#64 ‘Network’
Ratings, Rage, and the Rise of the Mediated Male Meltdown
Network (1976) is a prophetic howl of a film, a blistering satire about television’s moral decay that now plays more like a documentary. Written by Paddy Chayefsky with venom-dipped precision and directed by Sidney Lumet with grim theatricality, it’s an outrage machine that skewers capitalism, media, and the attention economy before those terms were even in fashion. But for all its brilliance, it’s still another story about an old white man screaming into the void while women and people of color are shoved aside—or shoved off cliffs—to make room for his collapse.
Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a washed-up news anchor who suffers a very public on-air breakdown and, in doing so, becomes the hottest thing on television. His cry of “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” is meant to be a primal scream against societal numbness. And it is—but it’s also the birth of the performative male breakdown as content. Beale doesn’t heal, he broadcasts. His pain isn’t addressed, it’s monetized. And the network execs don’t care if he’s mentally unraveling—as long as the ratings are up.
And then there’s Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen, the only major female character and the film’s sacrificial lamb to the god of critique. She’s brilliant, ruthless, and completely hollowed out by ambition. The film presents her as a symptom of the disease: a woman who thinks in Nielsen numbers, who dreams of a programming slate powered by terrorism and tabloidism. But unlike the male characters—who are tragic, noble, even lovable in their decay—Diana is monstrous. Her drive is never allowed complexity. Her desire is pathological. She’s punished not just for playing the game, but for winning it.
Max Schumacher (William Holden), Howard’s old friend and the film’s aging conscience, gets to moralize while cheating on his wife and delivering endless monologues about integrity. He’s the kind of man the film wants you to admire: disillusioned, nostalgic, literate. He berates Diana for being soulless, but never questions the system that made him her boss, her lover, and her judge. Their affair is framed as a clash of worlds—his crumbling idealism vs. her gleaming amorality—but guess who gets to walk away with dignity? (Hint: not the woman left sobbing under fluorescent lights.)
Meanwhile, Beale’s messianic descent ends not with redemption, but assassination—engineered by corporate overlords who fear he’s finally telling too much truth. It’s a brilliant, cynical ending. But it also cements the film’s thesis: media will consume you, sell you, and discard you, especially if you’re unstable, sincere, or female.
Yes, Network is brilliant. The performances are volcanic. The writing is blistering. The themes are terrifyingly relevant. But it’s also a product of its time—worshipping at the altar of male collapse, while sneering at women who dare to play with the same tools. It asks, “What hath television wrought?”—and then answers, “A mad prophet and a heartless woman,” as if those are the only two options.
4 out of 5 cathode ray tubes set to combust
(One for Chayefsky’s script. One for Lumet’s direction. One for Dunaway, devouring her role like a starving wolf. One for the still-too-real satire of media as spectacle. The missing star? Exploited for ratings, discarded in a boardroom, and never given a severance package—because nobody gets out alive once the camera starts rolling.)
