Outside Your Heaven

Posted: 28 Feb 2019 11:36 AM PST

I live in New York, which means I can and did see the Broadway version of Network starring Brian Cranston. It was brutal and fabulous -- a great stage adaptation of a hard-as-fuck thing to adapt. I dare say that it improved on the 1976 film in some ways, and the film is a goddamn masterpiece. It found its own spin, its own voice, a way to be about television while still pushing the form of live theater. It's technically bravura, combining live video, audience participation, and great performances in thrillingly complex yet never confusing ways. But its main contribution to the material is to make it funny. I mean genuinely funny. The original film, while effective satire, never feels like a film you quite want to laugh at, whereas this is a riot from beginning to end.

I could go on and on about what it does as a stage adaptation, but that's not my main concern here. I'm more interested in how they "updated" the material for our modern media age and how that forces us to ask what the hell it even means to update something as terrifyingly prescient as Network.

Network is in that lineage of films we might call "what happens when we let the id out?" media satires, where some media maker, in a fit of desperation or rage or cynicism, begins expressing shocking, unfiltered, controversial views on a mass media platform, expecting it to be a disaster, when of course the opposite happens: it's the biggest success they've ever had, which brings up all sorts of questions about what ugliness the public is suppressing. The famous comedy version of this is Mel Brooks' The Producers (which also started as a film and had a theater adaptation). Another is Spike Lee's Bamboozled, which, while still comedic, is a much darker, more serious take on the idea. (You can a walk away from The Producers feeling good, not so with Bamboozled, though they are both funny.)

Network is somewhere between these. It's about an aging news anchor about to be fired who goes mad on live TV and begins "articulating the popular rage", as the young ambitious program director who sees dollar signs in him puts it. He stops reporting the news and just yells his own extreme beliefs at the camera, and of course the ratings skyrocket. This horrifies the old guard at the network, but they are edged out in favor of the network's new corporate masters who want the news profitable. Everyone is happy until the news anchor starts criticizing the parent company on the air for letting investors from Saudi Arabia buy a controlling interest. This prompts the CEO of the parent company to impart the news anchor his religious take on global capitalism as humanity's one true salvation, which he tells him to preach on his show. The newsman does, and the ratings fall so fast the young program director -- who has masterminded the anchor's ascendance thus far -- has him murdered on the air in last ditch attempt to save her career.

The film is widely considered one of the most accurate satires ever. On the surface it's about the co-opting of news media into corporate interests -- it predicted CNN, Fox News, and how the profit-driven churn of the 24 hour news cycle corrupts what was once a cornerstone of democratic civil society. That's the level that most people understand it at, but there is something much wider and darker going on in it. It starts -- not ends -- with the news media, and peels back layers and layers until you see the fucking Shoggoth that is global capitalism and the vice grip is has on the planet. Everyone knows the famous Mad As Hell scene, but the truly great scene in the film is the Primal Forces Of Nature scene, where the CEO explodes in an Old Testament fury about business being the only real Law of The Universe. "Corporate Cosmology" is the term the film's narrator has for this outburst, and it will leave you shaking with horror at its apocalyptic completeness.

This corporate cosmology scene is the most interesting difference between the play and the movie. Like most of the play's other adaptation decisions, it wisely don't try to imitate the film, but instead chooses a radically different presentation: a serene, brightly lit, televangelist-like staging vs. the dark, lit-from-below, cult-like imagery of the film. This initially makes the corporate cosmology feel more banal and less scary, yet it's worth noting that this is the only aspect of the film that the play embellishes, adding a whole new scene near the end where the desperate program director confronts the CEO. A scene like this is implied to happen off camera in the film, where we hear that the CEO simply refuses to let programming take the newsman off the air to save the ratings (which is what prompts them to resort to assassination). The key thing here is that, in the play, we are allowed to hear the CEO's reasons for this refusal, and they feel cleverly crafted for 2019.

I love the movie and have loved it / been terrified by it ever since I saw it during when Bush Jr. was president. That said, I never quite fully understood why the CEO tells the newsman to preach his corporate cosmology to the masses, and then refuses to let programming stop him when the ratings fall. In both the film and play version of the scene it doesn't feel like the CEO is lying to the newsman. He feels like an Illuminati sage laying out How Things Really Are in an attempt to blow your fucking mind so that you're humbled by the cosmic awesomeness of zero-regulation market economics. It feels like an honest sermon... in that the person giving it believes what they are saying about the world. But if they believe that, they also must know that the masses knowing the truth is counter-productive to the system functioning. As the narrator in the film says: audiences hate it when the newsman changes his message to say that we are all cogs in a global capitalist machine. They liked his original message, that we are all individuals who are masters of our own destiny, that this individualism is what makes us part of the great America democracy. Because of course we do. Believing that bullshit is how demi-gods like Mr. CEO Man stay in power. So why would he jeopardize that?

On the surface it may seem like the CEO believed the public would understand, and it would kickstart some sort of revolution towards a more perfect, conscious embrace of capitalist utopia. He does say that he wants the newsman to help him create a "perfect world". Thinking about it now -- and especially having seen the play -- I think it's clear that this part of it is a con. In other words, I fully believe this CEO is being sincere when he outlines his corporate cosmology, but the part where he tells the newsman to tell it to the masses is because he wants him and his show to fail. It may, in the end, by a joke or a game on the CEO's part. He knows the newsman got his following by telling the unfiltered truth about society. So he just gives him the full truth, the truth the audience doesn't want to hear, in order to scuttle the show. And he scuttles the show because, in the end, he doesn't need it. He needs his Saudi deal more, so fuck the show. What's one network in his global empire of business? It means everything to the Machiavellian tv execs at the network, but the parent company has other revenue streams. The CEO simply has a sense of irony. He's thinking something like "This little punk wants to tell people the truth, does he? Fine. I'll give him the fucking truth. I'll give them so much fucking truth it will make their tiny peasant minds burst into flames."

This isn't precisely what the CEO says in the scene added to the play. It's a weird conversation, where the program director demands the CEO tell her why he refuses to take the newsman off the air. He gives her this cheerfully dismissive speech about Marshall McLuhan being wrong, that the medium isn't the message, that really ideas are what matters. The message is the message, dummy. In the end, television is immaterial. It will be replaced by something else. Media is always about transmitting ideology by whatever means are available. That's what everyone wants. Craves. Needs. The medium is always just hardware. In other words, content is king.

That term "hardware" is from the play, and it is one of several deliberate anachronisms the play deploys. At first I thought it was curious that they kept the 70s timeframe of the original movie, given how spot-on accurate it was about predicting modern news media. Why not update it to now? You realize by the end, though, that if you're adapting the actual screenplay of Network -- and indeed calling it "Network" -- you're sort of bound by the heyday of television as a cultural frame for the events of the story. The way they reference our modern television culture is mainly in the staging, how it feels like 70s television for the first half of the show, but in the second half -- when the news anchor gets his own show to vent his rage on -- the entire presentation shifts toward modern shows like Sean Hannity or Rachael Maddow. And, of course, the audience seeing the play becomes part of his show, since the stage is set up as if we were his live studio audience, all being prompted to say we're Mad As Hell. The stage audience plays the role of the TV audience. It works beautifully and feels naturally meta.

All these subtle suggestions about different eras of media, these different types of news personalities and the different ways their audiences are expected to perform and support their personas, as well as the vague but provocative final speech by the CEO, put me in a frame of mind of wonder what would a true update of Network even be? The original movie is about capitalism exploiting extreme ideological content for profit and in doing so creating a horrifying feedback loop that escalates out of control. Before profit-driven 24 hour news networks were a thing, this felt like a terrifying possibility. Today that's simply the world we live in, though its fair to say that conventional broadcast or even cable television is no longer the real frontier where this kind of social phenomenon is mutating in its most cancerous form. Today's version of Network is, of course, something like YouTube, where any and every angry white dude can be Mad As Hell, where the Machiavellian program directors are algorithms that select for ideological extremism because they get the most hits. The one thing about the original Network -- brilliant as it is -- that I never quite believed was the way the masses responded to the Mad As Hell speech. No one would really go to their windows and shout I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going to Take It Anymore. Its too public, too exposing. What people would do is 'like' a video. What people would do is follow a algorithm-curated rabbit hole of suggested videos. What people would do is make their own video.

You could totally do a new version of Network based on this. The analogs are so obvious it writes itself. But if you did you'd have to address the horrific ideological direction it has taken. Part of the reason why the stage production is fun to watch, even in its pitch-black worldview, is because the news anchor's rage mainly articulates economic exhaustion, not white supremacy, which is what it would be today... which we know because we see it happening everyday. Network is happening right now. It's Gamergate. It's the Trump presidency. It's every Youtuber who gets a million hits screaming about the evils of feminism or political correctness. They're all mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore.

Network is still generally regarded as a relevant, scathing satire. However, there is this "out" people have with it, which is to imagine it is only about television. The theater adaptation is mostly well reviewed, though the less-than-impressed critics seem to regard its views on the complete moral breakdown of media as old news.

Is it, though?

I've never understood Network as being about television news media, but about how capitalism fuels extremism, with television news media as its go-to example. The changes added to the theatrical production seem to underline this, encouraging us see television in the 1970s as an instance in a larger pattern of corruption. It is encouraging us to take these observations on television then and apply them to Youtube now, but it wants us to do that on our own. Saying "This already happened. So what?" actively resists the point.

Yeah, it happened. Network today invites us to consider how the fuck we let it happen, since we so clearly saw it coming. The point isn't that it predicted Fox News. We all know that. What we don't know is why it keeps happening, why it will happen forever until the world is destroyed

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