I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile
smash-ups: “The Death Hour.” A great Sunday night show for the whole
family. It’d wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.
Network (1976)
As Howard Beale’s mental health worsens due to the emotional demands of his show (9.3), Diane Christensen develops a new project for the network. "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour" is a weekly drama series that follows the trajectory of the Ecumenical Liberation Army—an ultra-left terrorist group—in which they broadcast real footage of criminal acts such as bank robberies, kidnappings, bombings, etc., as a lure to produce ratings. This kind of transgressive fiction in which the media contributes to terrorism by turning it into a form of entertainment was already addressed in Max Headroom (5.4). When pitching the idea to Laureen Hobbs, the Ecumenical Army liaison within the Communist Party, Diana expresses her vision in these terms:
Let me tell you what I want. I want a lot more film like the bank rip-off the Ecumenical sent in. The way I see the series is: each week we open with an authentic act of political terrorism, taken on the spot in the actual moment. Then we go to the drama behind the opening film footage. That’s your job, Mrs. Hobbs. You got to get the ecumenicals to bring in that film footage for us. The network can’t deal with them directly. They are, after all, wanted criminals.1
Diana’s lack of a perspective that allows her to establish a relation between the victims of these terrorist acts and the fact that they can become a source of income for the network, is essentially a complete lack of distance between TV representation and “real life,” and, therefore, a loss of respect for society and life (9.1). If the “real”—regardless of its consequences—is what sells, that is what television should broadcast. Simultaneously, this attitude towards reality brings about a particular consequence which we already addressed, the capacity of the media (and of capitalism in general) to co-opt everything that comes into contact with it (5.5, 5.12, 5.18, 6.14, 6.16). Once the Ecumenical Liberation Army and Lauren Hobbs get familiar with the pecuniary dynamics of the network and realize the economic profit to be made from the situation, they forget their principles and sell out.
Although this is a rather dramatic representation of this circumstance, it evidences an incontestable truth: as the distance between representation and reality narrows and the “media” becomes a threshold (9.2, 9.4) or a hyperreality (9.5), it acquires the capacity to absorb everything. Like the seeds from outer space in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the media threatens to swallow everything in its path and leave copies, insubstantial simulacra in their stead. “There’s no pain,” says one of the doubles to the film’s protagonist, “suddenly while you’re asleep, they’ll absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.” Doppelgängers that inhabit the map and not the territory.
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