“The movies and television lead him [Man] straight into an artificial paradise. Rather than face his own phantom, he seeks film phantoms into which he can project himself and which permit him to live as he might have willed. For an hour or two he can cease to be himself, as his personality dissolves and fades into the anonymous mass of spectators. The film makes him laugh, cry, wonder, and love. He goes to bed with the leading lady, kills the villain, and masters life’s absurdities. In short, he becomes a Hero. Life suddenly has meaning.”
- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society – p377
Howard Beale has a stroke after each show and collapses on the floor, but the camera keeps on rolling and the audience takes it this is part of the gig. The producers and supporting staff seem none too concerned with his medical and physical health - one of them keeps on directing the masses to 'cheer' loudly in approval.
Table of Contents
Married for thirty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud
“Even if he is unaware of it, the average men preserves in his collective consciousness the obscure feeling that he has been duped.” – Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p191
The story centers on Howard Beale, an ageing news anchor in the mould of Walter Cronkite, no children and widow to a recently departed wife. He has been falling steadily in the ratings and has developed an alcohol problem. He is expected to be fired in two weeks’ notice by his boss and longtime friend, Max Schumacher. It’s nothing personal – he just happens to be suffering from ‘lousy ratings’. In defiance of everyone’s expectations, Howard goes on the air, announces that he will be retiring in two weeks, and then states that he will commit public suicide on national television a week from today. It takes the news editors some time before they stop screwing around and actually realize what Howard just said, but by then the damage is already irreversible. Howard insists on going on the air once more – claiming he wants to apologize in an attempt to redeem his otherwise impeccable reputation as a newsanchor. Instead, he decides to yell ‘Bullshit’ and lifts the veil on editorial news – that it’s less concerned about properly ‘informing’ people than it is about gift-wrapping good rhetorical excuses for the daily charade of lunacies portrayed on the news. His boss [Schumacher] keeps him on the air, himself having been informed at a recent stockholder meeting that his news division is going to be reduced from an independent establishment to a corporate network mouthpiece.
Howard Beale’s second performance triggers an all-time high in the ratings, leading some executives to think Howard Beale should be turned into an exploitation piece. To Max’s disappointment, Howard is all too eager to stay on television and soon finds himself uttering the infamous words: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” It’s established at this point that Howard Beale has either gone bonkers, or if he is indeed intent on shaking the people from their catatonic state, is not aware how he is being used by his corporate overlords. His audience, meanwhile, regards him as a modern-day prophet. Max, on the other hand, not fitting in the new unscrupulous executive mould, gets the boot. It doesn’t stop him from getting into an ill-advised affair with the executive producer of the Beale show, Diane Christensen, whom by her own admission, is incapable of any emotional attachment.
Co-opting anti-establishment culture
“Money is the principal thing: culture, art, spirit, morality are jokes and are not to be taken seriously.” -
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p221
(Top): Patty Hearst, granddaughter of wealthy business magnate William Randolph Hearst, is abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army and (allegedly) through brainwashing turned into a sympathist for their cause. Mae Brussell was among one of the skeptics who suspected this to be part of a ruse intended to garner support for the creation of paramilitary SWAT teams across the US; (bottom) Diane Christensen clearly relishes the thought of having her own classless warriors playing the part of Robin Hood. The Great Ahmed Khan is leader of the Ecumenical Liberation Army, an ultra-leftist insurrectionary gang. Tellingly, all the 'mutilated' Marxism muttered by these fellows fades away like snow before the sun when they get their own 'reality' TV show - Arthur Jensen's claim that the world is no longer run by ideology seems to be reinforced by this Marxist group pretending to be anti-capitalist yet at the same time raking in big bucks from primetime television appearances.
The American people, Diane senses, need a ‘messianic figure’, to express their indignation at the state of affairs – the public can not be expected to articulate their own rage, and what’s more, the institute of television has nothing to gain by this. If a revolution is to occur, it should definitely be televised – and co-opted to serve an economic purpose.
Diane Christensen: The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them… I want angry shows. I don’t want conventional programming, I want counter-culture, I want anti-establishment.[2]
Left-wing guerrilla communist parties are approached, and deals are struck where an intermediary will supply the footage of Patty Hearst-type bank robberies, terrorist acts (plane hijackings, automobile smash-ups, and so on) and so on, since the network can’t be directly implicated with an insurrectionary Marxist group. In an amusing scene, we see the Marxist liberators of the proletariat fighting over distribution costs, revenue and the spreading of the wealth to be gained from the TV series. When one member of the group finally has enough and wants to remind her fellow Marxist about their plight, the following dialogue ensues:
Mary Ann Gifford: You fuckin’ fascist! Did you see the film we made at the San Marino jail breakout demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?
Laureen Hobbs: You can blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass. I’m not knockin’ down my goddamn distribution charges.
The Bolshevik red hat of the Great Ahmed Khan is similarly misleading – musing with accountants over ’subsidiary rights’. What the director of Network, Sidney Lumet was implying, is that political ideologies are a thing of the past. Socialism, capitalism are elastic concepts devoid of any real form or meaning.
But it does not go far enough to solely square out political parties and point to the fact the emperor has no clothes. Art, too, is disingenuous. In the book ‘The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters’, previously declassified material is shown in which it is revealed in no uncertain terms that the CIA and other intelligence agencies used novels and other social arts to instil ‘cultural’ propaganda into the masses – and what’s more, both the West and the Bolshevik Soviet Union got their own versions of this engineered ‘culture’. The proletariat of the Soviets were told that Western culture was dehumanised and base – and indeed, the CIA and its massive ensemble of paid lackeys made sure that perception was upheld. ‘Counter-culture’ movements, such as free love, emancipation and nuclear disarmament movements, were kicked off to upset the old social order and to serve a common agenda – that of unifying the western ‘democracies’ into a more cohesive whole, a more ‘planned’ version of what went before. Kind of like the Soviet Union, but rather than a sudden and swift revolution in the vein of the October Revolution, an incremental one based upon gradual acceptance of an agenda the masses will not understand until it is finally completed.
The institution of television
Beale has become a cultural icon to today's news anchors, each chopping at the bit to do their own take on the act. (From top to bottom): Keith Olbermann doing an impression of Howard Beale's infamous Mad As Hell monologue; Peter Finch in the film Network doing his 'Mad As Hell' speech; Bill O'Reilly loses his temper off-air with the crew; Jon Stewart playing the role of the court jester; Diane Christensen would have something to say about Stewart's indignation towards Jim Cramer's showmanship.
“I don’t think I’ll listen to any protestations of high standards of journalism when you’re right down on the streets soliciting audiences like the rest of us. If you’re going to hustle, at least do it right.”[3]
What Diane is proposing is turning Max’s news broadcast into even more of a carnival circus. She proposes, among other things, a fortune-teller called Sybil the Soothsayer, a more apocalyptic rhetorical spiel for Beale. What’s at issue here is not so much whether the news division as it is at this moment is any more respectable than what Diane has in mind (some would even take issue with the very idea that television is there to inform), but that Diane wants to bring faith-based thinking into the equation. Sybil the Soothsayer will be making a prediction based upon current events, and the next week the audience will get to decide whether she was right or not. Howard Beale’s previous television speech comes to mind:
“Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can’t think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don’t know why we’re going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decays, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That’s the God bullshit. And then, there’s the noble man bullshit; that man is a noble creature that can order his own world; who needs God? Well, if there’s anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit.”[4]
I.e: the media is there to do the thinking for the public, and their prediction of ‘reality’ becomes the focal point of attention. The masses will then have something to argue about in next week’s show, based upon the accuracy of Sybil’s prediction. Like some Delphic Oracle, the media is indeed there for the masses, but not necessarily in the way they would expect it to be – it’s there to consult the populace prior to every decision they make. Some would term this to be the age of experts – at its most extreme, this would entail that a woman would not dare to change the diapers of her newborn baby without consulting an expert prior to the dirty deed. Jacques Ellul quotes Jacques Driencourt on page 286 of his book:
“Driencourt notes with surprise that “the country which boasts of being the most liberal [United States] is the country in which the technique of thought direction is, by its perfection, the closest to totalitarian practices, and is the country in which people, accustomed to living in groups, are most inclined to leave it to the experts to fix lines of spiritual conduct.”
- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p286
So for all the talk of parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech, the public is not really involved in their own destiny. An intermediary is involved in nearly every decision-making process, and the people are discouraged through advertising to make rational decisions for themselves but to let the state or some corporate institution take care of it. But the public still has a craving to buy into the collective ‘faith’ that somehow their voice still matters. That’s where the media and television comes in. What better way as a ‘boss-man’ (whether it be a President or a dictator/monarch) to cut an imposing figure then to make televised speeches on a regular occasion, to show that someone is still listening to the public? It’s up to the media to get the people to chatter about political shenanigans as if it actually matters. Zbigniew Brzezinski seemed well aware of this even back in the ’70s (when this movie was being made). Quoting a line from his his book, Between Two Ages:
“In the technetronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages
Corporate cosmology and the court jester
Arthur Jensen's vision of the future is one where all people serve a common goal, all serve for the benefit of one vast corporation, and everyone has a share of stock (or indeed, serves as 'stock'). 'All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized'. Ignoring the economic aspect for a minute, it's not too dissimilar to BF Skinner's behavioral dystopian novel, Walden Two. Being an individual in such a society would be a near impossibility, or would render you a direct enemy of the state.
Nowhere is this more evident than when he practically pleads with them to turn off their television sets and stop listening to the ‘experts’ on TV for daily guidance of their life. “This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damned propaganda force in the whole godless world…”. Howard Beale, in his newfound role as ‘mad prophet of the airwaves’, vents his frustration on television’s growing penetration amongst all ‘colors, creeds’ to an ignorant audience. He condemns parents for dressing and raising their children like the tube, and implores them to ‘turn it off and leave it off’, before going into a stroke and dropping on the floor. (judging by the audience’s reaction, they seem to think this is all part of the show) This is the clincher, folks. Here we have one of America’s biggest-grossing TV celebrities, second only to ‘The Million Dollar Men’, yet nobody seems to be the slightest bit concerned about his mental and physical health. Not his mental coach, his colleagues and certainly not the executive producer of his show. As long as it doesn’t affect the company’s vested interests, Howard the Prophet gets to do anything he wants. Whatever he does after showtime is his own business.
He is playing the part of the court jester – the only one who is allowed to mock the king – an act of defiance others would get in trouble for. He is allowed to do this because nobody could take his criticisms seriously because of the way it is presented, and because it downplays the tyrannical rule of the king. But there are areas where even a Howard Beale may not tread, and this concerns the ‘laws of nature’. The laws of ‘nature’ concerns precisely that which can be molded into shape by human beings – think Darwinism, survival of the fittest, rule of the strongest.
It’s only after he manages to spoil a secret business deal involving his parent company and the Saudi’s that Howard Beale becomes a liability to the network. The powers that be are not amused, and Beale is summoned to one of their premises: once there, he is taken into a dark room and is subjected to an intense verbal assault, shattering what little faith he had left. In no uncertain terms, the corporate overlord – Arthur Jensen – tells him that he has meddled with the ‘laws of nature’, and that his conception of the world no longer has any bearing on reality.
“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale”. What Jensen infers to Beale is that all this talk about democracy is just that, an elaborate smokescreen for the masses to endlessly obsess and fuss over. This the media is supposed to perpetuate, and that is exactly what Beale is allowed to do – so long as he does not ‘meddle with the laws of nature’, which is international business. This is solely the domain of people like Mr. Jensen – it is not the domain of the general populace, and the media is in contractual obligation not to dwell at length on this topic in any great detail.
After having let Beale in on this secret, Jensen suddenly sees an opportunity for Beale to preach this corporate ‘cosmology’ to the masses. Starting from that moment, Beale loses some of his exuberance and outlandish gravitas and starts talking plainly and depressingly on the ‘dehumanization’ of the human being. He reaches a conclusion similar to that of Jacques Ellul when he states that the human individual is finished, that people are becoming mass-produced, numbered and moulded into easily manageable economic units (or ’stock’, as Jensen would prefer). The public does not take well to this new direction, and the affiliates are slowly bailing out. Diane Christensen’s world is slowly crumbling before her eyes; her chief cash cow is rapidly running out of steam.
Dehumanization, turning humanoid
Meanwhile, Max is wrestling with having to cope with a woman who can feel no love, pain, joy or pleasure, disregarding them as ’sentimental’ values best left to the characters of a sitcom. Diane, who confesses to being not much of a ‘lay’, and not very good at maintaining a sustaining relationship, has literally nothing else but an insatiable hunger for churning out high-grossing television shows devoid of any substance. To her, life is one big repetition of easily predictable scripts. When making love, she discusses legal troubles she is going through with her new hit format, climaxing at the very idea of the ‘Mao Tse Tung Hour’ finally going live. In her own words, the only thing she wants out of life is a 50-share.
Beyond TV, there’s not much she has going for her. Her personal interests all serve one common purpose: to convert actual events and predictable trends into easily digestable television.
She does not care about the moral or qualitative value of her shows, or the irresponsibility of a television format chronicling jail robberies and terrorist groups. As long as the network company cannot be implicated in the proceedings and the show sells, radical leftist communist groups can insert whatever propaganda they want into the programming. The communists, in turn, are converted from proletarian liberators into the very thing they despise: bourgeois opportunists wrapping themselves in a red Marxist cloak.
Anything that interferes with this wanton craving for showbizz success, Diane tries to destroy. She is not really able to appreciate her lover as a human being beyond the merely physical – perhaps this is because television does not allow for a fully three dimensional character in the vein of a Max Schumacher. Television thrives on reducing everything to common banality: there is no time to dwell at length on true individual characteristics: everything has to be easily deduced to stereotypes or archetypes. Hence to Diane, if it cannot be pre-scripted, pigeonholed or analysed in advance, it can’t be of much significance. She’s a ‘good’ TV producer; successful, though entirely unscrupulous. She’s a terrible human being though – a low-tech technocrat that has derived her entire worldview from an instrument engineered for the sole purpose of propaganda. And unlike any other propaganda force, this one perpetuates itself and indirectly changes everyone who comes in touch with it.
“Everything you touch dies with you. Just like Howard Beale was destroyed, like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed”, Max imparts to Diane before leaving her. In The Technological Society and Propaganda, Jacques Ellul maintains that everything seen on television, from cop shows to hospital series, is by definition propaganda – a particularly favorable impression of a particular institution is presented to you and through repetition this make-belief image becomes your general perception of it. if a collage of ‘make-belief’ representations of reality thus becomes your only frame of reference, then society in general can no longer be regarded as free regardless of whatever form of government it has – because the minds of the public at large are on auto-pilot. They have psychologically inhibited the mere thought of being subjected to propaganda. Once this barrier of self-preservation has been shattered, suspension of disbelief sets in, and society can in turn be remoulded not by consent, but by persuasion of the most extreme, compulsory kind.
Getting the ‘individual’ to think of himself as a ‘consumer’ first and foremost is a big step forward in the corporatist utopian brave new world of Arthur Jensen – no longer does he or she exist simply because of innate human rights; he has a specific function in life – to consume. Couple that with the ‘privilege’ to work – ‘produce’ – and it is clear that the identification of man as a consumer (or ‘homo economicus‘, if you may) has been specifically constructed so that the individual is in service of the economy, not the other way around. He exists solely to keep the economy afloat – which takes precedence over the individual.
Footnotes
1. [^]The sinking of the USS Maine was what ignited the Spanish-American War, and both William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pullitzer were in a race to provide the most sensationalist story possible – both scapegoating Cuba, of course, for the attack. Indeed, one could say based on prior history that ‘infotainment’ has always been alive in newspapers – back then, it was also a near impossibility to regard anything as ‘fact’ in a newspaper. Jacques Ellul goes even further and states that most news is ‘faked’ in the sense that a misconstrued version of events is generated which then passes as the norm. To quote:
“Men fashion images of things, events, and people which may not reflect reality but which are truer than reality. These images are based on news items which, as is the case in much of the world, are “faked”. Their purpose is to form rather than to inform. Faking the news is systematically practiced by the Soviet radio, but the procedure is found to a lesser degree in all countries. All of us are familiar with the “innocent” fraud of the illustrious newspapers in which a photograph is accompanied by an ambiguous caption. A shipyard, for example, is indifferently described as a plant in one of the democracies, or in the Soviet Union, or whatever. This kind of thing represents the first step toward a sham universe. It is also indicative of an important element in today’s psychology, the disappearance of reality in a world of hallucinations.” – Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p371
“You supply the pictures, I supply the war” is what Hearst is reported to have said to Remington when the latter lamented that “there would be no Cuban war”. A fictionalized account of this is featured in the movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles‘ critique of William Randolph Hearst.
Link: – http://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/lords17.html (Portraits of Press Lords – William Randolph Hearst – Chapter 17: Farewell: Lord of San Simeon)
2. [^]The opening chapter of this book credits Network with accurately predicting the so-called ‘reality TV’ format, in the sense that a narrative is built around some raw footage and the illusion is maintained that no editing or scripting has taken place.
Link: – http://books.google.com/books?id=R178zShWUtIC&pg=PA5&vq=Mao+Tse-Tung&dq=I+want+counter+culture,+I+want+anti-establishment&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0 (Imagine nation – Peter Braunstein, Michael William Doyle – Google Books)
3. [^] This article sees an emerging trend in the mainstream media of anchormen trying to emulate Howard Beale to the letter. One (Keith Olbermann) even went so far as to do a live impression of Network’s most famous scene. The main point raised by the article, that these pundits are missing the point of the film in that the indignation they show could be similarly applied to themselves. Jon Stewart, for example, in his much-publicized interview with Jim Cramer, seemed to take personal offense at Jim Cramer’s ‘mistreatment’ of business as a game – yet one could make a similarly admissible argument that Stewart is blurring the lines between entertainment and news even further, and putting the people into an even bigger catatonic state – throwing curve balls at news topics that ought not to be treated lightly or are really no laughing matter.
Link: – http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/03/the_howard_beale_generation.html (New York – The Howard Beale Generation)
4. [^]Compare this television speech to the following quote below from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and you’ll notice a common thread:
“We hear of ‘democracy on the march’ and other such panegyrics. But nothing in this myth corresponds to facts, it is a set of ideological constructions which do indeed start from concrete, technical, and true facts – but these facts in no way imply such constructions. Mythical constructions such as these lie in the realm of these moral fables for which for which politicians, economists, and sociologists are often responsible. The press and the radio then take up these fictions and popularize them, and the public, always uneasy about its failure to find solutions to the problems perpetually dinned into its ears, falls eagerly upon what seems to be a solution and gives it currency.” – Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p323
So one could say that Howard Beale was not exaggerating at all when he said he just ran out of “bullshit”.
Link: – http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/PhilFilm5.htm (Philosophical Films – Network)
