Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976)—one of the most accurate and scathing critiques of the media ever produced—chronicles the misadventures of Howard Beale, a fifty-something anchorman who is fired for low ratings, and Diana Christensen, an ambitious programming vice-president willing to do anything to boost the network’s audience share. As Howard announces publicly that he is going to commit suicide live on his show, Diana seizes the opportunity and transforms him into a “latter day prophet. A magnificent messianic figure inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times! A strip Savonarola, Monday through Friday.”1.
Before his first broadcast after announcing his suicide Howard has a vision in which a voice asks him to tell people the truth. The anchorman reacts incredulously but the voice tells him that it will take care of it, that it will put the words in his mouth. “For God’s sake” says Howard, “I’m not Moses,” to which the voice responds, “and I’m not God! What does that got to do with it? We’re not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We’re talking about impermanent, transient human truth.” When Howard asks what any budding prophet would, “why me?” the voice answers: “Because you’re on television, dummy!”2
Howard is a prophet for our times, imbued not by an ineffable god but by an energy that links him to his deepest feelings which, of course, he shares with thousands of people. His discourse is based on proclaming “the truth,” something genuine and supposedly unmediated or, in Diana’s words, on “articulating the popular rage.” Of course, this discourse would appear to be spontaneous and accesible, but by the time his program takes off the ground it has already been co-opted by the media. The Howard Beale Show becomes a success, he is now the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” ranting against the absurdity of the media in the media. The result of this operation, as we have already seen, only strengthens the media establishment (5.5, 6.14):
Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! 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 force in the whole godless world […] So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth… Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.3
The traveling carnival of acrobats, storytellers and jugglers that Howard speaks of is none other than the media amusement park that Marilyn Manson described in Holy Wood (6.16), the world-shopping mall (3.3.3, 5.12) that results from the capitalist paradeisos (6.13, 6.14). And while Howard’s discourse gives the impression of offering dissent when in fact it only offers its appearance, the “truth” hidden in it is essential to understand our historical moment: it is a desperate appeal for us to come back to reality.
We deal in ILLUSIONS, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds… We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You DO whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even THINK like the tube! This is MASS MADNESS, you MANIACS! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF…4
What Howard Beale asks of his audience—his audience in the film and also of us—is that we make the effort to distinguish once again between reality and fiction (a subtle irony in our case), that we escape from the “waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality,” from the mediatized dreams that have taken over the world’s exterior and now inhabit its surface like a nightmare that persists after we have awakened (4.7).
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