United States, 1976
Directed by Sidney Lumet
With Faye Dunaway (Diana Christensen), Peter Finch (Howard Beale), William Holden (Max Schumacher), Robert Duvall (Franck Hackett), Ned Beatty (Arthur Jansen)
An anchorman, Howard Beale, is told by the news division chief of his network, Max Schumacher, an old-time pal who has been put under pressure by a new, ruthless, ambitious general manager, Franck Hackett, that he would be fired in a couple of weeks because the ratings of his evening news bulletin are too low – anyway the man is too saddened by the loss of his wife and getting too old and insecure. Even as competition is tougher than ever, Howard Beale definitely feels he is well past his prime.
Howard Beale cannot cope with the move and readily tells his audience he would commit suicide the very day he is supposed to quit, and inside the studio of the news show. That causes quite a fuss inside UBS and a scandal elsewhere and Howard Beale is ordered next day to apologize and to quit immediately. Instead, he raves and rants ever more.
The incident is eagerly watched, as it happens: ratings jump, papers put him on the front page, and Diana Christensen is thrilled. The spirited, cheeky, defiant, astute chief of the entertainment programs division of UBS thinks she can turn the disastrous, senseless, and ludicrous incident into a mother lode to raise the revenues and influence of the news division and the network. She is already planning implausible projects of series and telecasts that are supposed to allow the audience vent their anger and relate their anxiety to new television heroes as the world around them seems to melt down, from the Watergate affair to the oil crisis, from the rising left-wing terrorism in the United States to the treat of communism and chaos overseas. So she thinks Howard Beale could be cast as a modern-day, mass media prophet telling the truth and sharing folks’ pain – and that is exactly what Howard Beale increasingly thinks he really is, by design of a supernatural power. The move would shed another light on the news and fuel passion, curiosity, polemics, anything that would automatically make the UBS evening news the stuff to watch for everybody.
Max Schumacher is appalled, if only because that means using a man obviously suffering a breakdown to make money while distorting facts and playing with fire. But Franck Hackett is seduced: so Howard Beale leads a brand-new weekly bulletin featuring a seer and a few other lunatics who promise to tell the hidden truth, and he becomes a real influencer. And with Franck Hackett’s support, Diana Christensen becomes also the boss of the newsroom as her division and the division that Max Schumacher has managed until he is abruptly fired merge.
Things get complicated, however. Diana Christensen and Max Schumacher cannot help but fall in love with each other despite their disagreements and many differences, from age to views on life and work. Meanwhile her pet project of exploiting the crimes of a real left-wing militia to make a series blending reality television with fiction and political opinion with pure entertainment struggles to gather momentum. And above all Howard Beale proves hard to control and his ravings and rantings become troublesome and embarrassing as he slams first the way UBS is run by a multinational firm and then how this company gets money from problematic shareholders, especially from the Arab world. That sets him on a collision course with the chairman of the multinational firm but a crucial business meeting does not end up with Arthur Jansen firing him but instead convincing him to alter his message: from a critic of capitalism, the anchor becomes a preacher of a new gospel claiming the advent of a powerful, benevolent capitalism making democracy, nationalism, and individualism irrelevant. But the switch in ideas turns the audience away from the one-time prophet: ratings get low and Arthur Jansen’s adamant support make the situation unsustainable for the UBS executives, including Diana Christensen who is still reeling from her bitter break with Max Schumacher. How would things go from here?
The film begins with Howard Beale reading the news in the news studio the old way, and ends with Howard Beale getting killed, while performing the new way in his studio. A tragic and dramatic narrative arc it is, but the film has increasingly strayed away from this character’s study to a portrayal, under every angle, of Diana Christensen, becoming more than the relation of a newsman turning mad and at the same time infamous and influential, but the expose of a new brand of media executive Diana Christensen is supposedly embodying to a fault – in case the audience misses the point, the speech of Max Schumacher as he drops her forcefully highlights what is wrong with a personality thinking only with the categories and logic of their work and career, cut off from reality and feelings, unable to have feelings and sensations as she only reacts to the fabricated feelings and sensations their creative work inside media companies has shaped. His little speech, however smartly it is delivered, however deeply felt it sounds, however fine the scene is, is still a ponderous statement summing up the film’s political message.
Or rather what could be the message. The film has a scattershot take on the hectic management of a failing network that covers much ground in plots, styles, and themes. It has definitely the outlook of a serious leftist fiction but engages with satire, though the subplot about how the network,, the terrorists, and a United States Communist Party leader negotiate looks a desultory pretext to line up cartoon-like characters. It insists on shooting a romance that begs belief but sees to it it ends up dovetailing and illustrating the searing criticism of the breed of managers who are the blame for the crisis. But then the media analysis lurches into a wider take on capitalism and corporations, riffing on an old trope of the American cinema other directors, from David Wark Griffith to Frank Capra, dealt with by delivering films and characters more moving and relatable, sometimes sounding a bit naive but at least shooting clear and effective narratives.
The film, as years go by, is viewed as prophetic – as much as the lead character but thanks to other, more relevant ideas. But it is not: through the plains-spoken and abrupt remarks Diana Christensen makes the night she starts to seduce Max Schumacher, it just depicts what news really were on a network back then and have remained – a hodgepodge of sensational stories, centered on crime, leaving only a modicum of time to foreign news and ignoring many economic and social problems. The stardom the anchors get by virtue of the job, the invasive advertisement, even the visual spectacle of the news bulletin’s credits remind it is just a show like many others in a network’s schedule. The brazen development the film imagines is simply that the news division is gobbled up by the entertainment division – but indeed, the difference, as pointed by Diana Christensen and denounced in one of his rants by Howard Beale, is more about the supposed specificity and seriousness of the contents than anything else – a news bulletin is still a mass media product catering to the wider audience possible in a midst of shows aiming at the same goal, which most of the time looks rather like pandering to the greatest number of instincts.
And that brazen development actually leads us back to the real impression the meandering narrative creates in the first place: that this is not about a man who struggles but a woman who fights. Despite the provocative, stunning role that actor Peter Finch got and performed with a deep sense of the fragility and anxiety of his character and a great ability to switch from a disturbing and ironic take on the very nature of a performance to a poignant investigation of a man at a loss, it is actress Faye Dunaway who steals the show most of the time – the film sounds at times as a vibrant vehicle designed for a bright star then at the apex of her career. It is a dizzying and dazzling whirlwind of a performance she puts out brashly and exquisitely, capturing the own madness and exuberance of her character faultlessly at every turn, even the saddest.
In a way Diana Christensen is as much as loser as Howard Beale – but the latter gets killed while the former keeps her job. Despite what Max Schumacher thinks, and it is quite relevant and intelligent, she is a monster that may be erring on the wrong side of morality and mistaking badly what life means, but whose survival skills, learned inside the American corporate culture, still allow her to have her fair share of the American dream, even it is the skimpiest possible, and the least exhilarating and inspiring possible. Her flaws stand as, in retrospect, a far more scathing and relevant criticism of capitalism than the speech of Arthur Jansen – who by the way does not embody any spirit of the time; he is just putting on a performance to sell Howard Beale his ideas, and he has told as much before starting his own kind of rant. The scene rather points to a lack of clarity in the film: is Howard Beale really inspired or is he not just a guy losing his marbles? How seriously can he be taken and what feelings can his borderline case rightly elicit? The film could have probed these questions further, but it moved on too quickly on to other topics, choosing a broader view that makes it a bit rambling, even if the consummate skills and the great flair of veteran director Sidney Lumet help “Network” being a powerful watch.