“Network” is a prayer, not a prophecy

Inside one of cinema’s bleakest masterpieces, there is something hidden that feels like hope.

There is a story that Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and literary executor, once told about a conversation he had with the novelist in 1920:

I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race.

“We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka said.

This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall.

“Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.”

“Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.”

He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.”’

When, against my better judgment, I find myself ruminating and feeling rather doomy about the direction of things, I often think about this exchange.

It makes me smile. The combination of humor and despair; the seemingly glib, yet sneakily profound, irony of saying there is hope “— but not for us”; it’s Kafka’s whole style in miniature. Finding comedy, and therefore a kind of humanity, while staring into the abyss. Gallows humor as art.

This story is always wandering somewhere in the recesses of my mind. But it came to the forefront most recently as I was re-watching Network — recently released as part of the Criterion Collection¹ — for the umpteenth time. It’s still masterful. It’s still hilarious. It’s still prophetic.

But, goddamn, is it hopeless too.

Paddy Chayefsky's bad day

Network was directed by Sidney Lumet. But if the film has an auteur, it's Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter who was so closely involved with every aspect of the film, even holding "final cut" rights, that he’s better understood as its co-director.

And if Chayefsky is Network's demiurge, then it's fair to say — to paraphrase Kafka — that he's having a very bad day indeed.

As the film begins, the network in question, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), is a failing enterprise, behind in the ratings and bleeding cash. Its longtime anchor is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an old lion in the vein of Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, and he’s getting sacked.

There is also every indication that things are about to get worse.

Lurking in the background is Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), a banal corporate enforcer dispatched by the conglomerate that has just acquired UBS — the Communications Corporation of America (CCA) — to seize control of the network and jack up its profits, first and foremost by gutting the money-losing news division.

The national zeitgeist, meanwhile, is increasingly grim.

We are decisively in the post-’60s fugue state: the dream is over, stagflation is king, and Gerald Ford is a caretaker president who nobody voted for. As the film’s chief antagonist, a striving and amoral executive named Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), puts it when summarizing “a concept analysis report”:

The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered by Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, the Depression. They’ve turned off, shot up and fucked themselves limp. And nothing helps.

It’s not quite 2026-level bad. But, to quote another Jewish poet, it’s getting there.

The hope outside

Yet the awful truth is that the world of Network is even worse than it seems.

I don’t just mean that the film gets darker, and yet also funnier; I mean that as the film accumulates, the despairing thoughts of its demiurge, Chayefsky, become increasingly nihilistic and suicidal — to the point that, by the end, the world of Network is nothing less than a totalitarian nightmare.

That is a common interpretation of the movie, and I’ll admit that there were times during my latest watch when I felt suffocated by Chayefsky’s methodical construction of a kind of existential prison that its characters are not only unable to escape but unable to even imagine escaping.

After some more of that damn rumination, however, I decided that reading of the movie was wrong. Not because it’s too bleak — this is a movie where suicide is repeatedly played for laughs — but because it’s too pat.

To return to the Brod-Kafka conversation I mentioned in the beginning: I don’t think Chayefsky’s point is simply that there’s no hope for the men and women of Network, but rather that there is “an infinite amount of hope.”

But it’s not for them. It’s for us.

How Network negates itself

There are four scenes, all of which involve Beale, that, taken together, show how Chayefsky manages to find hope in hopelessness.

The scenes trace a temptation narrative — a fall. In the person of Howard Beale, the soul defends itself. Incoherently, “madly,” and almost by accident; but still. There is a wild holiness to Beale urging his audience to proclaim, “I’m a human being, goddammit!”

And then, corrupted by pride, and overwhelmed by the awesome power of a false god, Beale embraces his own annihilation.

Scene one: “And I’m not God!”

In the first scene, Beale goes on the air and recounts a visitation he experienced the night before after awaking from “a fitful sleep”.² He says that the Voice — which he describes as “shrill, sibilant, faceless” — tells him: “I want you to tell the people the truth” even though “the people don’t want to know the truth.”

Beale says he initially refused, telling the Voice, “How the hell would I know what the truth is?” But the Voice, he says, had no patience for this. “Don’t worry about the truth,” he says it told him, “I’ll put the words in your mouth.”

At this point in the film, Beale is lucid enough to recognize that the story he is telling is more or less the same as the one recounted in Exodus, and he says he tells the Voice, with incredulousness, “What is this, the burning bush?! For God’s sake, I’m not Moses!”

But the Voice — crucially — does not respond by saying, as God did to Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” nor does it declare “I AM WHO I AM.”

Rather, the Voice responds: “And I’m not God! What’s that got to do with it?!”

Then, according to Beale, the Voice offers a fuller explanation of itself and its mission to him (emphasis mine):

“We’re not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth! We’re talking about impermanent, transient, human truth! I don’t expect you people to be capable of truth — but, goddammit, you’re at least capable of self-preservation! That’s good enough! I want you to go out and tell the people to preserve themselves!”

Again, the Voice affirmatively disclaims godhood. It explicitly says it is not offering some kind of all-encompassing, permanent, eternal truth. It repeats, in fact, that “I don’t expect you people to be capable of truth.”

All it is asking for Beale to articulate is what it sees as the bare minimum — “self-preservation” — which, it insists, is “good enough!”

Like Moses, Beale asks, “Why me?” But unlike God, the Voice does not tell Beale, as God does Moses: “I will be with you.” It gives, instead, a far more prosaic — but practical — answer:

“Because you’re on television, dummy! You have forty million Americans listening to you, man!”

It’s all terribly compelling, but it’s also still — clearly — the ravings of someone losing his mind.

Scene two: “I am imbued, Max.”

Immediately after Beale shares his story of the Voice, he meets with his boss, Max Schumacher (William Holden), who at this point in the story is still under the (mistaken) impression that he’s running his own news division.

Schumacher is Beale’s best friend, and although he knows Christensen and Hackett are thrilled with Beale’s ratings, he does not want to continue putting someone he loves on the air to humiliate himself for CCA’s benefit.

But Beale — exhilarated by the effects of a psychotic breakdown and the unexpected revival of his career — refuses to relinquish his pulpit. When Schumacher tells him he plans to take him off the air, Beale responds (emphasis mine):

What’s happening to me, Max, isn’t mensurate in psychiatric terms. This is not a psychotic episode. It is a cleansing moment of clarity. I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy … It is not a breakdown. I have never felt so orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth.

At the crescendo of this rant, Beale faints — but not before bellowing: “You will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

I want you to notice two things here.

Beale is already forgetting what the Voice told him. It did not promise him “some great ultimate truth”; it explicitly said the truth it offered was not “eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth.”

And the Voice said something else: “I’m not God!”

Christensen and the other opportunists at CCA are branding Beale “the mad prophet of the airwaves” — but the Voice flatly contradicted that. If the Voice is not God, then Beale is no prophet.

But it’s unclear whether he cares anymore. He is back on TV. He is imbued.

Scene three: “My life has value!”

The third scene, Beale’s “mad as hell” diatribe, is the most famous moment in Network and one of the most iconic scenes in American cinema. It is also much hollower — and much darker — than the endorphin-rush of catharsis it provides may lead you to believe.

This is intentional, and it has a lot to do with the way Chayefsky structures the monologue. The worst parts — the warning signs that we’re listening to the ravings of an increasingly unwell and megalomaniacal demagogue — are all in the front.

Here, for example, is how Beale begins. You’d only need to tweak a few words here and there and it could be a run-of-the-mill Facebook post from a MAGA³ supporter (emphasis mine):

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shop-keepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seem to know what to do about it. There’s no end to it.

Although Beale has already forgotten that he is not “imbued” and that the Voice that spoke to him was not God, he still has the self-awareness to admit that he has no solutions: “I don’t want you to riot or write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.”

Despite his increasing mania and rising messianism, Beale is sticking to the script the Voice has given him. He is not offering some kind of “truth.” He is simply urging — demanding — that his audience assert its right to “self-preservation”:

All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad! You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!”

Next is the culmination:

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs! I want you to get up right now, go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

That’s usually where the clip stops.

But I want you to watch the rest of the scene, because a closer look reveals that as stirring as what Beale is saying feels, and as noble as the basic impulse that all human lives “have value” is, what we’re actually watching — and what he’s inspiring — is not something to celebrate:

Yes, people are screaming the phrase from their fire-escapes and out their windows. It seems like a thrilling display of collective self-assertion.

But notice what else is happening: ominous thunderclaps, flashing lightning. These are not signs God gives us when he is happy. And as you examine the scene more closely, it’s clear that the “God” of Network, Chayefsky, is not happy either.

Do all those people in their little apartments, indistinguishable from one another, chanting the same phrase — a phrase they’re repeating from someone else — strike you as true individuals? Is this what liberation looks like? Or is it meaningless, commodified catharsis?

As Schumacher listens to the crowd with a look of weary barrenness, Diana Christensen — who has supplanted Schumacher and now controls the broadcast — is effervescent.

He turns his face from the empty spectacle; she calls various regional stations to hear the chants and revel in her triumph.

Scene four: “They say I can sell anything.”

I want to now focus on the second-most famous scene in Network, in which Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the chairman of CCA, and the film’s true villain, explains that Beale has “meddled with the primal forces of nature” by urging his audience to flood the White House with telegrams to stop a Saudi-backed front company from buying the conglomerate — and, with it, UBS.

But before we get into Jensen’s nightmarish and towering rant about “a holistic system of systems” and the “primal forces of nature” that represent “the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today,” it’s worth taking a beat to appreciate how the scene begins.

Because it doesn’t start with the rant. It begins with Jensen, in a rather unpretentious and down-to-earth manner, introducing himself to Beale and saying — with no less explicitness than that of the Voice — exactly what he is, as well as his intentions (emphasis mine):

I started as a salesman, Mr. Beale. I sold sewing machines and automobile parts, hair brushes and electronic equipment. They say I can sell anything. I’d like to try to sell something to you.

After walking him into the conference room — or “Valhalla,” as Jensen calls it — Jensen sits Beale down on one end of the long table and stands before him at the other end. And then he thunders:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance!

Jensen, knowing his mark, understands that the best way to get through to the “mad prophet of the airwaves” is to speak far more like the “burning bush” that confronted Moses than the Voice that confronted Beale ever did. He doesn’t quite scream “I AM THAT I AM,” but he may as well have.

Still, he’s not content to simply demand Beale let the deal go through.

Appreciating the power of Beale’s hold over his audience, Jensen wants to turn Beale — this advocate of the “human being” and its right to “self-preservation” — into an apostle of a corporate cosmology that is nothing less than the absolute annihilation of the very idea of the individual human.

And so he makes a hard-sell (emphasis mine):

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollar, electro-dollars, multi-dollars; reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

Then, almost as if breaking character, Jensen lowers his arms and, back in the mode of the kindly salesman who walked Beale into “Valhalla,” asks: “Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?”

Beale is mute with wonder. So Jensen continues — and in absolute contrast with the Voice, which insisted it was not God and that the truth it offered was “not eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth,” Jensen insists that Beale bow down to a truth that, although horrifying, is fixed, immutable, and beyond even a scintilla of hope of resistance (emphasis mine):

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 … 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.

Jensen’s peroration is so powerful — and Beale’s capacity to resist, which was never strong, is so corrupted by his own messianism and deteriorating mental health — that Beale never notices what we, watching from outside, can plainly see: this corporate Lucifer has tipped his hand.

Is this “corporate cosmology” the “natural order of things today,” or is it how the world has always been “since man crawled out of the slime”? It cannot be both. If it’s new, it’s contingent — something that happened, and could therefore unhappen. If it’s eternal, then Jensen’s rage at Beale makes no sense; you don’t thunder at a man for “meddling” with the inevitable.

The speech is a sales pitch; it is designed not to tell the truth but to manipulate its recipient into giving the speaker what he wants. Jensen told Beale he was a salesman. Beale should have believed him.

But Beale is too far gone. And as he asks the same question of Jensen that he asked of the Voice — and accepts the exact opposite answer — we see how fully he has fallen:

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Jensen has closed his deal. Beale will soon go on the airwaves and insist, to his audience’s chagrin (and despite rapidly declining ratings) that, “It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being who’s finished.”

“Is dehumanization,” he later asks, “such a bad word?”

A flicker in the dark

What happens next to Beale doesn’t really matter.

In keeping with Beale’s new philosophy, the movie begins to move forward with a kind of pitiless determinism. And why not? Through the serpent of Jensen, Chayefsky-the-demiurge has seemingly snuffed out the last flicker of humanity left in Network’s nightmare-world.

Yet I still don’t think that’s Chayefsky’s ultimate point, nor is it the conclusion we should take from the film.

Because that contradiction I noted earlier from Jensen — his mutually exclusive claim that his “corporate cosmology” was a new order and how the world has always been — is not the only example of the film’s plot undermining its characters’ explanations.

If there truly were no America, Jensen wouldn’t need the SEC to cooperate. Yet Hackett, in an earlier scene, warns: “The SEC could hold this deal up for twenty years if they wanted to!”

If there were truly a kind of sublime wisdom to what Beale said once he became Jensen’s mouthpiece, why would audiences turn against it so viscerally? I suppose one could say, echoing the Voice, that people don’t want to hear the truth. But in the film, the reason we are given is that the audience finds Beale’s new schtick “very tedious and depressing” and quickly stops watching.

I think that’s a perfectly Chayefskyian phrasing.

Because while it’s not optimistic — it would be better if the audience rejected it as blasphemy, rather than simply for being dull! — it’s also not fully nihilistic. To stick with the Gnostic frame: it would suggest that somewhere in Network there remains a flicker of the spirit trapped in the otherwise evil physical world around it.

And if there’s a flicker of that in Network, which Chayefsky has almost designed as a perfect trap, imagine how much more there is in our world? I don’t think that’s an excessively sunny gloss on this, either; Chayefsky put everything he had into this screenplay, and whatever else he was, he was a brilliant writer.

That’s not quite Kafka’s “infinite amount of hope,” but maybe it’s just enough.

1. Featuring a great new essay by Jamelle Bouie.

2. Note the Kafka allusion.

3. Hell, Beale even gets a little MAHA with it, too: “We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat.”