Network

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
"Because less than 3% of you people read books! Because less than 15% of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. 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."
—Howard Beale

Network is a 1976 American film, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, that might just scare the living daylights out of you and make you stare at a wall for ten minutes. Network is a harsh, satirical critique of (among other things) television and the short-attention-span culture over which it presides, the media in general for rushing to serve the Lowest Common Denominator, the conglomerates who've homogenized American entertainment, and the executives who treat the nightly news as a profit center instead of a public service. It won four Academy Awards,[1] was added to the Library of Congress in 2000, and in 2007 was chosen by the American Film Institute as the 64th greatest American film ever made.

The film's main story centers around Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an evening news anchor at struggling TV network Union Broadcasting System (UBS). After being given two weeks notice that he is being laid off, Beale announces on live TV that he is going to kill himself. UBS fires him immediately, but Max Schumacher (William Holden), the head of the news department and Beale's best friend, protests; the network ultimately decides to give Beale one last broadcast, presumably so he can have a dignified farewell. Beale takes this opportunity and runs with it by launching into an on-air rant about how life is "bullshit"—which causes his ratings to skyrocket, prompting UBS to immediately renew his contract. During a subsequent broadcast, Beale preaches to his audience with the now-famous line "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!", which soon becomes his mantra. UBS turns Beale's news program into a live talk show, with segments on gossip, astrology, and opinion polls—with Beale billed as the "mad prophet of the airwaves."

In the meantime, network programming executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) decides to capitalize on Beale's success, convincing network president Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) and chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) to merge the news and entertainment divisions—so that she can manage Beale's show—and create a new program, The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, aimed at the new audience that Beale is bringing in. In the meantime, she enters a relationship with Schumacher, who must choose between her and his wife Louise (Beatrice Straight).

Network was added to the National Film Registry in 2000.

If you're searching for information on the various companies that broadcast television, see Networks.

Tropes used in Network include:

Diana: You had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost puppies.

  • Bad Boss: Hackett. How bad is he? He orders Beale assassinated because his ratings aren't high enough.
  • Betty and Veronica: For Max, his wife vs. Diana.
  • Black Comedy: For all its effective dramatic scenes, this is a brutally hilarious satire of the media that grows more prescient by the year.
  • Brick Joke: "What are we going to call it, The Mao Tse-Tung Hour?"
    • As a subtle Call Back: Max tells Howard a hilarious story about jumping out of bed, throwing his raincoat over his pajamas and rushing to report on a bridge. Guess what Howard Beale wears when he delivers his famous speech?
  • Bunny Ears Lawyer: Howard after getting fired, so much. He delivers the news in his pajamas.
  • Character Filibuster: Every main character gets at least one, and most of Beale's appearances on TV are to deliver filibusters.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: The Ecumenical Liberation Front. Literally.
  • Cool Old Guy: The president of the network, until he's replaced by Hackett.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Frank Hackett couldn't care less about the condition of Howard Beale (or anyone else) as long as the ratings keep coming in. When Diana is asked whether she and Hackett are having an affair, she laughs it off with "Frank Hackett has no loves, lusts or allegiances that are not directly related to becoming a CCA board member. I'm not even a stockholder."
  • Crapsack World
  • Dead Line News: Beale threatens to kill himself during a live news broadcast. Later, the network executives have Beale assassinated on-air since his ratings are declining and the chairman refuses to cancel his show.
  • Downer Ending: "This was the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings."
  • Driven to Suicide: Howard, almost.

I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I had going for me in my life, I've decided to kill myself. I'm going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. Fifty share, easy.

"YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature and YOU! WILL! ATONE!"

  • Executive Meddling: A fictional example. Jensen convinces Beale to drop his fiery populist message due to the fact that he's railing against a merger of CCA (the corporation that owns UBS) with a Saudi Arabian conglomerate — a merger that the deeply-in-debt UBS needs to stay afloat.
    • All he really does is explain his own philosophy in terms Beale instantly accepts. The message is still just as fiery, he just switches sides.
  • Foreshadowing: In the first five minutes Beale and Schumacher joke about putting murders, suicides and terrorists on the air.
  • Grand Inquisitor Scene: The confrontation between Howard Beale and Arthur Jensen.
  • Grumpy Old Man: Beale.
  • Happily Married: Max, although it takes him until the end of the film to realize it.
  • The Hero Dies
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters
  • Hypocritical Humor: Beale criticizes television while on television, although he's fully aware of this and orders his viewers to turn their television sets off.
  • Ice Queen: Diana.
  • Large Ham: Almost every main character, with Peter Finch's Howard Beale being the mightiest of them all.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Max says that the younger woman he's having an affair with can only relate to reality through television. She imagines their affair as a drama/tragedy, but he doesn't know if she expects a happy ending where he returns to his wife or not. He says all this in a conversation with his wife two-thirds of the way through the movie, which he refers to as the second act of a drama.
  • Love Triangle: Diana/Max/Louise.
  • Lowest Common Denominator: In-universe, this is the target audience of UBS after Beale's news show becomes a hit.
    • Network Decay: What eventually occurs (the ratings are high, but the quality...).
  • Manipulative Bitch: Diana.
  • May–December Romance: Between Diana and Max.
  • Money, Dear Boy: The only reason anyone does anything at UBS is for ratings, including keeping Howard on the air at all, and then killing him.
  • N-Word Privileges:

Diana: Hi. I'm Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.
Laureen: I'm Laureen Hobbs, a badass commie nigger.

  • No Celebrities Were Harmed: Mary Anne Gifford and her captors, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, bear a suspicious resemblance to Patty Hearst and her kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Similarly, Laureen Hobbs stands in for 70s communist firebrand Angela Davis.
    • Diana is rumored to be based on a television exec at the time who obsessed over ratings every minute of the day.
    • Howard Beale's threatened on-air suicide was inspired by Christine Chubbuck's real one.
  • Not-So-Badass Longcoat: Howard.
  • Not So Different: According to Jensen, there is no difference between America and any other nation: they all care about money.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

    • Given the course of the world in the coming decades and the collapse of the Soviet Union, this line can be seen as very ahead of its time.
  • One-Liner Echo: See Memetic Mutation.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Both Ned Beatty and Beatrice Straight (playing Max's wife Louise) have fewer than seven minutes screen time each, and for both of them it's mostly just in a single scene. However, both scenes are very high points in a film with a lot of them, and both actors earned Oscar nominations. And Straight actually won the award.
  • Only in It For the Money: After beginning the movie as a dyed-in-the-wool communist, Laureen Hobbs has become this by the end.
    • It's a strange example, because she's still a communist, but Diana convinces her that she can only advance her cause by gaining money and influence, which requires working with the network. Once she starts compromising with the corporate agenda, it tends to take over everything.
  • Only Sane Man: Schumacher to a degree, as even though he too is a flawed character he's one of the only people to recognize Beale's descent into madness and call out the network's exploitation of it.
  • Precision F-Strike:

Secretary: Mr. Hackett's trying to get through to you.
Max: Tell Mr. Hackett to go fuck himself.

  • Rant-Inducing Slight: For Beale, getting fired. Emphasis on the word "rant".
  • Reality Show: The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, a show chronicling the exploits of a group of leftist domestic terrorists. One can argue that the film itself predicted the rise of the genre over two decades in advance.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Schumacher gives Diana one of these when he breaks up with her.

Schumacher: You're television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering. Insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death. All the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness.

  • Refuge in Audacity: Seemingly the entire raison d'etre of UBS' programming under Christensen.
  • Resignations Not Accepted: Howard tries to quit his job more than once, but he's not allowed to for various reasons. Until the network decides to kill him.
  • Running Gag: The scene in Diane's office where they're reading submitted pitches for television shows. You'll lose count of the times that characters are said to be either "brilliant", "beautiful" and "crusty but benign". Truth in Television, anyone?
  • Scary Black Man: The Great Ahmed Khan. Subverted in that he portrays himself as a criminal mastermind, but when he appears onscreen in person he's eating fried chicken and seems kind of dimwitted.
    • Or at least very laid-back, even during the big argument in the contract discussion, where he quietly pulls out a gun and fires into the air to shut everybody up, then calmly says "Give her the fucking overhead clause. Let's get to page twenty-two, 5(a), subsidiary rights...."
  • Screwed by the Network: The executives have Beale killed due to his show's declining ratings. And you thought FOX was bad.
  • Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Howard Beale, all the way.

Doorman: Good afternoon, Mr. Beale.
Howard: I must make my witness!
Doorman: Sure thing, Mr. Beale.

  • Strawman News Media: Type 4, with elements of Type 1 when Jensen silences Beale's criticism of his corporation's merger with a Saudi conglomerate.
  • Supporting Protagonist: Max Schumacher in the second half. Though Howard's actions drive the plot, most of the second half is told from Max's perspective.
  • Terrorists Without a Cause: The Ecumenical Liberation Front.
  • There Are No Good Executives: Nearly all of them are portrayed as greedy, amoral bastards except Chaney, who seems to be a decent guy but stopped trying to fight the corruption simply because he knows he can't win.
  • There Are No Therapists: For Howard, at least.
  • This Is Reality: Max reminds Diana that this isn't one of her television drama scripts, it's real life.
  • Tragic Hero: Beale, who in his autumn years just wanted to be done with all the bullshit, and ended up promoting it. And who dies in the end.
  • Truth in Television: In so many ways.
  • We ARE Struggling Together!: The Communist Party and the ECF can't stand each other, apparently. They collaborate anyway for the ratings.
  • Western Terrorists: The leftist guerrilla group that The Mao Tse-Tung Hour follows, and who kill Beale on orders from the executives.

All I know is that first you've got to get mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

  1. ↑ Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor for Peter Finch, Best Actress for Faye Dunaway, and Best Supporting Actress for Beatrice Straight.
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