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To close the circle of audiovisual proposals that I began as a way of going deeper and seeing other perspectives after the publication of this document, and which I have generated three proposals that are worth reviewing, in addition to the document itself that serves as a basis, such as Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941), Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951) and A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957).
First Context and Core Elements Considered
My last proposal to close this circle is Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976). The film won several awards, such as the 1977 Hollywood Academy Oscars for Peter Finch for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Faye Dunaway for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Beatrice Straight for Best Supporting Actress and Paddy Chayefsky for Best Original Screenplay. At the 1977 Golden Globes Sidney Lumet won Best Director, Peter Finch won Best Dramatic Actor, Faye Dunaway won Best Dramatic Actress, and the film also won Best Screenplay. The same category, Best Original Screenplay, was awarded by the Writers Guild of America. The Los Angeles Critics awarded the film in the categories of best film, best directing and best screenplay in 1976. The New York Film Critics gave it the award for Best Screenplay in 1977. The 1978 BAFTAs awarded Peter Finch Best Actor. The 1977 David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress went to Faye Dunaway.
In 2000, Network was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress because of its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. The Writers Guild of America West published its list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays on 7 April 2006, ranking Network number 8. According to the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Films, Network is ranked 64th.
Throughout the different proposals, particularly since Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951), and of course, in the reference analysis document, television has been an element that has been mentioned in various aspects. It is therefore appropriate to talk about television in the United States.
Unlike other places, also pioneers in television, test broadcasts began in the United States in 1927, although due to the lack of agreement on technical standards, among other aspects, regular broadcasts were slow in coming, and were led by private corporations, and not by a public initiative, as was the case in Europe. In 1934, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) appeared, an independent state agency to regulate the sector, including censorship. It was in this way that a fee of 3o images per second and 525 lines per image was set.
As in the case of CBS (Columbia Broadcasting Company), ABC (American Broadcasting Company), NBC (National Broadcasting Company), television in the United States usually has its origins in radio stations. The reason for this is that the emergence of the television medium implied a serious readjustment in the sphere of cinema. Antitrust laws had forced the majors to get rid of the theatres, and in this context a medium such as television was perceived by the majors as a potential threat because of its potential, so they started asking for licenses to control the way television was going to be implemented in the United States. So, on the basis of the same anti-trust laws, licences were denied to them and awarded instead to the radio stations, so film chose to distinguish itself from television, with the majors going for what television could not offer given its technological limitations: colour, new types of large screens and the first tests with the three-dimensional format. But the race for competition soon began to collapse in the form in which it had been proposed in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century, so the first commercial agreements between television and cinema began, where Hollywood acquired a dual role: producer and supplier of films directed especially for television from 1966 onwards, in Heredero and Torreiro (1996, 15-65).
By the 1960s, with the introduction of colour broadcasting and the first steps in satellite broadcasting, these three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, reached 90% of the audience. By the 1970s, which is when the action in the film we are analysing, Network, takes place, only the three major private television networks had competition from the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a publicly owned network created in 1969.
The impact on cinema was remarkable: studios reduced their permanent staffs, long-term contracts with actors and actresses began to be shortened, giving more autonomy to their stars, who started to found production companies of a more heterogeneous type; the film industry diversified in its subject matter, and in turn a triple phenomenon was experienced: The film industry became more diverse in its subject matter, and in turn a triple phenomenon was experienced: stars with a more confrontational and/or sexualised character, and the emergence of a series of black actors-turned-stars that informed the changes that social and economic organisation was bringing about in the United States; the next element to be highlighted is the so-called "television generation": a series of directors who came directly from television and who had been working in this medium since the early 1950s, which led them in the 1960s to directing in the cinema, such as John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Franklin Schaffner or, in a later block, Richard Donner or Sydney Pollack, who followed the same path. Other professionals also followed the same path from television to cinema, such as scriptwriters (as in the case of Chayefsky), actors (John Cassavetes, Martin Sheen) or composers (John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith). This generation constituted a kind of "cinematic modernity", with the renewal of themes that arose from the awareness of the forms of cinema and the values they assumed in an intimate and very prominent way, forcing the major studios to adopt a more intellectual tone, adapting Tennessee Williams and turning to directors such as Elia Kazan, with a much more liberal tone, in Gubern (1995, 338-340).
In the United States, each television network operates its own television stations and reaches agreements with affiliate stations, which will earn the right to air local advertising and access the programming of the network with which they have the agreement in exchange for an agreed price.
From the mid-1950s onwards, a system for measuring audiences was introduced in the United States, promoted by the Nielsen company, which began by being installed in a limited number of one thousand homes, with an increasing number of television sets being added to the sample. Thanks to this, it was found that quiz shows outperformed variety shows and dramas in terms of viewership, until the 1959 NBC Twenty One scandal, where a Senate committee found evidence that the quiz show's sponsors gave the answers to certain contestants. After that, dramas were once again the focus of the major networks' production strategy, turning to Westerns and crime-related themes first and foremost. By 1970, the Federal Communications Commission set new regulations, and thus differentiated the audience by segments such as sex, age, residence, social class... this action was important for sponsors, advertisers and large networks, because they were able to establish better strategies aimed at sponsorship and advertising.
In the period between 1954 and 1958, television presenters and broadcasters linked to news programmes started to become professional journalists. By 1960 television gained a prominent role in news broadcasting, albeit subsidiary to other media. But demand began to rise, and CBS, which had 30 minutes in the morning dedicated to these matters, saw that it had to bet, and with success, on a format that would reach one hour.
Walter Cronkite of CBS initiated the demand for a mid-afternoon newscast in 1976, which was rejected, but eventually meant that all the major broadcasters began to include short newscasts, one-minute news slots in the prime time intermissions. In 1979, ABC was the first major network to broadcast a half-hour evening news programme called Nightline. As a standard, for a half-hour newscast, we will have 17 minutes of news proper, while advertising and the weather report will take up the rest of the time until the half-hour is reached.
It was from 1980 onwards, with CNN and its broadcasting of news, in a broad form, and in the evenings and early mornings, that the rest of the major companies understood that news had to have more space in their schedules.
With the arrival of President Reagan and the deregulatory offensive, continued by George Bush at the helm of the White House, the world of television was no exception from the 1980s onwards. And as a result of these deregulatory measures, the concentration of channels controlled by a single owner was greatly facilitated, in the same way that cable television, which was just emerging at that time, also experienced a great concentration of networks, as a way of reacting to the drop in audience driven by the development of the home video market, competition from independent broadcasters and the production of their own news programmes more focused on local audiences by local entities.
In the late 1990s, large television companies ended up within large corporate structures that demanded profitability, including news programmes, following Itzkoff (2014, 227-230).
One element, which is of enormous importance to the subject matter at hand, and which is part of this document, is that in 1987, the Federal Communications Commission moved to waive the Fairness Doctrine, which had been in place since 1949, and which regulated the duty of broadcasters to report on issues of public significance, taking different perspectives and always verifying sources of information, and it did so in the name of "freedom of expression". It is time for you to review the following document to see how we have arrived at the present time from different perspectives.
An Approach to Network: Television and the Transition of Hegemony in the United States
Following the framework set by Itzkoff (2014), we can unravel how this interesting film was conceived from the notes of its producer and screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky.
By 1969 Chayefsky, with the collaboration of producer Howard Gottfried, works on a miniseries for television with an agreement with CBS in which it is decided to make a satirical approach in which an executive named Eddie Gresham wants for a large imaginary chain that represents any of the big ones in the United States, called UBS, to perform a version of a play by Bertolt Brecht, "The Threepenny Opera", a musical comedy in three acts, whose score is heavily influenced by jazz, and which offers a critique of the capitalist world from a socialist perspective (the questions are posed: What is it to pick a lock? What is picking a lock compared to buying shares? What is it to rob a bank compared to founding one? What is it to murder a man compared to employing one?). In this context, Eddie Gresham's character's idea is for Mack the Jackknife, the protagonist, to be played by Harry Belafonte, who is of African-American descent. The projector would be rejected by the imaginary UBS and a supposedly musical show, devoid of any so-called "ideological" baggage, would take its place. Although the imaginary Eddie Gresham would be mistaken for a senator, and this would serve to initiate a series in which Belafonte would also have a leading role, this time playing a congressman and preacher from Harlem.
Following this proposal, the very real CBS rejected the project outright. At the end of 1973, however, Chayefsky presented a second television project, for which, in the course of the spring of 1974, he was attached to the head of NBC news and interviewed veteran news anchors such as Walter Cronkite (CBS) and John Chancellor (NBC). His idea was to tell the story of an anchor who falls apart mentally during the news. The second starring role would be that of a heroic thirty-something executive, struggling to keep his moral integrity intact in the corrupt world of television, maintaining the fictional network representing the big networks, which he calls UBS, with a focus on comedy. And this time he turns his thoughts to the world of cinema, this being the element from which the final script of Network would emerge, with certain variations.
The action finally begins in September 1975 and Howard Beale, the anchor of the UBS newscast, is sacked due to low ratings. Days before his dismissal is to be carried out, Howard Beale announces live on air his intention to commit suicide the following week.
UBS is in the process of a takeover by another large company, the fictitious CCA (Communications Corporation of America), which would entail a considerable cut in the news budget. It is in this context that an aggrieved news director allows Howard Beale to return to the airwaves, and he will take the opportunity to attack the model of the big television companies.
The young and ambitious Diana Christensen, head of programming, senses that the ratings have gone up, so she ends up getting Howard Beale to stay in charge of an increasingly delusional version of the news, with the news anchor's mental health deteriorating, He then goes on to hear voices, leading him to the greatest possible success, as he delivers a speech in which he incites the audience to shout out their windows "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!".
In October the new programming should start and Howard Beale will have his own programme starting in January, Diana begins a series of contacts with the Communist Party to launch a reality show about the terrorist group "Ecumenical Liberation Army", called "The Mao Tse-Tung Show".
Howard Beale discovers that negotiations are underway between the CCA and Arab millionaires to acquire the network and embarks on a crusade to flood the White House with telegrams to prevent the deal.
It is with this in mind that Arthur Jensen, president of the CCA, meets Howard Beale and "initiates" him into the religion of cosmological economics, of the universal flow of capital and converts him to his own particular vision of God, for Howard Beale will become his prophet.
As the film opens and the voice of an over narrator, actor Lee Richardson, introduces the film, a screen divided into four monitors appears on which we can see the three most famous television news anchors in the United States at the time: Howard K. Smith (ABC), John Chancellor (NBC) and Walter Cronkite (CBS). The fourth anchor is from the imaginary UBS (Union Broadcasting System), Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch.
By implication, Chayefsky implicitly gives us an initial reference for this world: it is enough to be on television (some people would now say, on the "social networks" or "on the Internet") for it to be "truth", when it is nothing more than a pure invention, taken from a reality. This effect of "truth" that we can take for authentic is reproduced when we hear the first hour traffic and see the corporate headquarters of CBS, NBC, ABC... and the fictitious UBS. Another element that reinforces this idea comes from the fact that when Howard Beale prepares to go live, on one of the monitors we see images and hear a news narration. President Gerald Ford, who has suffered two assassination attempts, affirms his willingness to continue his public activities, and we hear President Ford say "The American people are a great people...". In fact, both attacks take place on September 5 and 22, 1975, and September 22 is precisely the day on which the action described in the film begins, which conveys the idea of something far from the truth, even if it appears to be real, and which is aimed at the sphere of politics and the media, which are part of specific interests.
The decline in Howard Beale's audience share begins with the concatenation of some mournful events that start in 1969, when his audience share goes from 28% to 22%, dropping to 12% after the death of his wife. Within a year Howard Beale has become a widower, childless, completely alone and has begun to take refuge in drink, and in the past as we see when his friend, Max Schumacher, who is also responsible for the news, informs him of his dismissal two weeks in advance, so that, as we see, "the two friends, reminiscing about old times".
And linking these "old times" we perceive the "Ecumenical Liberation Army", which will end up having a programme, the aforementioned "The Mao Tse-Tung Show", and which will be part of the machinations of big Western capital, in a key that is not exactly "revolutionary Marxist", but rather adopts revolutionary means, although they go in a different direction. This itself corresponds to a more than interesting reception of what May 1968 and Maoism meant for the configuration of neoliberalism hegemony... and of the Alt Right and the neo-conservatives themselves. This element is reinforced by the immediate sequence in which the CCA company is confirming the acquisition of UBS and the transformation of the news is a fait accompli.
The next day it is worth underlining a very interesting element, as Faye Dunaway's character states:
"The Arabs have decided to raise the price of oil by another 20 per cent. The CIA has been caught opening Senator Humphrey's mail. There's a civil war in Angola, another in Beirut. New York is bankrupt and Patricia Hearst has finally been caught... and the front page of the Daily News is Howard Beale."
The conjunction of these elements leads immediately to the next scene, in which the construction of a character begins, that of "a prophet dominated by anger and denouncing the hypocrisies of our times", who will be Howard Beale himself.
The next shot involving Beale shows him, foreshortened, with a clear parallel to Mantegna's "Lamentation over the Dead Christ", in which Beale holds a supposed revelation, to be shared "to the American people" via television:
Last night, I was awakened from a deep sleep, around two o'clock in the morning, by a sharp, sibylline, penetrating voice. [And the voice said to me: "I want you to tell people the truth, which is not easy, because people don't want to know the truth". And I said, "Are you kidding? How the hell am I supposed to know the truth? And the voice continued, "Don't worry about the truth. I'll put the words in your mouth". And I replied, "What is this, the burning bush? I am not Moses. And the voice said to me, "I am not God; what has that got to do with it? And the voice continued, "I'm not talking about eternal truth, or absolute truth, or final truth. I'm talking about expired, transitory, human truth. I don't expect people to be able to know the truth, but at least to fight for their own preservation". And I said: "But why me? And he replied: "Because you're on television, you dummy".
In other words, we are dealing with a parody of the account given in the book of Exodus, chapter 3. In particular, the following aspects are worthy of note: in the biblical account, Yahweh says that he has seen "the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; for I have known their distress, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Therefore the cry of the children of Israel has come before me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.
And Moses said to him, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? And God said to him, "Go, for I will be with you, and this shall be a sign to you that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.
Spiritual allusions, the mountain is the mass media, and it is a spiritual space upon which God will manifest Himself.
Howard Beale explains himself in an immediate scene:
This is not a psychopathic episode: it is a purifying moment of clarity. I'm possessed, Max, I'm possessed by some special spirit, it's nothing religious at all, it's a sensory eruption of great acuity [...]. I feel myself attached [...] to a great living invisible force which I believe the Hindus call prana. [...] I feel myself on the verge of the ultimate truth, and you are not going to take me off the programme now or in any spaceless time.
Yet, like Moses, Beale is to reveal the divine nature and name: "Behold, I come to the children of Israel, and I say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you. If they shall ask me, What is His name, what shall I answer them?"
We have already seen it above, when I explained that Arthur Jensen, president of the CCA, meets Howard Beale and "initiates" him into the religion of cosmological economics, of the universal flow of capital and converts him to his particular vision of God, for Howard Beale will become his prophet.
In fact, the Greater Moses, who is still Jesus Christ, according to Christian theology, one of the reflections of things to come. Like Jesus Christ, Howard Beale has three falls on his way to redemptive death.
Beale does not, however, identify with any particular religion; rather, it is a syncretism of Christianity, Judaism, Eastern religions and physics itself.
Howard Beale then came out onto the street in his trench coat over his pyjamas and without an umbrella to walk to UBS as he received another revelation, stating that "I must bear witness". Beale goes live, as he has arrived, and in his speech he states that at a time of economic crisis and rising crime, citizens are barricading themselves in their homes, promising to keep quiet in exchange for maintaining their comforts. In this context, he announces that he is not going to leave them alone, inviting them to go on the rampage:
"I want everyone to get up and go to their windows, open them and stick their heads out and shout, '"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!".
According to Gurpegui (2017, 66), he explains that "in his screenplay, Chayefsky pointed out that the citizen reaction sounds "like the Nuremberg rally", alluding to the Nazi party congresses held in that city between 1933 and 1939", and adds: "Beale no longer articulates a discourse of social contestation, but directly incurs in populism. In the same way, the collective reaction is much more akin to the irrational and, at bottom, authoritarian automatisms of a discontented mass than to an indignant response to injustice".
If you note, Beale, who speaks for those who suffer, for example a black employee whose already low wages are falling with the loss of purchasing power does not take Beale seriously, but it is the impoverished middle classes who do take Beale very seriously, but it is all a cacophony mixed with thunder, more reminiscent of a leader directing the wrath of a fighting rat than a shepherd leading sheep.
And it is now that we come to perceive the degradation of the so-called "radical left". The voice-over introduces a spatio-temporal narrative ellipsis and explains:
In October, Howard Beale's programme achieved a 42% share, beating all other news programmes on the other networks combined. In the Nielsen ratings, it was the fourth highest rated programme of the month, surpassed only by The Six Million Dollar Man, All in the Family and Phyllis, an extraordinary situation for a news programme. On 15 October, Diana travels to Los Angeles to meet with East Coast programming executives to plan the next season's schedule.
Immediately we see Diana, the character played by Faye Dunaway, meeting in Los Angeles to provide a space on television for a prime time programme on the progressive struggle of the oppressed classes, with an audience, in Diana's words, of 30 to 50 million viewers.
After that we go straight into the specially produced programme for Beale to lead his sermon. We are on the set and there are various scenarios for the different sections: Sybil the Fortune Teller, Jim Webbing and his "Department of Truth", Miss Mata Hari and her dirty laundry section, and one more section called "a chapter of Vox Populi", you know: "vox populi, vox dei", although the point is that the voice of the people is the voice of God, as long as that voice of the people has been put there by "his prophets", the bad thing is to determine that God is not always in the celestial heights, but in the heights of the establishment.
Beale's discourse is now openly apocalyptic and he pursues a subversion of order through the masses (Faye Dunaway's character Diana calls him "Savonarola"). Beale announces the death of Edward Ruddy and the consequent appointment of Frank Hackett as the new president, in a context in which citizens do not read books or newspapers, and the CCA's purchase of UBS turns it into a powerful propaganda system, something he preaches with a strong populist tone (and there is always some truth in the middle of every lie), that television manipulates and that, consequently, the televisions where that very programme is being broadcast must be switched off, at which point Beale falls to the ground, suffering his second fall.
The next scene relevant to the type of analysis we are developing here occurs when the narrator explains that:
"The Mao Tse-Tung Hour was broadcast on 14 March to a fairly favourable reception. The network announced fifteen programmes, with an option for ten more. The usual contractual difficulties arose".
We have the triumph of the heads and tails of the same coin. If Beale is attacking with a populist way of denouncing degradation, through the religious way whose God will soon manifest himself to Beale himself, the other side of the coin are the cultural struggles subsumed in the way inaugurated with May 1968 through the critique of socialism through Mao and his "Cultural Revolution", in the same "house of prayer" of the same "God": the same television channel of the same financial network, and all this with a conversation revolving around finance and its basically shared interests. ... the reference to the money changers in the temple is the same coin on both sides. "God" is about to reveal himself.
As I have mentioned before, CCA, having acquired UBS, is going to sell to an investment fund with petrodollars of Arab origin, and Beale asks to flood the White House to stop the operation, then, like Jesus Christ, he suffers his third and final "fall"... the prophet is about to see God and close his revelation, which is none other than what the president of CCA is going to reveal to him:
Itzkoff (2014, 119) tells us that in principle, permission had been obtained from the New York Stock Exchange to shoot this scene at its Wall Street headquarters. But when the institution's officials realised what was written in the script, and seen as a whole, the permission was immediately cancelled. What we see here is the conference room of the New York Public Library, which is also quite significant, especially when you can tell from the lighting that we are not in a public library, let alone one like the New York Public Library.
The truth is that from that moment on Beale preaches cosmological economics, but the audience decreases, and at that moment his assassination through the Ecumenical Liberation Army is activated.... there were a few things at that moment that hindered what would come later, so they had to be removed, and in passing announce the resurrection at a future time through television of the one who will preach "to the great American people" the absolute and revealed truth, with the denunciation of the necessary (and very useful) "traitor" of what the Ecumenical Liberation Army symbolises (one could now remember Jordan Peterson, for instance).
The Preacher's Narrative and the Conspiracy Theories: An Adaptation of Aristophanes' Modus Operandi, Which We Have Already Seen
The preacher we see in Network is one who is linked to mass media, spectacle and spurious ends, something I talked about in this analysis that is worth revisiting.
On the sense of time or time arc in which Network is set, we have UBS exploiting Beale, but the film makes it clear that the other big TV networks are in search of their own Beale, because they are going through the same thing as UBS, and there are the same interests and powers behind it. It is interesting how other media, such as, for example, the newspapers, which continue through the "opinion articles", which are increasingly far removed from knowledge, what "God" has started a few hours before through the two sides of the same coin, either Beale's or the "Mao Tse-Tung Show", are assembled in the same strategy.
The next element, very well underlined in Network, is the conspiracy theory and the supernatural as a way of constructing the "God" discourse. From the assassination of John F. Kennedy onwards, receiving a transformation every so often when it seems to be running out of steam and as the conditions of the American masses become worse, conspiracy paranoia is very much present.
This phenomenon also occurs in Spain where we have a similar approach, based on the same elements close to the Alt Right and its "cultural struggles", which seem to be the Alpha and Omega of all the problems of Spain and the West in general, to which are added spaces with spectres, an economic and political vision very close to Schmitt in his criticism of democracy, liberalism and where to "assassinate" the Enlightenment and reason, and with them Hegel and Kant ... but all this is not developed through an organised discourse, but rather through a play of lights (of set) and creeds (repeated by the social networks), of some present and tangible "God" who has his ministers and prophets, whom he certainly rewards, to perform the same cult as on the other side of the Atlantic and with the same ends. Of course, it is also claimed that some prophet is, of course, in danger of his life, as it could not be otherwise, and also on both sides of the Atlantic.
I will return to these aspects in a future paper on such matters, but in the meantime, please review this document in order to see how it matches the modus operandi used by Aristophanes, and with absolute certainty, for the same purposes.
Bibliography
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Gubern, Román, Historia del Cine, Anagrama, 2016.
Gurpegui Vidal, Javier, Network. Un mundo implacable (Network). Sidney Lumet (1976) (Guías para ver y analizar), Nau Llibres, 2017 (Kindle Version).
Itzkoff, Dave, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, Time Books, 2014. (Kindle Version)
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