As I wrote yesterday, I’ll soon begin a new project focusing on the 1976 film “Network,” directed by Sidney Lumet and written by three-time Oscar winner Paddy Chayefsky. It might be a week or two before this project begins, I need to clear up the backlog of projects that I have completed but not brought to market yet in ebook form.

When I get to this project, it will build on some of the writing I did in 2020 about movies in the 1970s. “Network” is, in some respects, the quintessential 1970s film, one where so many strands about this period in history tie together. But it’s interesting that we see it that way now, because Chayefsky did not set out to capture the moment with this film.

Rather, he wanted to tie together the growing influence of television on the culture, what he saw as the death of individuality, and the ways that global capitalism were driving increasing dehumanization. These are themes that have made the film more resonant over time than it appeared to be when it was released. At the time, the movie received significant criticism for its over-the-top treatment of TV news, which people in the industry at the time considered unfair.

It wasn’t an inaccurate critique at the time, but “Network” so accurately charted the curve that TV news was on that its broad satire turned out to be eerily prophetic. Today we can watch “Network” and nod comfortably about the ways Chayefsky got it right — the way news and entertainment would merge, the way populist rage would crowd out public interest discussions and, most strikingly, the way corporate visions of a capitalist, technological utopia would come to dominate everyday narratives.

But I don’t want to get too caught up in the ways “Network” anticipated the present, because I don’t think enough attention has been paid to how well the film captured its time and place. We like to think that we’re in an especially difficult moment in American history, and we certainly are, but it can’t compare to the out-of-control feeling that existed in America between the years 1973 and 1975.

In just a few years, the United States experienced:

  • Defeat and retreat in the Vietnam War
  • An energy crisis unlike any we’d ever experienced
  • Stagflation — a combination of economic stagnation and rapid inflation
  • The resignation of Vice President Agnew over bribery charges
  • Watergate scandal, which led to President Nixon’s resignation

All of this had to be absorbed and internalized by the American people at once. We went from the election of 1972, where Richard Nixon was re-elected with an astounding 62 percent of the popular vote to a complete destruction of his administration in little over a year and a half.

But the times were even more incomprehensible than this, because the culture was still trying to absorb the rapid changes of the 1960s, where women entered the workforce at the fastest rate in our history, divorce rates spiked, drug use was extensive, pornography laws broke down, leading to X rated theaters propping up in most American communities. The gay rights movement was underway, environmentalism was embraced widely for the first time, and, to top it all off, violent crime was at the worst point in our history, far exceeding what we experience in American cities today.

In the most famous scene in “Network,” UBS anchorman Howard Beale spends a full day walking the streets of New York City in a rainstorm. One could easily cross-cut this scene with an early moment from the film “Taxi Driver,” which came out the same year, with psychotic cab driver Travis Bickle driving through the rain splashed NYC streets talking about the crime and filth of the city and hoping “some day a real rain will come.”

Beale arrives at the studio, still dressed in pajamas with a raincoat on top. He gets to the anchor chair and recites this:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows 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, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air's unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our teevees 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. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything's going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. 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 teevee and my hair dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write your congressmen. Because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street. All I know is first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddammit. My life has value." So I want you to get up now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!"

We remember the “mad as hell” tagline now, but not the circumstances that inspired it. I don’t know if people were precisely mad as hell in that moment, more like bewildered and exhausted. I say exhausted, because people do not tend to rebel against the culture they live in, they tend to mirror and embody their times. So people who grew up in a very different age just 10-15 years before were now desperately trying to fit into this new world.

And it made them crazy. They were mad, just maybe not in the way Beale was describing. They were in the middle of a national nervous breakdown, and they were participants in it.

So, this is what my examination of “Network” will be about — the movie as a document of the madness.