on television
and what is put into the empty real lives. In other words, we are ensconced in
a matrix built and maintained by the real
entities—corporations—that
manipulate and prostitute us even while telling us that we like it.
No one is to say publically what Wall Street and K Street
are doing to America, not to mention the medium by which the citizenry are informed.
Beale’s mad vision of restoring true democracy and the intellectual freedom of individualism
reveals the “man behind the curtain” (Arthur Jensen, the chairman of the board)
to be something less than a wizard. Rather than squeezing the attention-getting
“oracle” as if Beale were a distended or bloated melon to be held in a tight vice
until he either capitulates or bursts, Jensen coöpts the prophet himself—not by
money though; rather, Jensen feeds Beale’s lunacy. Unfortunately for Beale, his
new direction loses viewers; he thus becomes a threat to Jensen’s own network. Through
all these twists and turns, the news is quietly absent—presumably truncated by
the “media circus.”
The core message in Network
is not merely that journalistic integrity and quality lose out
all-too-easily to sensationalism (i.e., an expansive profit-motive), the
business interest, and political advocacy. Rather, the true insight is
paradoxical in nature, prefiguring the solipsism (i.e., your brain is really in
a vat even as you think you are eating or running) that is illustrated so well in
The Matrix trilogy. What we think is
real life—the “drama” and edited “news”
on television (even “reality television” shows)—is anything but, while
absorption in this fake world saps viewers of any real emotive investment in
their actual lives. In other words, what t.v. addicts take as the real world is
anything but, while what they assume is dull and meaningless is actually real
life. One problem with this metaphysical inversion is that commercial and governmental
powers can have their way all too easily in the false world of “reality
television” primped up as news. The first step out of the closed system of
manipulation is to wake up (as in the Buddhist sense, I suppose) and fall from
the matrix as if a sludge of entrails going down the tube. Such “waste” is of
course premised on the vested interests (and related values) in the Matrix only. Hence, the individuals awakened
are not really discarded waste products; rather, the unprogrammed human beings
are of infinite value, according to Kant, in exercising reason to assign values
to things rather than be assigned a (conditional) value by them (i.e., the
machines).
1. Jim Edwards, “SPOOKY:
The 1976 Movie ‘Network’ Predicted YouTube and ‘Two And A Half Men,’” Business Insider, February 15, 2012.
