Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016 American presidential election campaign in a crystal ball. It was called Network and it foretold the rise of Donald Trump.
The plot is King Lear appears on Newsnight: a newsman run mad. The protagonist is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an anchorman at a failing network. The year is 1976, and America is embattled with inflation, depression and the end of the Vietnam war. It is not a time for American heroes, to paraphrase Chayefsky’s acolyte Aaron Sorkin writing in The West Wing.
Beale’s ratings are low. He is fired. He announces that he will kill himself, live on air.
‘I just run out of bullshit,’ he says. ‘Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living.’ There is ‘the God bullshit’ and also ‘the noble man bullshit …if there is anybody out there who 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’. Beale is right, and his viewers know it. He speaks their anger, but they can do nothing. They are stupefied by toasters and television. It is already too late.
But something can be done: Beale’s despair can be monetised for profit. The head of drama, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), takes the Beale show from the news division — news is explicitly drama now, for who cares for fact? She does not put Beale in a hospital, but back on television. He is a prophet, she says, articulating ‘the hypocrisies of our times’. If this is not dark enough, Christensen hires terrorists to shoot footage of themselves committing crimes so she can ‘base a movie of the week around it’.
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