Mad as Hell in “Network” (1976)

0:13 Erin: Diana Christensen is a television executive in search of an angry show, something that articulates the rage of the average viewer in Howard Beale, failed newscaster turned mad as hell Prophet. She seems to get exactly what she's looking for, but in doing so, she reduces political and social discontent to a form of entertainment focused on generating audience excitement and television ratings. On today's episode, we're discussing the 1976 film Network, which seems to suggest that with the advent of mass media, acts of anti establishment defiance tend to be incorporated by the systems they oppose. This is Erin Olanik. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.

0:58 Wes: So, Erin, I've seen Network a few times, but I've never tried to figure it out entirely, never tried to put all of it together because there's so much in the movie. And I was thinking about this sort of typical gloss on the film, which is that it's a critique of news as entertainment and that it's commonly thought of as prescient. So Fox News or other very politicized news networks, or reality TV or daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer. So it's often thought of as very prescient in that regard. But when I watched the movie, it took me some time to figure out what it is I thought was actually being satirized. Right. Is it the news industry? Is it the audiences? Is it rapaciousness of certain executives in seeking ratings? Is it multinational corporations? Is it the very idea of protest? Is it counterculture itself? That's the subject of satire. It's not very clear. And then when I, doing a little background reading, Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter himself, was worried about what he called the lack of satirical clarity in the movie. And that's in part because he tries to fit so much into the movie, but part because I think there's this kind of fractal quality to it where. And this is kind of Paddy Chayefsky's character, where there's one critique and then there's a critique of the critique. And that just never ends. It keeps going down the rabbit hole of self critique. But anyway, I thought I'd start out by. By just asking, what is this movie about? What is it actually satirizing?

2:46 Erin: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that what I was struck by this time around is this idea of the audience as being refracted, which is part and parcel of television, but the only time we really see them is in the live studio audience setting. And Especially, of course, in the famous ending scene, which I always forget actually happens. And then I'm always surprised.

3:10 Wes: I totally forgot about that as well.

3:12 Erin: Yeah. Like, why is that somehow the least memorable part of this? The least memorable, famous part of this movie?

3:18 Wes: It's the most surreal.

3:19 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess compared to other stuff, it's not that shocking. I think it's probably the audience. And I think that this film is a little bit cruel, maybe toward the audience because they're like the missing element, you know, despite the fact that they're brought into the studios. That's really an aberration, Right. To have a live studio audience for a news show and they're referred to. I like the word you use, like fractally. I think I'll steal it and say that the audience is referred to fractally or conceptually, in terms of shares, in terms of ratings. And we see the effect that the show has on them or the success that it's having with the public only through these kinds of inside baseball expressions which are used from the very beginning, from the very opening narration in which we're sort of expected to be familiar with the parlance of network TV executives. I mean, it's presenting this film to us as something that we will enjoy or recognize. And therefore, it's sort of talking up to us. But then there's this vague figure of, you know, the American TV watcher who is being chucked down to. And I think part of that is maybe the snobbery of film versus TV inherent in a movie about this problem. Right. If it's a film criticizing tv, then it's okay, you know, you've made the right choice by buying your ticket and going to see this rather than staying at home and watching whatever was popular in 1975 MASH. I don't know.

4:57 Wes: How is it that we are not the ones, right, chanting I'm mad as hell in the studio audience. Although it would be different, right, if we were watching network in some way, we identify with this critique. And if we suspect as a satire that there's an angry critique there and that we're rah, rah, rah about it, then we fall into that same trap as Howard Beale's audience. Right. I think some people who might know little about the film and know if they know anything, it would be that mad as hell line. Mad as hell. And I'm not gonna take it anymore. Iconic scene of people going to their windows and going out and screaming that out into the night air. Which seems like a moment of Triumph seems like a moment of real rebellion and authenticity, but of course turns out to be bullshit. So similarly, I think we have to be uneasy as an audience of the film and we have to wonder if the screenwriter isn't actually angry at us and if. If we aren't actually being ridiculed even. Even for our engagement with this very film. I had always loved the film and I love Paddy Chayefsky and I love especially the Hospital with George C. Scott. And what attracts me about Chayefsky is his long dramatic speeches that he gives to the characters. And he gives them. He gives those speeches to them pretty indiscriminately, right? Everyone gets to be a mad prophet at some point, whether it's the executive, Frank Hackett or Beal or Max, which you might think of that as a flaw of characterization to give everyone those sorts of speeches. But also it gives it a more dramatic play like quality. And the speeches are exciting and they're suited to satire. So I always love that. But it's a little bit skewed because now when I view these movies, I'm preparing to comment on them and I'm taking notes and I think it takes me out of the more immediate enjoyment unless I do two viewings, you know, one where I try not to think at all about the fact that we're going to record. And then the second one where I do notes. The second time it felt less dramatically compelling to me because of the kind of high level abstraction of the satire. And it becomes increasingly surreal. You mentioned that ending. It gets progressively more surreal as the film goes on, despite the introduction of a romantic subplot and the breakup with the wife and all that. But, you know, this attempt to introduce some humanity. But overall, you know, I still found myself very interested in this recursive or fractal critique of. Critique of critique. Especially with the way in which some attempt at authenticity gets just co. Opted. Every attempt to sort of break out of the inauthentic position gets co opted. So for instance, Beale's had enough and he's been left childish. Widower with a 12 rating and an 8 share shares. That's the word is a line I love because the way it combines real personal tragedy with the overarching question of ratings, you know, the artificial outside of life tragedy of ratings. So he's had enough and it's all bullshit and he takes his stand and threatens suicide. And it's an exciting moment where it seems like something authentic has broken out, but ultimately it's something that excites Diana, the ruthless executive, is interested only in ratings. And yet is excited by counterculture. Is excited by this group of terrorists and their antics. Not because she agrees with their politics, but just because she's excited by the chance to make what she calls angry shows. To do something that will articulate the rage of the public. Give the public an outlet for its rage. Many people today would think of that as a legitimate activity. To give people who are fed up with the status quo. Or fed up with certain systemic injustices, whatever you want to call it, an opportunity to vent that rage. And to do it through news programs, to do it through entertainment. So she co ops, she takes Beal's show and turns it into a ridiculous carnival, right? And she does the same thing with the terrorists. You know, there's the great scene where they're negotiating the TV contract. The terrorists somehow become more interested in TV than they do in their own violent revolutionary activity. That co opting effect is something that really interested me in this.

9:27 Erin: To go back to a couple of things you said. I don't know that the question of Beale's ratings is so outside the personal. One of the main reasons that there is a hierarchy set up here with film over TV is because film is not subject to the slings and arrows of television viewership. And a lot of TV lives and dies by identification with particular personalities. And sort of like an immediate gut response to someone, you know. At a movie theater you have something that's been distilled through a group of people who are trying to anticipate what they think, their audiences or. And of that audience, you know, who they think is going to like this particular film. It is a business and it is geared towards people. But it takes at this time six months to a year to put something together and then to package it for distribution. And it's advertised. Movie theaters sell concessions and they want to sell tickets. But there is a very, very big delay. And I think that that is part of what, you know, Chayefsky, by simply by choosing film as the medium for his message. Though he did do a lot of teleplays and stuff like that is making a kind of commentary. And I think his experience in teleplays is reason enough for him to know what he's talking about. The chosen medium of this story is very much, I think, establishing this kind of hierarchy and saying television is subject to little teeny tiny changes in people's opinion of you personally. Right as the talking head in the middle of the screen. And so I think that Howard, very Rightfully takes it personally. It is personal, I think. But I'd say, like, in general, you know, what you love about the film is what annoyed me this time. You know, I've often said, I think in this podcast before, that I really don't like issue films. You know, that is films of explicit and self consciousness, social commentary. I've enjoyed Network in the past and that's not like a blanket rule. But the speeches this time got very tiresome to me. It was like, oh, God, you know, we haven't even gotten to the Ned Beatty speech yet. There's a sense of like, okay, everybody has to have their little moment, which. And it just was so loud and so histrionic. And I don't mean to be down on it because I think it's very well written and I love Chayefsky, I love Marty and I love the catered affair. And my grandfather knew Paddy Chayefsky, they went to school together. So I like him. But this has aged to me in a way, weirdly. I think that the subject matter is as timely as ever and I think it's beautifully written in a lot of ways. But I think that the presentation of it and the sort of grandstanding of it and even absurd things like Peter Finch's accent sort of coming in and

12:19 Wes: out, really, I didn't notice that. I was so impressed that. But I wasn't looking for it. I didn't learn he was Australian until after I saw it. And I thought, wow. But, yeah, I suppose if you're looking for it, it must come out.

12:30 Erin: Yeah, well, it comes out almost English, I think.

12:33 Wes: I know he does. I looked up in interviews with him, he sounds like posh English with like a hint of Australian.

12:38 Erin: Yeah, he was a real jerk, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that just further evidence with a heart attack.

12:46 Wes: Yeah, right. How is he a jerk?

12:49 Erin: So he was just a terrible alcoholic and womanizer and he broke up. She had responsibility for it too, but he broke up Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier's marriage during this tour of Australia. That's right.

13:01 Wes: I forgot about that. That's the guy. Okay. Wow. What a guy to leave Laurence Olivier for.

13:08 Erin: If you could see him when he was younger, you would understand it a little better. But I think that the. Yeah, obviously this is silly. I have like, my own personal likes and dislikes. I like his performance in this movie. But, yeah, personally not a fan of him. But anyway, so I just. This time that really bothered me. It seemed like it was moving constantly from one high octane moment to the next. And I'm sure that's, you know, that's the point. That's the structure, that's the invocation of television that's happening in the film. But I started to get exhausted with the whole thing and I didn't have much patience for it this time around.

13:45 Wes: Yeah, you were saying that you liked Finch's performance. I do as well. The way he captures Beale's disorganized madness is very cool. The facial expressions. So that's very good. And that character is very good. You were talking about the self conscious social commentary in the, in the film and the sort of tiring speeches. And I think you're right. I don't think it can ever really escape that accusation in a way that it's engaged in the kind of moralizing that it seems to critique. And perhaps that's a, you know, that may be a problem for comedy and for satire in general. There's an anti moralistic strain in comedy, but it goes back to this whole co opting problem that I was talking about. So it wants to break out of the frame of moralism, but it's. That's just a kind of metamoralism or it's just a kind of attempt at a higher moralism. And sometimes that attempt can seem almost nihilistic because it's too good for any particular ethical position. It's too good to side with the audience. It's too good to side with the corporations, with the TV executives. It's too good to side with any particular art form, except maybe implicitly film. So there's that aspect to it. But I think I'm more sympathetic to the nihilistic quality of that. So, for instance, when I hear those speeches, I always hear them as being satirized. Every speech puts the character in a position of being absurd and silly.

15:19 Erin: Well, the Beatty one is most obviously a parody of Beale's particular evangelical style. Right.

15:25 Wes: Yeah. And Beatty is, you know, he starts out, that scene, starts out with him saying that he is a salesman. It's been said he can sell anything. He's very friendly and amiable as he walks him into that very grand conference room with all the little green lights, goes to the other end of the table and then just immediately launches into that routine, which is tailor made. You know, it's a salesman's tailor made routine to convince Beale that he is a higher godlike figure who can instruct Beale on what he should be preaching next. And he even jumps out of character for a second to say, am I getting through to you? It's an incredible speech, but, yeah, it obviously lives within the realm of satire. And at that point, things have gotten very surreal. And ultimately, again, the surrealism will climax in the assassination of Beale. Right. This decision to assassinate him is completely as broken out of any realistic narrative frame.

16:26 Erin: Oh, I think that's done very well, though, because you really get the sense that they have no other choice. In a weird way.

16:33 Wes: Yeah, it does. The plot tries to motivate it, you know.

16:37 Erin: Yeah.

16:38 Wes: In that scene where they talk about the amount of money that they could lose, you know, there's every attempt to motivate that decision because without that, it's very dissatisfying for an audience. But, you know, I still think it is very surreal. You know, the different speeches that Beale gives. Whether it's the everything is bullshit and what does this have to do with the price of bread? And I don't have to tell you that things are bad, that a dollar buys a nickel's worth. I think that's the kind of speech that many audiences will, when they first see it, take that at face value and say, yeah, this is all bullshit. We are controlled by oil states and there's systemic injustice and institutions are messed up. And you could go either way, politically, you could do this in either direction and then react to that grievance as a sort of central organizing principle of one's ethical activity. So I don't think that to many audiences, that will seem, on the face of it, implausible, at least first. But of course, it becomes clear that that is also bullshit. That attempt to step out of the realm of bullshit is only a step deeper into it. And Beale, later on, right, can pontificate after he's been inspired by Jensen. He can just as convincingly pontificate about what's finished is the idea that this is a country dedicated to freedom and the flourishing of every individual democracy is finished. The time has come to say dehumanization is not such a bad word. Great stuff like that. So I think almost every speech in here has that quality of being meant to be taken as bullshit. We just never. We never escape that. You know, on a larger level, you could take this as another, which I've brought up a lot on the show, but as another critique of the problem of representation and its inevitable failures.

18:37 Erin: I think there's a way to do this that's a little bit. If the film wasn't so in love with these speeches, then they would be shorter and. And then it wouldn't be quite so. You know, the fact that it monopolizes the film for such long periods of time. And I will say, and this is. This is gonna be pretty embarrassing, but I'll say it anyway. When I first saw this, when I was, I think maybe 19, something like that, I did not realize that this was a comedy. I thought that Beale was really seeing visions. And I just. I totally did not get it. I didn't get anything about it. And partially I think that was because of my lack of experience with 70s film at that time in my life. And I had almost no prerequisite, you know, for this experience of seeing this film. This is one of the. Actually the first real 70s films that I had seen besides like Star wars, you know, and action films. Far be it from me to suggest how to edit this film or how to rewrite the script, but I think that for me it would work better if the speeches were shorter. It wouldn't feel as though there was so much importance and pretense hanging on them and so much of a seeming right to derail the movie and to get you signed on. Right. And they'd be a little lighter. And I think also, like, tonally, I think the movie's really interesting, but the blackness of the comedy is so black at times that that also doesn't work for me. So I think just like a lighter touch in everything. Which isn't to say that there shouldn't be jokes about these, like, really serious issues, but I think that there should be more of them and that they shouldn't be interspersed with such long periods of seriousness. For me, the best scene is totally that script scene with the Great Ahmed Khan, the script negotiation. I mean, that is just like, laugh out loud hilarious.

20:26 Wes: Yeah. How does he end that scene? What does he say at the very end?

20:29 Erin: He shoots the gun. And then he's like, now let us return to subsidiary rights or something. Something like that.

20:35 Wes: And then he. Well, first he says, give her the fucking overhead claws. Which is a great. It's a moment where the corporate mentality or the tv really, the TV mentality has again co opted or infected what started out as genuine enthusiasm and genuine political commitment.

20:57 Erin: The performance of Lorene Hobbes is one of my favorites in the film. And I love this moment where she's exploding over this distribution clause and how the Communist Party isn't going to see a penny of their earnings until they go into syndication or something like that. Like the Communist Party is going to be a beneficiary of this extremely capitalist exchange over this TV program, which is just hilarious. I Love that element of it. It's really great.

21:23 Wes: Yeah, the irony is great with all that. But, yeah, I think you're right about the film is heavy. I don't think anyone could argue against that. And so it can be hard to. To take in a way. You know, it might even be tedious. Now, this. I never felt this way when I was younger. To me, this sort of hit the sweet spot in every single way. I just. I could watch it through being completely wrapped with complete attention. And like I said, in the current viewing, I didn't enjoy it as much as I did in the past. But I was also trying to think hard about everything that was going on.

21:56 Erin: So I also remember being really disturbed by the fact that William Holden was dropping F bombs and had a sex scene with Faye Dunaway. I was really upset by that.

22:08 Wes: Yeah.

22:08 Erin: And I'm not even a big William Holden fan. But for some reason, that violated a boundary that I didn't realize I had as a, you know, an old movie person.

22:16 Wes: It is. It is weird. You know, even I felt that, yeah, old movies don't mean the same thing to you as to me, but they mean enough. That. That was weird. But I think, you know, with the heaviness comes some interesting ideas. And you. Repeatedly, in the movie, you kind of watch the line between words and actions get compromised. Like Diana practically inciting terrorist acts so that they can be filmed. And then the line between passion and cynicism in the beginning. It's interesting with Diana, when it starts out, it's a little bit hard to tell what she's so excited by. You're asking the question, is it. Is she a communist? Is she pro terrorist? Is she? Or pro guerrilla fighter? You know, freedom fighter?

23:02 Erin: Of course she is. She's. She's Ms. Bonnie Parker.

23:05 Wes: Yeah, right. Or is she completely cynical? And I don't think that question is ever actually really resolved. And that's part of the point of the movie, is that those two things are not as easy to distinguish as one might think. So this total attunement to the pleasures of an audience on the one hand and to getting ratings, and then on the other hand, the attunement to justice and to authenticity and to, you know, even aesthetic pretensions to being an artist, those things are actually harder to distinguish than we might think. And again, going back to that scene with the. With the Ecumenical Liberation army signing a TV contract and being just as ruthless. And when they find themselves tasked with that, they can do it as devotedly and as expertly as I Assume that they're doing their bank robberies. They can be totally absorbed in that new task. Just as they were in the old. And with the same dedication and passion, almost. So those lines break down. And you ultimately wonder, what ought we do for an audience? What does an audience have a right to demand? Again, we can't escape the moralism of this. And the question. It's the old question and dispute between Plato and Aristotle. About what representation does to people educationally, emotionally, psychologically, morally. And what our entertainments and art and all the rest of it ought to do to safeguard that. That's part of what's going on here. And then the question is, do we cater to audiences at all? What are we trying to do? Aren't we trying to make them enjoy themselves? Even if we are literary novelists, you know, how can we even get away from them?

24:53 Erin: Well, I think that in terms of the way to read Diana's motivations. We're told how to by Max, eventually, right? She is tv.

25:01 Wes: TV incarnate, right.

25:03 Erin: And I think that all of her instincts we see throughout the film, they are correct. You know, when she wants to pull the plug on Beale and they don't. You know, when she sees the potential that no one else can see. She's a pure symbol, in a way. She's a vessel. So in a way, she's the only character, really, who has pure motivations. The fact that Dunaway makes this role work, by the way, is, like, remarkable. I think that she's the best part about this film. But her motivations seem to be just what is the best for tv. And where that overlaps with turning a profit for the company. Of course, there's a significant overlap there. But she's not in it for the sake of pure social climbing in the way that Hackett is. So Hackett's just this corporate guy who is trying to work his way up the ladder. And even Max, who's an extremely unlikely and sort of bizarre choice to be the hero and the moral center of the film. In a way. Even he has this whole self concept which is tied up in being a grand old man of tv. And he sells his best friend down the river for a while. In a way, by becoming romantically entangled with Diana. It's like his morals are compromised. Not only because of the fact that he's having an affair, of course. But this idea that he's taken in by tv symbolically. Right. So Diana has a very strange purity of character about this.

26:29 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. And the reason I say that is because, of course, I'm going to. I'm going to recruit that for my own thesis about the collapse between cynicism and enthusiasm. Right. She may transcend that. She may just transcend the distinction between those two things.

26:45 Erin: Sure.

26:45 Wes: Between genuine political or ethical enthusiasm and mere cynicism. Mere being out for ratings. Because it comes back to the question of what it means to be TV incarnate. She's essentially in the. In my notes, I called it the fiction department because I couldn't think of what it was really called. The entertainment division. Right. She's not in the news division.

27:08 Erin: I think she's in programming.

27:10 Wes: Programming, yeah. The news division is separate, and the programs we hear are these cop shows and these other sorts of shows where there's always this crusty but benign character and she sits listening in boredom to that, and she wants to be excited. And of course, there's that one famous part where she says she wants angry shows. And this comes directly. This is part of the core of the idea that comes. I think there's a bunch of Paddy Chayefsky's notes now that are available, and he says something like, the audiences just want angry shows. That is like the sort of core of the movie. Which, again, is a very. It's a very ambiguous idea. And it even speaks to our current dilemma with contemporary social media.

27:54 Erin: Totally.

27:55 Wes: Not even you could see social media. Sort of the culmination of all of this, is the anger of people via social media. Is this a force for good? Is this a force for justice? Or is it total degradation? Is it sort of the logical conclusion of the degradation that TV may represent? I'm not saying I agree with him. If she's cynical, you might think, well, she thinks angry shows will generate more ratings. But you don't really get that sense from her. You get the sense that, you know, if she is TV incarnate, it's not just that she's a cynical TV executive, but she's functionally related to the tastes of the average audience member, which Max takes to be the worst tastes of the typical audience member. Or you might say she's representative of the medium itself and the kind of the form of the medium or the psychological structure of the medium. So I think that purity you mentioned lends itself to her being a representative of something very abstract, the psychology of TV watching the medium and all the things involved in it. But what we should note is that what she seems to be most excited about is the potential for audience excitement, just for the identification with that Particular experience. And you could put a kind of cynical spin on that and say, as I think Max would say, she has to live vicariously through that because she's a mere vessel. Right. She's just a mere TV box, just like a medium would be. And even she herself says she can't do love. Right. All she can do is work.

29:30 Erin: Right.

29:31 Wes: But you also get the sense that the medium has a life of its own and kind of wants to live on its own terms. It's like a virus, infects people. So titillating entertainment is kind of meme etic. It's self propagating and. And she represents that. So she's more than just cynical TV executive. And I think Chayefsky wanted her to be more than that.

29:53 Erin: Well, I like that. And I like the fact too that she consults mediums too. Right? Yeah, that's part of the plot. Just an interesting side note, I'm constantly defending my love of Faye Dunaway to my family, and you and I are both too young to realize this, but did you know that in the 60s and 70s she had a reputation for being a terrible actress?

30:18 Wes: Did she really?

30:19 Erin: An inexplicable. Inexplicable reputation because she got a lot of Academy nominations. She got at least three, I think, and has been in some amazing movies and I think is a wonderful actress. But I think because of her beauty and her that old saw about how if you're a beautiful actress, then people assume you can't act or something like that. And I know that after Mommie Dearest, which by the way, is one of the great performances ever, her reputation really fell. And of course she was difficult and she was a pain in the ass and people should definitely.

30:49 Wes: But the day before this was the Poseidon Adventure. And Holden and Dunaway did that together.

30:54 Erin: Yeah. No, I thought it was Towering Inferno.

30:56 Wes: Yeah, it was Towering Inferno. They did that together. And he really did not like her because she would make him wait for two hours while she took phone calls and did makeup and stuff. And then he eventually pushed her up against the wall or he grabbed her and said, I'll push you through the wall if you ever do that again,

31:11 Erin: or something like that. Which is totally deserved. If anyone wants to see. I highly recommend search YouTube for Bette Davis, Faye Dunaway. So Bette Davis is the reigning queen of Faye Dunaway put downs. She had a terrible experience with her working on a TV movie and she then brought it up at any late night talk show opportunity that she could. And it gets more and More embellished and outrageous over the years.

31:37 Wes: That's awesome.

31:37 Erin: It's hilarious. So, you know, not the most professional actress in the world, but kind of a delight for that reason. I think that's the stuff that Hollywood. Great Hollywood stories are made of.

31:49 Wes: You know, like Finch, she pulls off this manic quality and even a kind of a touched.

31:54 Erin: Oh, totally.

31:55 Wes: The whole thing you said about mediums is, you know, important. Like a very touched, prophetic quality, a religious fervor. And that's, again, why I don't think we can just see her simply as cynical and interested in ratings. The kind of watery look she gets in her eyes all the time. There's a point where she's. I think she's looking at Frank giving some kind of speech, and she has almost like a look of religious admiration in her eyes. But. Yeah, so she pulls this off very well. And there's a kind of sharp quality to her that I think is perfect for the role.

32:29 Erin: So she's an oracle, I think, is maybe what we're getting at. She's an oracle and she consults oracles. But this secondhand excitement, which is, I think, a term that you used, is part and parcel of another great role of hers, of course, which is Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde. Right. And the overlaps and the callbacks are so, so significant that I can't imagine that they were actually considering casting Vanessa Redgrave instead of Dunaway. But Chayefsky said no.

32:58 Wes: Yeah, Lumet did. Yeah.

33:00 Erin: Yeah. Because of the Redgrave's association with the plo.

33:03 Wes: Yeah.

33:04 Erin: The fact that the first time we see her, she's looking at footage of a bank robbery in progress. Right. And gets very excited by it. And that's kind of Bonnie's whole. And I'm sure we'll talk about this movie on an episode in the future at some point. That's kind of Bonnie's whole MO is that she sort of gets off on the secondhand, this vicariousness or this. This charge that she gets out of seeing other people commit crimes, which is kind of like a television viewer. Right. And.

33:31 Wes: Yeah, and early reality tv. But. Yeah. In particular, our enjoyment of violence in films and tv, you know.

33:38 Erin: Right. I think there's a self consciousness to that baked into the script. Like, later, Holden has his callback joke when they're talking about love as being, you know, their many splendored night or something like that. I'm assuming that that was thrown in there because Holden was very famously in a movie, very successful movie in the 50s, called Love is a many splendored thing. So they use that term over and over again, which is a really silly term.

34:00 Wes: But, you know, again, there's the question of what's being critiqued in an audience, Right. Is it because we want to be titillated by violence or romance or Kojak always getting the culprit, as Beale puts it. Everything turning out fine in the end. Romantic Hollywood endings. You could make a list of these things that have to do with either idealization and, well, they all have to do with wish fulfillment. I think that would be the overarching thing. So whether it's violent fantasies or sexual fantasies or romantic fantasies, it gives the audience what they want. In Diana's case, I think it's perfectly commonplace that people enjoy violence in films and in arts. In the arts. But with her, she's doing reality violence. You know, reality TV violence even. You know, one might even call it a snuff film. So there's something about her inability to distinguish between the fantasy and the reality, and then the activity of bringing the fantasy slash reality to the TV screen. So that, you know, you see, even with her romance with Max, that she's. It's a good gag where she's constantly talking about business during every romantic moment and while they're having sex. Yeah, that's pretty funny and all of that stuff. There's no dividing line between these different parts of her life. And again, this brings us back to the question of what are we supposed to think about what's good for an audience or what's bad for an audience? Is it we're not allowed to enjoy violence in the arts, or that it's something about the way violence is represented or, you know, what counts as a good, acceptable experience for an audience from the point of view of this sort of critique. And we also see the suggestion that that boundary is compromised in the love relationship that her and Max try to have. Right? So that Max's idea is that she is really. This is all script to her. So her engagement with life is. She engages with it as if it were just a show. And I think the suggestion is that if it is just a show, you do things because they might get ratings or because they might excite an audience. You don't do them out of your own particular desires. She even has to begin the whole relationship by appealing to the medium, appealing to the tarot card reader or whoever it is. The love story is an attempt at a breakout. Right. If you wanted to look for some opinion on what authenticity would mean, it would mean the success of that plot of getting away from ratings and fantasy and getting back to real life. But of course that breaks down as well.

36:47 Erin: Yeah, there's a collapsing too of a film and TV in the self described scripts of their romance. At one point she references the Blue Angel, a Marlene Dietrich movie. So there is a sense of the ways in which film also is complicit in this sort of pre written scripts for romance. But that whole plot and that self conscious invocation of a script is the most appealing part of the whole film for me. I don't like their romance or anything like that, but I do like that kind of commentary. And the extent to which you can really do that in any film romance or maybe in any real life romance because of the extent to which we are affected by or infected by Hollywood style expectations or plot devices in our own lives where we don't even know to what extent our motives are pure or original or to what extent we're sort of carrying out something that we've

37:46 Wes: seen before acting out a role.

37:48 Erin: Right, right. And the idea that too, that we're, you know, as children sort of watching the movie of the relationships around us and then we repeat that too. Right. So I think that works really well for me. What didn't work this time is Beatrice Straight's five and a half minutes of screen time that she won an Oscar for that performance I think has aged really badly. And that kind of is the most histrionic example, I think of a bad, what I consider to be a bad speech in the film. I don't like that.

38:20 Wes: Interesting. Why do you think that? Because I think she. I thought she did a great job.

38:24 Erin: No, I didn't. Oh no, I did not like that.

38:27 Wes: I honestly think Holden's performance is the weakest in the film, but.

38:31 Erin: Oh, totally. Well, Holden is, is not a great actor.

38:34 Wes: Yeah, I don't think so either.

38:36 Erin: He's a personality.

38:37 Wes: Yeah.

38:38 Erin: No, not even. I wish. You know, it's weird because he's in so many great movies and he's one of those people where you're just like, I can't believe he's been in so many great movies. You know, he's in Bridge on the River Kwai, which is on the AFI top 100 list. He's of course in Sunset Boulevard. He shows up in the oddest places. So may, I don't know, maybe he's weakening it. But I find her. Her histrionics and that's to be a little ridiculous and the overuse of the word. I think it's either love or lover is like really silly to me.

39:07 Wes: Oh, really? Yeah, the whole winter passion.

39:10 Erin: The winter passion, yeah, it's silly. It's a little too scripty. It's a little too written. Also the. The evolution of her feelings towards him in that moment. I think if you're gonna scream that hard, then you can't flip over to ironic detachment that quickly. It's. It can't be done.

39:28 Wes: The speech I'm ambivalent about, but her actual acting I thought was very good. And what I think are the weakest parts of the speech is actually the self referential stuff about this is the obligatory middle of Act 2. The scorned wife throws out the husband scene. So unfortunately when writers do that, that's inevitably self referential about their own struggles with the script. And I know it was a struggle for Chayefsky, but when characters make comments about how they're. What's going on in their lives represents a bad script or something like that, then they are in a bad script. It's not a bad script, but they are in this case in a bad part of the script. So I don't like that stuff.

40:10 Erin: Oh, it's how she hurts. That's what I was thinking of. The repeated thing of how she hurts. She doesn't say that she's in pain. That really bothers me. I find that ridiculous. No, I think you're right about the self referential quality. And it also. He's doing something with her that he should be doing with Diana. So what does he do now that he's with Diana? He goes around and just talks to everybody about how everything is a script, you know, I mean, I think that the leakage of the script talk into this scene is a bit much.

40:36 Wes: It's not that it's not unified. Obviously it fits into the theme in a way, but it feels a little bit tacked on. This whole sudden idea of treating things as a script. You can tell he's struggling with the screenplay, which is completely understandable for a movie like this in the second act, you know.

40:51 Erin: Well, I think this whole scene is. I think it would have been far more effective if they had just kept the wife as a shadowy figure. I don't think you need this scene. He can go back to her and we can feel sorry for her without seeing more of her than when she goes to find that Beale has left when he's not on the couch.

41:07 Wes: It's an attempt to make the movie less abstract and less like a parable.

41:12 Erin: Right.

41:13 Wes: Because it's surreal and abstract and that can. I enjoy what you can do with that. But on the other hand. And it's fine with a comedy, right, because you're just laughing through the oven, the whole thing. But if it's more of a dramedy like this, then you. It lowers the stakes. And so this is an attempt to heighten the stakes and flesh out the humanity of a character when the film is just not suited to that.

41:34 Erin: Right. And this is where I think that the getting bogged down in these moments chips away from the overall sense of this film as a satire and as a comedy. This kind of thing is just a bit much for me. I think he says some interesting things though, in that speech. I think that's. This is where he says that basically because of Bugs Bunny, Diana's brain is not quite functioning on the level that theirs is. Which is funny that she's been raised.

41:59 Wes: Raised on tv.

42:00 Erin: Yeah, right. You know, which is an interesting idea. I mean, it's very icky because he's talking about the sort of intergenerational love between them and how they're not even able to really speak the same language. But I think that there's an anxiety expressed there about the effect that TV is having on people's minds. And in a way, that's an old anxiety. Right. I mean, people thought that novels were bad popular entertainment that would make people stupider. It does speak to a problem about maybe attention spans or something like that that we're now seeing. There's scientific evidence of the fact that people can't focus on things for long periods of time because they're so used to toggling back and forth between screens on their smartphones or. It's simplistic, but there's something true about it, that a generation raised on TV is going to be temperamentally different from a generation raised on film. Film may be different from people who didn't have access to any kind of screen. You know, obviously there's something baked in there that Shayefsky is trying to convince us of, that there is a mental deterioration going on that people are participating in. But I also see that as being self serving and sort of easy at the same time. I don't know.

43:09 Wes: So I think it comes back to what should we be doing for audiences?

43:13 Erin: Right.

43:13 Wes: I had a discussion about Game of Thrones. It was on pretty much pop, which is a podcast by one of my co hosts in the Partially Examined Life. I made a claim which people were not happy about, basically that there were no other than the visual aesthetics, which I. And I really enjoyed Game of Thrones and watched it religiously.

43:34 Erin: I've never seen it.

43:36 Wes: I'm not surprised.

43:37 Erin: Yeah.

43:38 Wes: But my claim was that there's no real esthetics to that kind of thing. It's all soap opera. So there's visual aesthetics, but there's no aesthetics to the script or the story. It's designed to be a soap opera. And what that means is it's designed to satisfy our desire for wish fulfillment. It's almost like a surrogate fantasy. It's an attempt to facilitate fantasy. I want to do violent things to bad people. I want to have love or sex or whatever else goes on in those films. One of the purest forms of this, right, is the vigilante film or the superhero film, which is basically a variation on the vigilante film where you get to imagine that you're a powerful person who has an unlimited right to violence because it's directed towards villains. And in the case of soap opera, it's more subtle because it's about social dynamics. It's focused on the love and power dynamics and the sort of power jockeying of people and all that stuff. That characterization fits the Platonic critique where you're just identifying with the worst possible motivations. So if we want to defend the arts, we have to be able to say that there's something else going on, at least potentially. And if it is, it's aesthetic. So that would mean enjoying a story not just because it's fantasy and wish fulfillment and escapism, but because it fulfills some criterion of the aesthetic which we don't have time to talk about, but involves, on my view, loss. It involves sadness. It involves going opposite direction completely. And part of that is just because that, you know, the focus on aesthetic representation is a deviation from desire and appetite. It's about something else. So that you can always read that sort of critique into a film like this and say, well, this is just a person who wants television shows or movies to be more purely artistic or aesthetic. The danger is, though, that that for a wide audience is just going to be boring. Pure beauty ultimately is boring. Right. If you have a novel with absolutely no plot, so you can't get away from appetite and titillation and all that stuff completely. So it's a difficult problem.

45:52 Erin: Well, this ultimately plays into, I think, what we're talking about with message movies. Right. Would you say then that message movies sort of solve that problem or reconcile those two halves of enjoyment and.

46:05 Wes: I don't think so.

46:06 Erin: You're not really saying message, you're saying.

46:08 Wes: Because the aesthetic and the messages and the aesthetic are completely opposed to one another. The more you make something about a message, the more you moralize it, you undermine it as well. You undermine the aesthetic quality of something.

46:19 Erin: Right, right.

46:20 Wes: If a Shakespearean villain is just a representative of corrupt kings and we got to do something about that, you know, what we have to do, you know, what we're required to do aesthetically is identify with the villain and identify ultimately with loss.

46:39 Erin: Okay, I see. Yeah. Because I'm trying to figure out how this film fits into that.

46:43 Wes: Yeah. So how do we judge this film on its merits as a work of art?

46:47 Erin: Well, I think that the idea of the message picture is a different gloss on what you're saying, but I think it's entangled in some of those same problems, but in a different direction.

46:56 Wes: Right, yeah. So what is the message picture? Maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.

47:00 Erin: A film that is usually a post war film up through maybe the 80s is when they stopped becoming quite so interested in this, really. This is a late example, I think, probably of a message film. Even. So, there was a high point of this in the 50s and 60s, a film that probably has the ambition to maybe lead the culture in a way of thinking about the social situation or some sort of philosophical issue.

47:28 Wes: So it's a social critique.

47:30 Erin: Yeah, it's a social commentary. And the worst ones are typically aimed, or rather the most mediocre ones, because that's. That's the worst thing that a message film could be is mediocre. Right. They're aimed specifically toward middle America. And they're interested in telling those people basically how to think about an issue and to lead the culture in that way. So they're self consciously trying to say to people, this is important and you need to consider these things. And it's very naked. They're not interested in sublimating those kinds of cultural concerns into the plot or letting the plot speak for itself. So examples of this, like Stanley Kramer makes a lot of these types of mediocre films. He made some good films too, but like, you know, Judgment at Nuremberg about the Nuremberg trials, where it has some. Some incredibly ridiculous moments where it's all about how Nuremberg is important and the movie's trying to convince you that this is important and that the Holocaust should never have happened. It's like, well, duh, you know, lots of stuff like that where you could say duh about a lot of issues in the message film, a high tone example of this would be on the Waterfront, which is why I'm not as big a fan of on the Waterfront as I might otherwise be. Where it has a particular message that it is pedaling and it's pedaling it hard. And it's designed, you know, for your moral edification, which doesn't interest me. I'm interested more in pure story and any. You know, you don't have to work quite so hard to bake a message into a film. If it's a well written script, it's going to have certain themes that are going to arise anyway. Right. But there is a tension when you're interested in a serious subject matter. It's easy to ignore thematic stuff in like a pure. In a romantic comedy or something, or something like that. Right. When you're dealing with serious issues, I think that line between drama and message picture becomes fuzzier. I think that there's a connection here between what you're describing as this kind of soap opera element, actually, and the message film, I think, is what I'm a comparison that I'm trying to draw. They're both operating on this kind of placating level. And that, I think is some of the irony of network. So part of what message films do is that you can leave the theater feeling good about yourself. Right. And you can say, luckily, I think the Holocaust was a really bad idea. And, you know, this movie backed me up in that very controversial opinion. And it'll give you a sense of self pride, you know, that you have the right opinion. Exactly, yeah.

50:01 Wes: The power of moralism.

50:02 Erin: Right, right. And so I think that network is engaging in this and it makes it therefore a bit ironic and a bit morally compromised. It speaks to that sort of hierarchy established between film and tv where maybe it skates it because it's saying, well, no, this is about how terrible TV is. So now if you go home and you think, well, I'm gonna stop watching tv, which probably will last for three or four days before you're back on it. It's interesting in that way because I think it's like on the Waterfront. It's a good message movie, but its quality is part of what is so strangely compromised about it.

50:36 Wes: So now I have to withdraw my comment about messages. Not just because I'm trying to do

50:41 Erin: it, just have to be contrary network, but.

50:45 Wes: Or on the Waterfront, but I think I put it too strongly. Right. So you can do social critique and still create a work of art. I think I'm not going to try and defend that right now.

50:55 Erin: No. I agree. I just think it's ten times more difficult.

50:58 Wes: Yeah, it's very difficult. It's easier with comedy because comedy buries the message and it borders on nihilism. It suggests maybe that we don't take anything seriously, even as it's got a. There's some ethical concern embedded in it. So comedy succeeds by making the ethical concern universal, by saying, this is about the stupidity of human beings. Aren't we all stupid? That's another theory I'm not going to defend right now. If it becomes too specific, right? If it's just about, hey, this group of people sucks and we got to do something about that, right? Or the implication is that we have to do something about that, then we. We just veer back into the power position, as you put it, being gratified by the feeling of power we get in moralism, in the same way we might be gratified by the feeling of power involved in watching the good guys kill the bad guys. That sort of titillation, that sort of wish fulfillment. So the only way to transcend that is to escape the power position altogether. Which is why I think comedy is never about power, never lets us fantasize about being in the power position, always decries that position as false. And like tragedy asks us to accept loss, it just does it in a different way. It says that loss is always vanity and that we. That our path to accepting loss is to laugh at our own vanity. So that's the way you do it. And then, so what happens in a satire where the focus is very specific and it might just be someone moralizing about TV has gotten so bad. And you younger generation, you were just raised on tv, you know, how is it not the old man yelling, get off my lawn and. And all that stuff? And it just depends on how well the comedy, you know, the satirical aspect is pulled off. And if there are all these dramatic elements, that becomes much more difficult. And Chayefsky, obviously, from his notes, realizes this, right? This was an enormous struggle for him to try to make this film work. So he just has to do that recursive thing that I mentioned at the beginning, where every critique gets critiqued in turn. So if it's Beale criticizing the bullshit. Ness of things, then ultimately that has to be bullshit itself getting critiqued, and then so on and so forth. If there's any way in which we're called upon to identify with the film's outrage about something, right? Being mad as hell about whatever network says we should be mad as hell about, I think implicitly we're meant to say, well, we've just fallen into the trap once again and we can't escape it.

53:30 Erin: And I think this is good at that kind of instruction. So I've seen many instances personally of people quoting the mad as hell thing or sharing the YouTube clip and thinking that it's meant to be serious.

53:42 Wes: Right, right.

53:43 Erin: But I think that this is where my idea that this movie should be just a little bit funnier because then it takes a pressure off because I think that these movies can be pressure cookers of self aggrandizement or accusation. And the funnier it is, the less pressure there is and the more it has a reason to be a film really besides whatever it's peddling. Because then you can just say, well it's funny, we could just laugh at it. So there's a kind of a self justification of that alone. Nevermind any other consideration in the film.

54:15 Wes: Yeah, well, I think you put that very well and I think Pressure Cooker is a very good description for the film. So let's leave it at that and we'll continue to discuss the Pressure Cooker and our postscript.

54:27 Erin: Sounds good. Thank you, thank you.

54:31 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.