Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—
it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
On July 15, 1974—two years before the release of Network—Christine Chubbuck, a reporter for Saratoga’s Channel 40 in Florida, committed suicide while presenting Suncoast Digest, one of the morning shows. Chubbuck suffered from severe depression, which she had discussed with family and friends, and had already attempted suicide in 1970 with a barbiturate overdose. That morning she tricked her colleagues at the station into opening the newscast, something she had never done before. While presenting a story about a shooting at a local restaurant, the tape of the incident jammed and out of nowhere Chubbuck nonchalantly said: “in keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color, you are going to see another first – an attempted suicide.”1 She then took a revolver from the anchor’s desk and shot herself behind the right ear. Seconds later the channel played a technical difficulties announcement. Reality is stranger than fiction, or at least it occasionally beats it to the punch.
Whether this seems to be a case of art imitating life—contrary to Oscar Wilde’s maxim—may well depend on the prosaic and realistic view of things that characterizes our times. Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter of Network, declared that from the beginning the focus of the film was to show a live death and that he had started working on the script before Chubbuck’s suicide. Lumet would later confirm that the character of Howard Beale was not based on a real person. But even if Chayefsky did not base the script on Chubbuck’s death, the idea of a televised suicide was clearly “in the air.” By the 1970’s, you only needed to think of the most violent and shocking act possible, and almost certainly some television network would be willing to broadcast it for ratings.
These paradoxical (and dangerous) spontaneous thresholds often occur in a mediatized world where cultural production is increasingly abundant, but they point to a growing interpenetration between reality and fiction, they announce that the media are no longer exclusively outside of us, instead we are the ones who have begun to live in an ever narrowing threshold that is composed of both map and territory. It was with great prescience that J.G. Ballard declared in the prologue to the french edition of Crash:
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising […] We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.2
Our world has become a media unreality (5.22), an enormous novel in which the only sensible role is to wake up from the spell cast upon us by the media.
- Sam Adams, “What Christine Chubbuck’s Suicide Says About Today’s Media Landscape,” Rolling Stone, October 13, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/what-christine-chubbucks-suicide-says-about-todays-media-landscape-192087/ ↩︎
- Taken from “JG Ballard’s Introduction to the French Edition of Crash.” Available at: https://imagesoferoticism.com/2013/10/20/jg-ballard-introduction-to-crash-1974/ Traducción del autor. ↩︎
- A historical treatment of this matter, seen from the point of view of renaissance magic, is the central theme of my book The Hounds of Actaeon: The Magical Origins of Public Relations and Modern Media (Washington: Academica Press, 2020). ↩︎
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