Howard Beale isn’t exactly a true prophet. And he’s not exactly a false prophet. He’s mostly a convenient one.
At the start of Network, Beale (Peter Finch) has bottomed out. The nightly news anchor at a national television network, Beale’s ratings have sunk so low that he’s been told he must retire in two weeks. Despondent, he announces on the air that he’s going to kill himself on the next broadcast. And guess what? Ratings spike. Network executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) sees an opportunity, arranges to give Beale regular ranting time before the camera, and turns him into an increasingly cranky folk hero who taps into 1970s America’s collective disillusionment—a “mad prophet of the airwaves,” to use the movie’s phrase.
Finch is the showstopper—moving from morose sorrow to televangelistic fervor to utter madness—but it’s Dunaway who devours this movie. (Both won Academy Awards.) Driven, brazen, and unscrupulous, her Diana seems like a model for the sleazy business types Michael Douglas would specialize in during the 1980s. There’s a great moment where Diana’s boss (Robert Duvall) says, “We’re talking about putting a manifestly irresponsible man on television!” and Dunaway’s eyebrows rise higher and higher in excited anticipation. Diana zeroes in on her career like a dead-eyed, great-white shark. On a romantic getaway with a married colleague (William Holden), she only talks business. Negotiating with a Communist activist (Marlene Warfield) to get footage from a fringe extremist group, she assures her that she doesn’t care about any of their politics. “I want angry shows,” Diana demands. And in Beale she finds one: “He’s articulating the popular rage.”
This is the false prophet. There’s a certain honesty to Beale’s venting and despair, but it’s also a dead end. In a late-night vision, Beale hears a voice telling him, “We’re not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We’re talking about impermanent, transient human truth.” And so it’s a limited truth. “I want you to get mad,” Beale tells his devoted audience, while simultaneously admitting he doesn’t know what they should do beyond that. There is no direction, no hope, just unchanneled, unfocused rage. As such it’s exploitable—by Diana, by other media outlets, by corporations, and by politicians (as we’ve seen in real life, especially circa 2016).
Beale as true prophet appears for a short while in the film’s second half, when he turns on the apparatus that has created him: TV itself. Berating his audience for their slavishness and revealing the corporate machinations going on behind the scenes, he proclaims that Americans have given themselves over to “the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world.” Looking into the camera, he commands, “Turn them off!” This is speaking truth to power; we know because it brings down the wrath of the network’s corporate overlord (Ned Beatty), who corners Beale in a darkened boardroom and delivers a booming speech about Beale’s insignificance in the larger “corporate cosmology” over which he presides. (Director Sidney Lumet pulls out the filmmaking stops here, framing Beatty amidst glowing green reading lamps that throb like globalist oracles.)
Why, then, do I call Howard Beale a convenient prophet? Because he’s ultimately a tool of Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay. As a narrative, the script is a bit ungainly. There are hirings and firings, rehirings and resignations; ratings go up, down, and around. The relationship between Dunaway and Holden never quite works. Still, those monologues sing—as long as you don’t mind Beale getting yanked around as a thesis-statement mouthpiece (before being harshly dispatched in the movie’s darkest joke) and never really registering as a human being.
