Comm 150 Exam 2: Network

Satire as exaggeration

What does this tell us about audiences? That they are easily manipulated and excited. That they seem to want to be part of any feeling because they are numb to everything else. Here Howard Beale is laying bare the political economics of television but because he is doing it on television it gets ratings nonetheless We're in the Boredom killing business

Frank Hacket

only concern is what the stock holders will think, and the only thing he thinks that they are worried about are ratings and profit. He dressed in a tux to show his class aspiration. His sense of value is only the what improves the quarterly bottom line. Other two men in the room should out weigh him, but they are passive in the face of Hacket's restructuring of management proposal and his obvious disdain for dispassionate journalism. CEO is not driving the show, but rather Hackett - the representative of the corporation that bought a controlling interest in UBS - is. Hacket's only aspiration is to sit on the board of the corporation that owns UBS: CCA

Inspiration

• Cheyefsky had been struck by the on-‐air suicide of television reporter Christine Chubbuck in Sarasota Florida, who shot herself on camera as viewers watched on July 15, 1974. • Chubbock • This idea, and the way in which tragedies like this are exploited for ratings, became the central conceit of the story.

MGM & UA

• Eventually UA wanted back in, so the film was co-‐financed by both, with MGM getting North American distribution rights and UA getting international.

Structure of film

• Network has aspects of satire and melodrama in its presentation, mostly because TV is melodramatic and this is a satire of TV. -The structure is essentially an allegory about the struggle over the direction of TV in the 70s personified through the decline of a newsman, and a melodramatic love story in which each dramatizes tendencies from the old days of TV and the possible future of TV.

Issues with media

• Since the creation of television, the FCC has regulated the spectrum, essenUally ensuring a kind of monopoly by granUng a range of the spectrum (for TV this was FHV & UHV) to broadcasting companies for free. -news outlets became subject to the same economic pressures as dramas and other genres • Indeed, in 1996, this problem was repeated when the Big Media interests wrote and pushed the passage of the Telecommunications Act, which gave away the digital spectrum to the media companies for free

•Cheyefsky

•Cheyefsky won three Academy Awards for Best Screenplay, and is considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the Golden Age of Television, due to his intimate and naturalistic dramas of the 1950s. He began to see the TV as an increasing source of dehumanization and desensitization American society and worked on a satiric screenplay that he brought to Lumet.

Conflict

-for sensation driven circulation, a reporter writes an anonymous letter saying that because life is so meaningless, the letter writer is going to kill himself on New Years Eve. -Interesting here that no one in the news room, which we see here at work, is even listening to what is being said. This is how meaningless it is.

things on the turn tables

Essentially Lumet is dramatizing this function of TV here, and laying the allegory bare. TV culture, a generation of people that believe that what they see on TV is real on not just entertainment, wants life to be soothsayers, expressions of the (ersatz) vox populi, scandal and private gossip and a charismatic figure telling us what to think and how to feel. Of course the rejection of TV is paradoxical here...The number one rated show telling you to turn off. Of course they wont.

Principle Characters and what they represent

Howard Beale (Throwback to Golden Era. A "mandarin" of television) Max Shumacher (Ethical programming, truth meaning, etc that is past its moment) Diana Christensen (the generation raised on TV and the logic of TV incarnate Frank Hackett (Corporate Man) Nelson Chaney (Endangered Species of Management) Arthur Jensen (Face of multinational capitalism)

Howard calling bullshit

Howard stops pretending to care about what gets peddled as "news" Why is it funny? Because people are aware of how utterly insipid television content is, especially on the inside. So it rings true. In this sense, it does exactly what Diane thinks that the audience wants: someone to articulate their sense of alienation from the society that is represented on the tube.

The wrong truth

If the propaganda function of Television is to preserve the status quo of the existing economic order, here we see what happens when it speaks the wrong truth. Here the nominally America corporation, CCA is being purchased by the Western World Funding Corporation which is actually a conglomeration of interests acting on behalf of the Saudi's (remember this was the late 70s during the energy crisis in which gas was sky-rocketing in price and there were lines at the pump.) It is interesting that Cheyefsky and Lumet see transnational globalism as too much for audience's to take, as if our self image as Americans (a people that still has some control over our destiny and that wants to keep foreign influence out) is something that we want to preserve. We are deeply invested, psychically, in the notion of American superiority, which is really a post WWII Cold War notion that is here being challenged. The FCC media rules (which have since been shifted to allow for this kind of things) at the time had to approve foreign ownership because of a war-time fear of handing over the airwaves to potentially anti-American influences.

Irony

Irony can be used for either conservative or liberal purposes depending on whether the object satirized as an established or an emerging force. When serious ideas or sacred cows get twisted, they become fodder for irony, such as when peace becomes the justification for war, when helping the poor justifies the rich getting richer. In short, when ideas become twisted in their meanings, the ironist wants his readers or viewers to step back and take another look behind the curtain of ideology to see the real forces at work.

Commodification of Communism

Irresistibility of the medium. The Angela Davis lookalike, who began as a sincere representative of communist worldview, become a cut-throat capitalist The irony of contract law by anarchists and communists being followed closely for splitting up their share of profit. This also implies a kind of trenchant critique of leftists in the 70s as being driven by the desire to be famous or to play to the media. They too come to believe that whatever is on TV is real. Many critics have commented that this is a pretty cynical reading of the critics of capitalism in the 70s, one that in the end tends to reify the Jensen message of there being no way out of the iron law of the market.

Exposition

Network begins with a situation that speaks to the political economic changes in the industry and their impact on members of the old guard. With the corporate takeover of UBS, the News Division - once given autonomy - is now required to be profitable. As a result, Howard Beale (a respected and respectable journalist) is going to be let go. The exegesis established Howard and Max as throwbacks to another Era of Television.

Satire

Satire is a form of storytelling that employs irony. Definition of irony is a use of language whereby the implied meaning is the exact opposite of the literal meaning. Satiric irony, then, has a distancing effect on the audience, forcing viewers to look at things in a different way. It often uses the same terms and ideas of the dominant paradigm and turns them around, exposing them and holding them up for ridicule or farce.

Establishing Diane's Character

She sees sensational footage and wants to show it because it is sensational She has no political axe to grind; she is amoral she just wants ratings, that is her only value. She has no sense of irony...no shame.. What do they want? Angry shows...things that mirror their rage and articulate it for them...pandering to the most dehumanizing element of television. In a recessionary economy, there is no freedom to resist the profit motive. People are coerced to comply with commercial motives for everything or TV (Diane) will fire you without any hesitation. After this, no body resist Diane or rolls their eyes as she pitches ideas, they just scramble to get it done.

TV grows up/ Golden Era of Television

Television as we know it was introduced to most Americans in a ten year period around 1948. • Most of the programming in the early 50s was modified versions of established radio shows (major networks (CBS and NBC) did not want Hollywood to compete). • By 1949, there were 2,000,000 sets in the US • By 1955, half of the US households had TV sets. • First TV specific genres make an entrance. The Talk Show, the Sitcom, the Game show, News programs like See it Now (Edward Murrow)

The seduction of Max

Television here - or at least a logic of the medium that cares only for ratings and knows how to get them by sensational programming - is seducing the representative of the old values of serving the public interest, in using TV to raise the conscious of the nation rather than debasing it. Importantly, he is seduced. He is captivated by her aggressive honesty. Her unabashed directness and complete lack of shame or sense of irony. Howard Loses his Inner Sense

Articulating their despair?

The audience wants to channel rage, to vent anger on whatever scapegoats the media will offer for it to hate, but here we see that it doesn't want a truth that takes away the illusion of personal autonomy and freedom. This is too difficult, too depressing, this is a tragic vision, and the drama department knows that the audience wants only heroic fights against injustice or angry rants that preserve the illusion of self-determination. Howard Beale gives up...he is no longer passionate to the point of fainting, but Lumet has him sit down and his body language speak of deflation. In many ways, he is now a perfect symptom and symbol of the feeling that Cheyefsky and Lumet feel characterizes contemporary society, but a little too spot on

Turn them off

There is a whole branch of mass media theory that asserts that the function of media in a consumer society is to serve as a distraction for the meaninglessness that people feel. Herbert Marcuse called this "repressive desublimation," by which he meant that we have all this pent up psychic energy that we redirect onto things - like giving a crap about the dramas we follow on TV - and it takes that energy away from directing it toward creative meaningful work. This ideological function keeps anything in society from changing or making sense, preserving the status quo which the folks who sell us all the consumer stuff and keep us conforming to the their image of what a person is and what the world should be like. It constructs and continually reifies what counts as common sense.

Jensen's Jeremiad

This articulates a vision of global capitalism that is post-national, post-ideological and post-human. The word 'immane" that he uses is an invention that Cheyefsky probably used to meld inhuman and insane, and it encapsulates a good deal of this. This also predicts what we have come to know about multinational corporations, that they are thinking about the long term more than networks...that it is worth it for them to lose money for someone who will do their ideological work for them. (Newscorp, for instance, loses money on things like the Weekly Standard because it preaches the neoconservative gospel that Rupert Murdoch finds important.)

Old and Crusty Programming

This articulates quite well how worn out the conceits of television dramas were (and are)That they are boring explains why Diane thinks that people want things that are more raw, more real. Essentially she wants to make the first news reality shows that draw on opinion, exploit popular rage, exploit emotional rawness etc.

Absurdity of Truth

This idea - extending the media trend of doing anything for ratings and exploiting the audience's love of blood and guts - is something that other films in the 70s dramatized as well. They are merely science fiction renderings of a similar critique. The scene establishes Max as a nostalgic, drinking and thinking about the past. Like the era that he represents, he is in the autumn of his years.

Articulating the Popular Rage

This is punditry. Which is different from news... it is telling us how to feel about the world, not about what the world is. If people are huddled around their TVs getting their representations of how the world is from the TV and it makes them mad, it is because the world on TV is one which only shows sensational stuff. So here, people are mad because TV makes them mad and insensitive, and now TV is giving them something - someone - that articulates the alienation and rage that they feel.