Network

In the early 1970s Paddy Chayefsky scripted two movies that set out to anatomize the problems of contemporary American life, but aside from a lot of menopausal bleating on the part of the central characters and a diffuse sense of conflict and decay, they didn’t really have much to say. Nonetheless, they said it loud and long, prolixity being Chayefsky’s stock-in-trade.

The two films, Arthur Hill’s, The Hospital and Sydney Lumet’s Network have gained a reputation as progressive films in a way, but they’re not. Chayefsky is essentially a puffed-up old reactionary with a chronically Oedipal attachment to the benign and embattled Liberal patriarchs needed to save America from the parade of grotesque and corrupt children set on corroding its essential institutions: the only legitimate value of the Sixties, The Hospital would suggest, is that the sexual revolution has produced a generation of hot young women whose equanimity about being raped allows for the reassertion of said patriarchs’ phallic powers. Network also likes to lay the blame for the contemporary problems of American life at the feet of fringe groups, the dehumanizing effect of the mass media and foreign competition, while its heroes are, of course, two dignified middle-aged humanist patricians, one of whom, Howard Beale, has quite understandably been made mad by the repulsive stupidity of a modern world he ultimately falls victim to.

Still, let’s give Chayefsky his due too, there is a sequence in Network that spells out quite explicitly and in theological terms the nascent political philosophy about to dominate the next thirty plus years of political life. Howard Beale has objected to and stopped a business deal with the Arabs going through by imploring his “mad as hell” viewers to inundate the White House with letters of protest. As a consequence he is summoned to an audience with Arthur Jensen, the head of the corporation whose deal has been blocked, in order to have the larger “system of systems” spelled out to him.

Jensen: You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!,Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

(pause)

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. 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. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality --one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

HOWARD (humble whisper): Why me?

JENSEN: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

HOWARD slowly rises from the blackness of his seat so that he is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light shooting out from the rear of the room. He stares at JENSEN spotted on the podium, transfixed.

HOWARD: I have seen the face of God!

It’s a famous sequence, quoted and sampled many times. It’s not just economics represented in cosmic and theological terms but also a vision of the world of finance and economics as real and natural, and of human life and forms of organization as epiphenomenon thrown up by a series of impossibly complex interchanges, a new Sublime in the face of which non-initiates such as Beale one can only gape in awe. Jensen’s argument is that in exercising one type of democracy, Beale has in fact run counter to the real, invisible movement of the truly enfranchising onward momentum of a globalizing and liberalizing free-market. The government and “people-power”, the democratic process are reactionary, hidebound, “folk politics”, the counter-productive flailing of the unenlightened, with their irrational emotional attachments, childish sentiments and anxieties over the destruction of their humdrum life-worlds.

Jensen is the high priest of this new Religion, a seer who understands the Utopian promise of Capitalism left to operate though its own immutable laws, a counter-utopia to the promise of Communism or even Keynesian economics, in which the state mediates between the interests of workers and capital. In Jensen’s vision Capitalism beats Communism at its own game, with a new form of common ownership, that of the stockholder rather than the worker: a popular Capitalism, a stakeholder democracy in which we are all voting at every moment with our dollars and shaping and refining institutions through the always-on, 24/7, implicitly democratic processes of the Market. This kind of vision, of Capitalism as a great mystical quest, as an arena of revelation and crazy-excitement, as the hidden reality that only those enlightened Economist-Kings who have stepped outside the cave and brought back to us the deeper truths of how our world is made and unmade continues throughout the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties. One bestseller in the mid-2000s, when the prestige of economics enjoyed something of a bubble of its own was called The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything.

And then everything falls apart.