Network · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Howard Beale walks onto his own set soaked through, raincoat streaming, and tells the country that a voice in the rain sent him there to preach. The studio holds still. Then he hands them the line, and they hand it back, and out beyond the cameras a whole city throws open its windows and howls it into the dark: I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore. Look at what just happened. Nothing did. No one crossed a room or fired a shot or changed a single fact. A man said words, and the saying was the deed.

That is the peculiar motor of Network, and it helps to name the kind of cinema it runs on. In what Gilles Deleuze called the movement-image, the default grammar of classical Hollywood, a person sees a situation and acts to change it; the action settles the situation, and the cutting follows the deed. Network wears that costume. It has a newsroom, a corporate knife-fight, an affair, a murder. But watch how little gets decided by anyone doing anything. The turning points are speeches. Beale's prophecies, Jensen's sermon, the wronged wife's five-minute aria of betrayal — the film advances by people standing still and talking.

Deleuze has a precise name for this. He calls it the reflection-image, or the Figure: the moment action stops being performed and gets transposed into spectacle, oratory, discourse. The deed becomes a figure of itself. Chayefsky, an apostate from live television's golden age, writes nothing but Figures. His characters don't argue, they declaim; they don't decide, they testify. Lumet, schooled in the same live-TV theater, stages them for it. The camera stays disciplined and patient, the room cleared so the language can fill it.

The purest Figure in the film is Arthur Jensen's. Hauled into a darkened boardroom lit like a cathedral, Beale is given a sermon on the "primal forces of nature," the world as one vast interlocking corporation. It resolves nothing in the plot. It is what Deleuze would call a discourse-image: an image that poses a problem it has no power to close, holding the question open as pure rhetoric. You leave the scene converted and unsatisfied at once, which is exactly its design.

Around Beale himself the film builds something coarser and older, the attraction-image, the staging that figures rather than acts. "The Howard Beale Show" is a montage of attractions in the literal sense: a prophet's set, an applause sign, soothsayers and gossip-mongers wheeled on like a vaudeville bill. Beale is no longer reporting the world. He is a number in a variety act, and the show knows it. This is where Deleuze's fabulation comes in, the subject caught in the act of legending himself. Beale doesn't lie, exactly. He invents a prophet and then becomes him, on air, in real time, until the man and the legend can't be pried apart.

The film's quietest invention is visual, and it is the one that has aged into prophecy. Lumet and Owen Roizman start in the grainy, available-light naturalism of 1970s New York and let the image drift, reel by reel, toward the cold frontal flatness of broadcast: symmetrical, evenly lit, addressed straight down the lens. By the end the movie looks like the thing it is about. Deleuze would read this as the image becoming a lectosign, a picture that has lost its self-evidence and now has to be read, a surface rather than a window. We keep watching characters watch monitors, screens inside screens, the signal radiating outward through banks of glass. The world of Network is steadily converted into something like Syberberg's information-space, where everything is a display to be deciphered. The camera stops showing us a room and starts showing us a broadcast.

And someone in the film already lives entirely inside that surface. Diana Christensen is television incarnate, a woman who narrates her own orgasm in ratings points. Deleuze's term for her condition is the consciousness of clichés: a character who moves through nothing but clichés and is lucid about it, fluent in it, incapable of anything else. Diana is the crisis of the old action-image given a face. She perceives everything and feels nothing she can't schedule.

Holding it all at arm's length is the ironic, omniscient narrator who frames the whole thing as a case study, the device Network borrows straight from Sunset Boulevard. This is Deleuze's relation-image at work: meaning assembled not in the action but in the knowing third party, the audience invited to read the fable from above. The narrator's last line, that Howard Beale was "the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings," lands the tragedy as a punchline, which is only possible because we have been made the knowing third all along.

Network descends from a clear line. Ace in the Hole gave it the newsman who farms human misery for circulation. A Face in the Crowd gave it the television-made demagogue whose charisma curdles. Sweet Smell of Success gave it the venom of hyper-articulate media men, which Chayefsky pushes to operatic pitch; Marty gave him the intimate vernacular he then inflated into aria. What Network seeded is, by now, the weather: news fused with spectacle, the on-screen prophet, the ratings logic that eats its own. The film did something specific to the movement-image. It kept the machinery of the action movie and quietly replaced action with speech, deed with Figure, the window with the screen. In doing so it filmed, decades early, the moment when public life itself stopped being acted and started being broadcast.