Network and the Return of the Humanoids
by Carly Jones

I discovered this film by chance. The DVD fell into my friend’s letterbox as a gift sent from afar. We watched it in ignorance, “some old movie my dad wants me to watch,” he said.

“Network” is a film that speaks. And after exactly 30 years it speaks even louder. It doesn’t even have to depend on a great plot to relay its comic disdain for all that is 70’s TV America and beyond, although that doesn’t mean it hasn’t got one. It is, however, a perfect excuse for me to now give away the whole story as best I can.

Skip to the last paragraph if you can get your hands on the movie or go here for a very detailed script run-down : http://www.filmsite.org/netw.html.

The film, set in 1976 in a New York Media scene that includes a Television Network called UBS (United Broadcasting Systems), tracks not only the rise and fall of a retiring Newscaster in its news division, but also the rise and potential fall of the Network’s corporate expansion.
Beale, an alcoholic on the verge of a nervous break-down, becomes an over- night success when he threatens to kill himself live on air during his next show and starts questioning the political and social “bullshit” of modern-day America. His friend Max Schumacker, who is also the show’s producer, is eventually fired for not fully supporting the exploitation of the “insane” Beale as an ‘angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our time’.

Note: The two friends both recall the good old days of Edward Morrow and CBS when they worked with the team recently made famous in the film “Good Night and Good luck”.

To his dismay, Shumaker is forced to watch the birth and success of the “Howard Beale” show, a hilarious medley of spiritual and revolutionary entertainment fronted by the enlightened and demented Beale, whilst having an adulterous affair with the ambitious and cold-hearted Diana, the Beale show’s pushy producer behind the Network’s new high ratings. Her programming includes a hit series dedicated to following exciting terrorist activity (“The Mao-Tse Tung Hour”) organised ironically by the Communist party leader Laureen Hobbes, who later becomes capitalised by her role in television production.

Eventually Beale’s outspoken criticism of the network that employs him results in an inevitable meeting with corporation boss Jenson. Live on air, Beale reveals that the corporation will be using oil-soaked Saudi dollars to expand UBS and urges his viewers to stop the deal (and thus, ‘Arab control of America’) by sending telegrams of protest to the Whitehouse.
However, the real purpose of the Howard Beale Show is revealed to its presenter during his discussion with corporate money-god Jenson.

“You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy…
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.
The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale”

From this moment onward Beale is no longer a performing monkey demanding individual activism - instead he becomes a ‘depressing’ vocal reminder of the failure of democracy and the dehumanisation of Americans into humanoids, “creatures that look like humans but are not”.
Naturally, hearing that their life has no value disappoints the audience and the ratings tumble. The corporate ladder-climbing Network boss Hackett and the beautiful Diana cannot convince Beale or Jenson to change their attitude so they decide to have Mr. Beale discreetly assassinated by one of their terrorist stars live on air. The show must go on…

"I'm as mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" (Howard Beale).

Throw in some flawless acting, sub-plots which gently examine human relationships and a mockery of everything that is modern television, news coverage, new religion, oil politics, global corporation, subversive ideological groups, capatilist government, social protest, and eh, brain-dead humans, and you have the film “Network”.

“Humanoids”, as “Network’s” anti-hero calls them, are the 1976 humans making and swallowing television, the prototypes of a doomed democracy.
In the recent cartoon clash we saw the media-makers jump onto the provocative bandwagon in the name of ‘free speech’. However, free speech is a right which, as some might argue, many of them do not deserve. They have blundered away such a golden opportunity to inspire public discussion and have become instead professional fear-mongerors, fearful of the mundane, “open-firing” information like ammunition from a machine gun.
Why would a weapon like today’s mass media, manipulated by one officer and one army, even bother asking for the right to free speech? After all, going by the logic of Howard Beale, there is no one left to talk to.
A long-winded way to arrive at a somewhat bleak conclusion - nothing has really changed from the “Network” reality: The tired cycle of self-perpetuating, self-congratulating journalism, riding on the waves of social insecurity, dependant on money, an invisible form of censorship in a precarious ‘world’ democracy.

"We demand free speech!"
"We demand free speech!"
"We demand free speech!"

Carly Jones

Interesting links: