Over the weekend, director Sidney Lumet passed away at the age of 86. In many ways, his pointed style and socially charged films tackled important issues with a nod toward the visionary and the prophetic. His “12 Angry Men” (1957) and “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) hyperbolized and analyzed class structures through criminal activity and daring acting. More than any of his films, however, “Network” (1976) stands tall as a terrifying satire of how we watch television.
Its send-up of network news gone haywire is most famous for mentally unstable anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) raving to the camera that he’s “mad as hell and ... not going to take this anymore,” but its visual development of Beale as an unhinged, self-proclaimed “prophet of the airwaves” itself became prophetic of a world gone mad with 24-hour news.
Late last week, Fox News host Glenn Beck announced he would be departing the cable news network at the end of 2011. Rumors flew over whether Beck chose to leave or was fired, as he likened himself to Paul Revere in that he needed to get off his horse and “join the revolution.”
And while the media has had their go at assessing the departure, including Jon Stewart devoting two-thirds of Thursday’s “Daily Show” to skewering Beck’s program, it’s an issue that deserves serious attention.
When scholar John Caldwell popularized the term “televisuality” in 1995, he was speaking to an increase in visual excess, a continued desire to move television into a kind of heightened cinematic representation that divorced standard television representations.
Others, like Jeffrey P. Jones, have noted how the news has made this same shift, with Beck’s program just being one of many news or opinion programs that espouse this kind of televisuality. Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” satirizes this visual and personality excess.
But watching “Network” in memory of Lumet, it becomes readily apparent the corporate powers that be in today’s vast television landscape rejected the film’s ideas. Indeed, Beale’s news-show-cum-opinion-hour designed explicitly to get ratings has all the markings of a Beck-esque show: one man in a spotlight, directly addressing his inflated opinions to the camera, parading through a studio audience, renouncing television even as he uses it.
Beale says of television: “This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation … This tube is the most awesome, godd***ed force in the whole godless world … Television is not the truth. Television is a godd***ed amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival.”
But he also says, “You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.”
This is both the genius and tragedy of Glenn Beck. He’s a man who used his conspiratorial rhetoric to help solidify the Tea Party movement, who could regularly secure comparatively fantastic ratings in his time slot and who knew how to flawlessly appeal to his spectators.
To say Glenn Beck is our Howard Beale is to make a very basic comparison that ignores the actual issue: the structure of news as its own network. “Network” asked: What happens when you put a radically unstable man on television, let him shout his opinion and put it in a news context without ever calling it news? Does it then become news? Or does news become something else?
Again, I’m not saying Beck is radically unstable. I’m saying he’s an opinion show on a network that calls itself a “news channel” and that he is part of a radical destabilization of how we constitute “news.” Glenn Beck is the actualization of the prophecy Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky made 35 years ago, and that’s why it’s peculiarly appropriate they occupied headlines over the weekend.
As Lumet exits our earthly realm, so too does Beck exit Fox. Lumet, a visionary of filtering how society works through his camera. Beck, a visionary of how using the camera to compose intensely personal aural essays and lectures.
They may be at opposite poles of the idea of what function television can perform when it becomes less about the neutralized news and more about the individual voice, but they are certainly important voices in trying to sort out how we obtain and digest the information we deem most important.
That’s Entertainment.
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