‘We’re All Mad As Hell Now’—How ‘Network’ (1976) Captures the Anti-Politics of Social Media
- Katherine Cross
- Nov 22, 2022
- 21 min read
Updated: Jun 27
‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ is a phrase that has been raptured up into the popular English lexicon, cited, quoted, parodied, remixed, and dissolved into an ironic confirmation of the satire that produced it. It was the most iconic line from Network (1976), a now-classic film that told the dark tale of a fictional American network news anchor, Howard Beale (played by posthumous Academy Award-winner Peter Finch), whose blooming madness was exploited by his bosses for ratings bonanza. But in becoming a meme detached from its context, it rather proved the film’s point: in the particle accelerator of mass media, even the most potent radicalism can be diffused into mere entertainment.
The line’s endless citation,[1] repeated without irony,[2] obscures the fact that the line represented a grim low point in the movie. Shouting it into the camera, Beale commanded the American public to get out of their chairs and holler the memorable phrase out their windows, shouting to the heavens in pure outrage about ‘the depression, and the inflation, and the Russians, and the crime in the street’ (sound familiar?), leading to angry Americans shouting about their anger into the uncaring night.
It was not meant to be admired, much less imitated. It was a warning. And a particularly prescient one, at that. The film has many admirers—such as Aaron Sorkin, whose own smugly liberal style is but a dim echo of Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s own preachy yet eloquently radical approach. Such fans suggested that the movie predicted the rise of reality TV; in 2000, Roger Ebert, in a reflection on the film, asked if even in his darkest nightmares Chayefsky could have foreseen how his film anticipated the World Wrestling Federation and Jerry Springer, which is almost quaint to consider now.[3] In truth, none of those things were what Network anticipated. The film was about something more abstract than a single TV show, or even a genre. It was about how mass media perverted popular will and commodified it.
And nothing embodies the realisation of its warning quite like social media. Indeed, to look at a platform like Twitter is to see millions of people yelling endlessly about their rage into the endless night of the internet, a vastly more efficient and perpetually running version of people yelling out their apartment windows. What results is a medium that is, despite all evidence to the contrary, anathema to politics.
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The best satires are often the least effective as warnings; the very things that make them popular—memorable, engaging speeches like Howard Beale’s—can outshine the subtler points that make them incisive. While writing this article, I looked up the most popular YouTube clip of the ‘mad as hell’ speech.
