We, the media… Case Study Analyses

Network (1976) & All The President’s Men (1976)

Perhaps no other film has been received so enthusiastically by those critics and audiences with a sharp disdain for the-then current state of American television as Sidney Lumet’s Network of 1976:

“As weird as this movie is (and satire must always extend reality to make the point) there was so much truth to be heard that the Academy voters recognized it and awarded the aforementioned Oscars.” (Nash and Ross, 1986, p. 2120).

Our more critical task is to pinpoint the degree to which the film both articulates growing dissatisfaction with the broadcast system in the 1970s yet anticipates – and seems to support – a package of Pax Americana ideologies that would characterise the shift towards the Reagan Right in the decades to come. In this respect, and despite its often sharp satiric thrust, the film performs as a classic ambiguous text that, looking in opposing ideological directions, first appropriates contemporary cultural concerns of the Left and then neatly turns them to serve wider hegemonic agendas of the Right.

More intriguingly, the film establishes an interesting and increasingly uncomfortable symbiosis between two opposing ideological forces – the corporation and the terrorist. Their common mutual needs – to secure the wider attention of the American public for decidedly opposing reasons – serves to weave and tighten their business relationship and provides much of the film’s sharp satiric thrust. Furthermore, looking ahead to films of the 1980s and 1990s, this theme emerges more fully as a persistent narrative motif in both cinema and the mediated reality of broadcast news – to reach its definitive historical apogee in the live daylight events of 11^th September 2001.

Television as Terrorist

Howard Beale/Peter Finch is main anchor for the fictional United Broadcasting System while Max Schumacher/William Holden is his troubled line manager. Both are veterans from the early days of network news (Edward E. Morrow figures large in their shared memories of the ‘Golden Age’) and, in the first scene of the film, they are both drunk, since Max has taken this awkward opportunity to fire Beale after 25 years on the air. In response, the two friends spin ludicrous satiric pitches for their programme. Their quick repartee effectively communicates their joint disillusion with their profession and its constraining commercial imperatives:

BEALE

I’m going to blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news.

SCHUMACHER You’ll get a hell of a rating, I’ll tell you that, a fifty share easy

BEALE

You think so?

SCHUMACHER

We could make a series out of it.Suicide of the Week. Hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week – the Madame Defarge Show! Every Sunday night, bring your knitting and watch somebody get guillotined, hung, electrocuted, gassed. For a logo, we’ll have some brute with a black hood over his head. Think of the spin-offs. Rape of the Week

BEALE

Terrorist of the Week?

SCHUMACHER

Beautiful!

BEALE

How about Coliseum ‘74?

Every week we throw some Christians to the lions!

SCHUMACHER

Fantastic! The Death Hour! I love it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hit men, murder in the barbershop, human sacrifices in witches’ covens, automobile smash ups. The Death Hour! A great Sunday night show for the whole family.

We’ll wipe fucking Disney right off the air

Despite the surreal craziness of their drunken histrionics, Beale locks into his idea that quickly turns to determination – to commit suicide on Schumacher’s live news programme. Thereafter the film charts the inevitable and ugly commercial logic that follows Beale’s crazed but perfectly rational decision. We soon learn of Schumacher’s dilemma – commercial pressures from Vice-President Frank Hackett/Robert Duvall the day before the annual shareholders meeting:

HACKETT

I’ve got some goddam surprises for you too, Schumacher! I’ve had it up to here with your cruddy division and its annual thirty-three million dollar deficit!

SCHUMACHER

Keep your hands off my news division Frank. We’re responsible to corporate level, not to you.

HACKETT

We’ll goddam well see about that!

But Schumacher is faced with a classic moral dilemma when Beale’s dramatic threats significantly improve audience ratings and increase revenues. Not only does he threaten to commit suicide, but, unscripted, explains why. The reversal in fortune brings Beale added star status of the kind twenty years as anchor of news delivery never did.

Meanwhile, Programme Executive Diana Christensen (in an Oscar-winning performance by Faye Dunnaway) is plotting her own aggressive hunt for screen sensation that she hopes will meet with Hackett’s corporate approval. To her colleagues she announces her agenda:

CHRISTENSEN

Now, I don’t want to play butch boss with you people. But when I took over this department, it had the worst programming record in television history. This network hasn’t one show in the top twenty. This network is an industry joke. We better start putting together one winner for next September. I want a show developed, based on the activities of a terrorist group. Joseph Stalin and his merry band of Bolsheviks.

Beale’s maverick grandstand against contemporary America is set, therefore, within the context of a broadcast company undergoing major structural changes following a recent takeover and, under tightened economic conditions, having to secure greater ratings from the competition. As we will note, these narrative elements concur with real-life industry ‘restructuring’ that would intensify in the 1980s and 1990s.

Plot twists that immediately affect the position of both Schumacher and Christensen are announced at the annual stockholder’s meeting where Hackett confidently asserts the new corporate line approach, that, in the face of acute revenue returns:

HACKETT

I am therefore pleased to announce I am submitting to the Board of Directors a plan for the coordination of the main profit centers, and with the specific intention of making each division more responsive to management.

In other words, Schumacher’s news centre would, like Sports or Entertainment, have to earn its own keep by increasing its advertising revenue from an increase in ratings. The film thereafter charts Christensen’s entertainment move against Schumacher’s news division through Hackett that effectively makes Schumacher’s noble enterprise answerable to Christensen’s more commercially centred department. The forum of battle is over Beale’s ‘news show’:

CHRISTENSEN

Howard Beale got up there last night and said what every American feels – that he’s tired of all the bullshit. He’s articulating the popular rage. I want that show, Frank. I can turn that show into the biggest smash in television.

Against Schumacher’s wishes, and as a classic template of mainstream appropriation, Beale’s news programme is turned quickly by Christensen into a live weekly show-business entertainment with customary announcer, enthralled studio audience, and sideline acts that include Sybil the Soothsayer, Jim Webbing and his ‘It’s-the-Emmes-Truth Department’, a Miss Mata Hari, and all supported by a full symphony orchestra with an imperial crescendo that heralds the arrival of Beale, “the mad prophet of the airwaves”.

Despite the Baroque crassness of the surrounding studio mise-en-scene, Beale’s impassioned diatribe at its centre forcefully articulates the broken and bowed American psyche of the mid-1970s:

BEALE

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. So we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything.

In his second pronouncement, however, the focus turns more sharply against the operations of corporate America and, as a pertinent uncomfortable example, the backroom operations of the United Broadcast System (UBS) itself. In an extended delivery, Beale uncovers for the watching millions first, the powerful fabrication of the television medium, and then second, the back story of mergers and acquisitions that impact upon scheduling and news content.

Under a stained glass window and an overpowering shaft of Heavenly scoped light, Beale fulminates against the very system that brings his own show so successfully to the watching millions. His fulmination begins with the recent takeover of UBS by CC&A, the Communications Corporation of America, and how:

BEALE

…when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this tube? So, listen to me! Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park, that’s what television is!!

And so, the diatribe swings wide to include the very narrative forms on which mainstream television is based:

BEALE

We’ll tell you Kojac always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true!

And Beale’s invective invariably then swings against television’s own audience:

BEALE

But you people sit there – all of you – day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds – we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe this illusion we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal…So turn off this goddam set! Turn it off right now! Turn it off and leave it off. Turn it off right now, right in the middle of this very sentence I’m speaking now.

At which point, Beale collapses to the floor in a sweeping swoon.

With even greater rising irony and ratings Schumacher is replaced by Christensen who becomes a network executive star in her own right, able to implement her grand stratagem that would allow real-life home-grown terrorists in California, under contract, to submit their own live video footage of subversive activities (bank robbing) for network airing – no need here for the familiar and strained creative overheads, unending script drafts or prolonged rehearsal schedules that would customarily include testy writers, lordly directors or up-start producers. Her ruthless manipulation and determination to succeed brings forth the horror that Beale and Schumacher had parodied in the opening scene – and it is a vision that neatly foreshadows the trend of Reality TV that emerged in the 1990s where, instead of bank raids, American viewers were to follow the dramatic real-life roller coaster rides that stereotyped the highway police car chase, the hostage crisis, or the court room drama.

However, at the risk to his own mental health, Beale’s performances take on wildly dangerous and unpredictable turns in the third act where he becomes a station liability rather than an asset. His third polemic is his most devastating for the broadcaster, but one that now signals an ideological shift in the film’s own assumed critique of contemporary America. In it Beale again berates the power of both CC&A – and by extension corporate America, but his ideological focus becomes increasingly suspect as he tracks the pattern of ownerships out of America to the Middle East:

BEALE

Well, I’ll tell you who they’re buying C.C. and A. for. They’re buying it for the Saudi-Arabian Investment Corporation! They’re buying it for the Arabs!

At this point Beale – and the narrative – takes an ideologically reactionary turn, by shifting the film’s social critique away from the American sphere and towards a foreign influence, which is acting against the valued mores of Americans. So, in a pitch of increasing paranoid xenophobia, he calls upon his audience directly to:

BEALE

Listen to me, goddammit! The Arabs are simply buying us! They’re buying all our land, our whole economy, the press, the factories, financial institutions, the government! They’re going to own us! A handful of agas, shahs and emirs who despise this country and everything it stands for – democracy, freedom, the right for me to get up on television and tell you about it – a couple of dozen medieval fanatics are going to own where you work, where you live, what you read, what you see, your cars, your bowling alleys, your mortgages, your schools, your churches, your libraries, your kids, your whole life!

His wild claims bring him face to face with Arthur Jensen/Ned Beatty, the UBS corporate chief, whose own grandstand messianic performance out-performs anything Beale could concoct. Writer Paddy Cheyefsky creates in Jensen the demonic personification of ultimate corporate power. The scene is set at night in Jensen’s Gothic mansion – replete with oak-panelled walls, deep leather furniture, and extended stained-glass windows – and comprises mostly of Jensen’s rising Evangelical crescendo to the subdued Beale. Jensen sets the corporate view quietly thus:

JENSEN

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! 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.

At this point, Jensen is step-by-step approaching the quietly amazed Beale and his screen image ominously enlarges to fill director Lumet’s fixed frame:

JENSEN

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 immune, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars! Reichmarks, rubles, yen, 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!

Beale sits humbly and looks upwards to the towering presence of the imperial Jensen and powerfully lit by a Devilish hue of red flames that reflect from his glowing eyes. His decisive claim to both Beale and film audience comes in a powerful close-up

JENSEN

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. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.

The abstract economic ‘theory’ of Jensen – and its human consequences – is more fully dramatised through the torrid relationship that develops and then collapses between Diana Christensen and Max Schumacher. Claiming again his true values (and returning to his wife), Schumacher delivers his own polemic to the woman he has implausibly loved but who has become also his professional Nemesis and, for him, the personification of contemporary television:

SCHUMACHER

It’s too late, Diana! There’s nothing left in you that I can live with! You’re one of Howard’s humanoids, and, if I stay with you, I’ll be destroyed! Like Howard Beale was destroyed! Like Lauren Hobbs was destroyed! Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed! You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. 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 are madness, Diana, virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you. Well, not me! Not while I can still feel pleasure and pain and love!

Despite the Oscar for screenwriting, the confrontation and diatribe against Christensen exposes the worst excesses of Chayefsky’s overall script as it lifts the thematic confrontation that should exist as subtext (and for the audience to discover) into explicit text where character speaks ‘on the nose’ all too obviously in place of the message/writer. From a pedagogic point of view, however, Schumacher’s laboured thesis as documented here through Diana Christensen to the film audience is an excellent seminar example of explicitly bad film screenwriting and should be used to identify in screenwriting workshops the slippery difference of text and subtext – and knowing the vital difference between the two. To be even more critical, we could on the other hand recommend the script as ideal for television drama where such heavy coding of the subtext is expected if audiences are to be captured and held through frequent and extended commercial breaks.

With the closing of act three the dramatic forces that propel Beale’s success contribute to his tragic downfall. While Jensen wishes him to remain his prophet, ratings begin to slide, affiliates are worrying and, with the Christmas buying season approaching, hard commercial choices have to be made by Hackett and Christensen. At first, the obvious, decent and professional alternatives are considered, building, for example, other segments of the show, or even stealing an ABC rival prophet. But the inevitable pull of even higher ratings creates a career temptation that Christensen can not ignore. In an example of creative intertextual synthesis, she suggests:

CHRISTENSEN

Well, what would you fellows say to an assassination? I think I can get the Mao Tse Tung people to kill Beale for us. As one of their programs. In fact, it’ll make a hell of a kick-off show for the season. We’re facing heavy opposition from the other networks on Wednesday nights, and the Mao Tse Tung Hour could use a sensational show for an opener. The whole thing would be done right on camera in the studio. We ought to get a fantastic look-in audience with the assassination of Howard Beale as our opening show.

The idea to employ the Ecumenical Liberation Army to kill Beale is of course foreshadowed in the film by earlier news broadcast coverage of the real-life assassination attempts on the-then President Ford. The final denouement that depicts the machine-gun slaying of Beale on live national television has all the grim inevitability of a Greek tragedy that brings into the American home Schumacher and Beale’s drunken prognostications that opened the film. So following the classic formulae we return in the dying minutes of the film to a blanket coverage from NBC, ABC, CBS and UBS showing action re-plays of Beale’s slaying as juxtaposed with commercials for soft drinks. As the television continues on relentlessly, we close on Cheyefsky’s final satiric quip:

NARRATOR

This was the story of Howard Beale who was the network news anchorman on UBS-TV, the first known instance of a man being killed because he had lousy ratings.

Lumet and Cheyefsky – Voicing Contradictions from Hollywood

Network (1976) was nominated for nine Oscars and won four (best leading actor – Peter Finch, best actress – Faye Dunnaway, writer – Paddy Cheyefsky for best original script and best supporting actress for Beatrice Straight. The dramaturgy made possible by the Oscar institution no doubt allowed ‘the community’ at least this public salvo against the onslaughts of commercial television now in its midst.

However, despite its high critical standing in Hollywood, it did not receive the blanket critical success one would assume. For David Thomson (1976), for example, the film was caught within its own dramatic contradictions wherein,

“It is an onslaught of trite sensation corrupting consequences. But its methods and devices are those of TV: the moving image; abrupt transitions; cheap laughs; hollow characters; activity concealing no point of view; movement as a distraction from meaning…a satire without detachment, roots or hope of remedy.” (Thomson, 1976, Sight and Sound 6:2. 122-123)

Indeed, the methods and devices of commercial television could be seen at work even in the staged dramaturgy of the Oscar awards where, in a grim echo of the film, television audiences witnessed the first presentation of an Oscar to a dead actor. Peter Finch had died at the age of just 61 a few months prior to the ceremony – and, it could be cynically argued, not from broadcast news, but the punishing demands and expectations of the ruthless Hollywood star system as engineered by the Oscar ceremony itself. Interestingly, the 1976 Awards also gave Oscars to Jason Robards for best supporting actor for his role as Washington Post bureau chief Ben Bradley, and to William Goldman for best screen adaptation – both for their work in All the President’s Men (1976).

Despite, however, its broad surface Liberal agenda Network (1976) exposes a number of awkward incongruities that betray uncomfortable reactionary tendencies. From his own impassioned monologue, for example, we have quoted how Schumacher condenses All That Is Wrong with broadcast television with the frigid and superficial character of Christensen and, indeed, the casting of Dunnaway and her brittle performance does not contradict his point of view (her dress code of dark browns settles into the corporate mise-en-scene and her office is often lit with a sharp icy blue).

Most uncomfortable is how the film’s satirical slant against broadcasting television is collapsed into a more interesting though unsettling angst against Christensen’s (represented) Feminist persona as heavily sign-posted in her confrontation with Schumacher:

CHRISTENSEN

I was married for four years and pretended to be happy and

Had six years of analysis and pretended to be sane. My

husband ran off with his boyfriend, and I had an affair with my analyst. He told me I was the worst lay he had ever had. I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am. I apparently have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and can’t wait to get my clothes back on and get out of that bedroom. I seem to be inept at everything except my work. I’m goddam good at my work and so I confine myself to that. All I want out of life is a 30 share and a 20 rating.

Christensen’s soliloquy is clumsily used to direct away from an institutional/political critique and deflect instead towards a gross version of the women’s liberation movement. Collapsing the film’s ideological struggle into impassioned conflict between broad stereotype figures follows the form of classic Realism wherein,

“Social and political issues are only reported if they can be embodied in an individual, and thus social conflict of interest is personalized into conflict between individuals (however)…the effect of this is that the social origins of events are lost, and individual motivation is assumed to be the origin of all action.” (Fiske, 1991, p. 294)

Representing the powerful corporate interests of the established television broadcasters in the form of a frigid, fraught and fearful “butch” Feminist exposes the film to accusations of, at best, timidity and, at worst, ideological blindness. Schumacher’s earlier arched attack exposes less of a professional concern about the state of television and more the industry’s prevailing misogyny.

Diana Christensen’s account of the broken and twisted course that brings her material and professional success would confirm in the minds of some arch conservatives, for example, all their worst forebodings about the Feminist rights agenda of the 1970s. The ideological deflection – away from the political to the personal – places the film firmly within the very bounds of conventional misogynist narrative that drives the commercial agenda of corporate television – whether it be ‘news’ or ‘entertainment’- where social processes are constructed around dramatised events and stuctured around leading characters. More pointedly and damning for Good (1989),

“…the film holds up the sexually emancipated, professionally ambitious woman of the seventies in horror. She is a beautiful and deadly lie, a devourer, a black widow.” (Good, 1989, p.108)

Satire’s Ideological Betrayals

This early Hollywood personification of the television industry – in the form of a powerful (white) woman – is the first of many that we will track (from Holly Hunter in Broadcast News (1987), through Michelle Pfeiffer in Up, Close and Personal (1996), Mia Kirschner in Mad City (1997), and ending with Téa Leoni in Deep Impact (1998)).

The stark contrast between Dunnaway’s ruthless huntress in 1976 to Leoni’s quiet but effective selfless professionalism of 1997 is a measure of how the overall representation of television in Hollywood cinema tilts from the satiric/critical to the comitous celebratory – by appropriating and representing certain versions of the Feminist agenda and neatly eliding others (Dow, 1996). Indeed, considering the satiric form in general, Nussbaum (1984) and Pollak (1985) in their own separate studies in satiric literature, have offered penetrating accounts of how satirists have been overtly and covertly misogynistic and, indeed, both regard the adopted form itself as radically and traditionally masculinist in its emphasis on power and attack.

More ideological betrayals have been already suggested – particularly the later tomic claims by Beale on how the ills of the ‘West’ can be so neatly deflected away from possible inherent problems of Liberal Democratic political and economic assumptions and towards the more tangible threats from the Middle East foreigners. Through its representation, then, of women and (unseen) foreigners, the film exposes its own reactionary impulses that articulate more the fears and anxieties of white male Americans in the 1970s than perhaps the filmmakers intended.

These anxieties are themselves condensed to satiric effect in the representation of the terrorists whose activities Christensen attempts to appropriate to maximise her audience ratings. A standard establishing shot of the Hollywood Hills leads to a meeting with (Black) Communist Party representative Laureen Hobbs/Marlene Warfield:

CHRISTENSEN

Christ, you brought half the William Morris West Coast office with you. I’m Diana Christenson, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.

HOBBS

I’m Laureen Hobbs, a bad-ass Commie nigger.

CHRISTENSEN

Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship

A short sequence of political repartee leads to the main pitch from Christensen:

CHRISTENSEN

Ms. Hobbs, I’m offering you an hour of prime-time television every week into which you can stick whatever propaganda you want. We’re talking about thirty to fifty million people a shot. That’s a lot better than handing out mimeographed pamphlets

The sharp and articulate Hobbs quickly agrees to act as representative/agent between the broadcaster and the “Great Ahmed Khan” of the Ecumenical Liberation Army. The next scene undercuts our grand expectations by simply presenting Khan – poor and isolated – in a ramble country shack eating chicken bones from a fast-food carton.

Later scenes that directly involve the William Morris agents in contractual haggles with the militants comically expose the degree of capitalist co-opting of revolutionary ideals:

HOBBS

Don’t fuck with my distribution costs! I’m getting a lousy two-fifteen per-segment, and I’m already deficiting twenty-five grand a week with Metro. I’m paying William Morris ten percent off the top! And I’m giving this turkey ten thou’ a segment and another five for this fruitcake. And…I’m paying Metro twenty percent of all foreign and Canadian distribution, and that’s after recoupment! The Communist Party’s not going to see a nickel out of this goddam show until we go into syndication!

Hobbs’ impassioned diatribe neatly and vividly crystallizes – howbeit in stereotypical style – the serious dramas that often lie at the core of contractual arrangements upon which the media industry is based – and the real economic hold the main broadcasters had over programming profit incomes at the real expense of the producers whose creative energies made the programmes in the first instance.

Media Owners and Terrorists – Common Interests

However, the 1976 representation of Homeland terrorists – and, particularly the central conceit that their ‘activities’ could directly support the long-term interests of corporate media (despite surface rhetoric to the contrary) – has a charged relevance in the context of contemporary concerns. It is in this noteworthy respect that Network (1976) establishes a clear narrative motif that would remain a consistent feature through a range of films that represent the news industry, particularly in the 1990s.

The terrorist theme, for example, emerges in Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997) where nuclear bombs are said to be transported in carrier bags across the Canadian border; in Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), which tracks the real-life CBS exclusive interviews with Hizzbollah and the station’s tactical coverage of the Unabomber’s arrest; again, Costa Garvas’ Mad City (1997) tracks the course of John Travoltta’s working class family man from disgruntled museum guard to naïve urban terrorist and media star, while blockbusters such as Independence Day (1996) and Deep Impact (1998) sublimate the threat to the United States in the form of aliens in the former and a renegade comet in the latter. The often intimate link that associates the terrorist agenda – to have a ‘voice’ – with the interest of the broadcasters – to garner bigger ratings – will be further discussed in later chapters.

Suffice to say that in the case of Network (1976) we at least have an account – albeit in the form of crude satire that rests on broad unsettling stereotypes – which critically highlights the commercial and political interests of both parties in their shared needs to communicate to the American citizen. It is a theme that would be echoed across a range of academic studies in decades to come, from Jenkins (1981), Weimann (1983) and Bassiouni (1983). In his own critical account, Livingston’s (1994) introduction draws on Long in particular, by quoting how,

“The media mission to cover the news and the terrorist’s ability to ‘create’ the news have led to a symbiotic relationship between the two, one in which the media not only convey the news but help the terrorists create it”. Terrorist attacks, Long continued, are often “carefully planned theatrical events” which “virtually guarantee evocative, emotional treatment by the media”. Brian Jenkins and Gabriel Weimann also use the metaphor of theater to explain terrorism. In this view, the violent act is intended to produce effects beyond any immediate physical damage…terrorist violence, in this sense, is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual physical victims of the violence.” (in Livingston, 1994, p. 3)

The symbiotic relationship underscored in Network (1976) and by such commentators, was further secured during the 1980s by the shift towards market journalism across both print and broadcast media – a subject that will help contextualise our analysis of Broadcast News (1987) in the next chapter. In careful consideration of Long’s observations, we might ponder to suggest how terrorist ‘events’ are themselves driven by commercial media logic towards ever-greater ‘spectaculars’ in order to cut through to the fragmented news audiences.

Framing Television – From the 1950s to the 1970s

We end the chapter, though, on a visual echo, one that takes us from All the President’s Men of 1976 to our first film text – All That Heaven Allows of 1955. Both films share an interest in the representation of the televisual image by the more dominant frame of the screen image. In the case of Sirk’s caustic melodrama, the main character of Carrie is surreally framed by the film as reflected in the darkened closed eye of the television screen, thus surrounded by Sirk’s enlivened colour palate but trapped, in dramatic contrast, in a world of foreboding sepia.

All the President’s Men (1976) – The Film Frame in Command

Alan J. Pakula’s political thriller 22 years later tracks the efforts of investigative reporters Woodward/Redford and Bernstein/Hoffmann on their probing journey into the heart of Nixon’s administration. In the process the film also includes the televisual electoral coverage of their nemesis and eventual victim – who seems only to exist ‘on’ television. The two worlds of film and represented television are dramatically contrasted visually. The reporter’s Neo-Plastic office is of a pristine innocent whiteness, strategically cluttered with red and blue prop elements – a space of clarity and windowed transparency that visually articulates their patriotic dedication to revealing truth. The coded mise-en-scene (as constructed on the soundstages at Burbank) is contrasted with the busy and fragmented televisual images that show Nixon in various stages of murky real-life campaign electioneering.

In a sequence claimed to be designed by screenwriter Goldman (2000, p. 330) the film closes on an iconic narrative note that, from a knowing 1976, looks back to 1972 by showing the lowly reporters late at night typing their reports in their otherwise empty Washington Post office. In dramatic irony, we see Nixon’s crowded electoral victory as transmitted live through a small office television between them. Their heavily punched typing resounds like volleys against the Republican victory.

The scene lingers on a single shot that records this carefully crafted mise-en-scene that juxtaposes the workings of the Fourth Estate and the operations of the television industry as it reports/creates the political dramaturgy that brought Nixon to the White House for a second term. For the director, speaking to Richard Thompson (1976),

“…the power of that shot depends on the audience knowing what the President at the height of his power doesn’t know, what even the reporters typing away don’t know: that in two years, what they’re writing is going to force him to resign.” (Thompson, 1976, Film Comment 12:15. 16)

More significant for our purposes, Pakula’s chosen framing device also makes claims to position the film process as the dominant controlling text over the rival discourses of print and television media that it includes. The shot neatly complements Pakula’s main ambition to position the film audience in a higher status of dominant specularity, an effect which is made all the more possible in a film that was made four years after the events depicted, and events, not incidentally, that were brought more fully into public consciousness by the television coverage of Sam Ervin’s Watergate hearings. The overall ontological agenda in the film, however, is to suggest that in a visually dark story that records real-life subterfuge and mendacity, audiences can be assured that final understanding and satisfactory closure can at least be achieved within the sure and safe zone of the classic Liberal Hollywood text.

The self-congratulatory tendency in All the President’s Men (1976) that dramaturgically set the film medium as morally and aesthetically superior to its mass media cousin is one tendency it shared with the Lumet/Cheyefsky Network (1976). One wonders how, from a structuralist point of view, the operations of Hollywood in this context were making some rhetorical claims against the television transgressor, how the film form was trying to establish itself – still – as the commanding langue of which the inferior values of television remained the itinerant parole?

Oscars, Satire and Foreshadowing the Future

By loudly lauding the two films with a collective eight Oscars it seems an ideological frame of mind that extended to the Hollywood community itself that still in 1976 – according to Comstok (1989) – considered itself capable of some creative and worthy products. Within this frame of contention, the Oscar cemermony itself provided the community – which Lumet, Cheyefsky, Pakula and Redford suddenly represented – with its own threatened counter voice of protest against the Hellenic hegemony of the invading conglomerates from industry and big business.

Accounts in the previous chapter have already underlined the complicit histories that had woven the interests of Hollywood and the television industries since the mid- 1940s. By the mid-1970s, with the development of the mini-series and the made-for-TV ‘film’, that complicitness was all too uncomfortable, especially for the likes of Cheyefsky and Lumet who had been bounced from the experimental soundstages of live television theatre and had taken the auteur flight westwards. The satiric function, then, of Lumet’s film would seem to concur with Bogel’s (1995) overall claim that in satire,

“…it is at least as likely that we attack a figure, distance ourselves from him, because we sense his threatening proximity to us…that satire is not a response to a prior difference but an effort to make a difference, to create distance, between figures whom the satirist – who is one of those figures – perceives to be insufficiently distinguished…(and)…works to convert an ambiguous relation of identification and division into one of pure division.” (Bogel, 1995, p. 45-46)

If that is the case, then the contrast between 1976 and subsequent years could not be greater. By this time the Oscar ceremony itself would become another live broadcast event, wholly dominated by the aesthetic and commercial demands of global television as exclusively arranged by the ABC broadcaster. This congruence of media interests would be further galvanised following the mergers of the 1990s which witnessed the takeover of ABC by the Disney Corporation.

The moral surities of 1976, then, would soon give way in the coming decades, to the postmodern corporate mix of self-supportive intertextual exchanges that, without the irony, would make Hollywood just another addition to the corporate portfolio, thus erasing the division that Lumet and Cheyefsky had tried to establish in their cutting satire. The 2003 nominations, for example, included main contenders The Hours (2002) and Gangs of New York (2002), two films produced through Disney’s Miramax. In this respect the Oscar ceremony continues to provide a unique opportunity for media corporations such as Disney to market their products through a national broadcast system – with worldwide rights – which they also own.

As for Redford and Hoffman, they would return separately during the 1990s in Up, Close and Personal (1996), Wag the Dog (1997) and Mad City (1997) to openly question any hope that may exist for the development of journalist freedoms of the kind they had represented in their heroic portrayals of underdogs Woodward and Bernstein.

Mad As hell…?

END