When
a new epidemic is launched and promoted, despite the lack of good
science and good evidence, it is jacked up on television screens. Images
begin to flow:
An
emergency medical vehicle on a street. EMT personnel, in hazmat suits,
load a man strapped down to a stretcher, into the van. On another
street, a man collapses on the sidewalk. We see a quarantined man
sitting inside a huge plastic bubble on a third street. Cut to an
airport lobby. Soldiers are patrolling the space among the crowds. Cut
to a lab. Close-up of vials of liquid. Camera pulls back. Techs in light
green scrubs are placing the vials into slots of a table-top
machine. Auditorium---a man on a platform, wearing a doctor’s white
coat, is pointing a wand at a large screen, on which a chart is
displayed, for the audience. Back to the street. People are wearing face
masks.
These
images wash over the television viewer. Meanwhile, the anchor is
imparting his prepared meaning: “The government today issued a ban on
all travel into and out of the city…hundreds of plane flights have been
cancelled. Scientists are rushing to develop a vaccine…”
The television audience has an IMPRESSION of knowing something. They’re in the flow, the flow of the news…they’re in the images…
---Network,
the 1976 film written by Paddy Chayefsky, reveals what media kings
would do if they unchained their basic instincts and galloped all the
way into the madness of slash-and-burn Roman Circus.
The
audience is jaded beyond recall. It needs new shocks to the system
every day. The adrenaline must flow. The line between reporting the news
and inventing it? Erase it. Celebrate the erasure. Watch ratings soar.
Why
pretend anymore? Why spend countless hours preparing and broadcasting
synthetic artificial news, as if it were real? Does the audience care
about such niceties? The audience just wants action.
The film proceeds from these premises.
Arthur
Jensen, head of the corporation that owns the Network, speaks to
unhinged Network newsman, Howard Beale, who has revealed, on-air, a
piece of the real planetary power structure in a few moments of sanity:
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I
won’t have it!! Is that clear?!… You are an old man who thinks in terms
of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples.
There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds.
There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast
and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational
dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars,
reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international
system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.
That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and
subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled
with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!”
Head of programming for the Network, Diana Christensen, shifts the whole news department over to the entertainment division.
Thus
emerge new shows with soaring ratings: Howard Beale, [Religious]
Prophet of the Air Waves; The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, in which a guerrilla
group films itself carrying out armed bank robberies; and Sybil the
Soothsayer, a Tarot reader.
Diana becomes the network’s new executive star.
There is no longer even a pretense of a need for news anchors to appear authoritative, objective, or rational.
Diana
Christensen is unstoppable. She sees, with burning clarity, that
audiences are bored to the point of exhaustion; they now require, as at
the end of the Roman Empire, extreme entertainment. They want more
violence, more insanity, out in the open. On television.
In promoting her kind of news division, she tells network executives:
“Look, we’ve got a bunch of
hobgoblin radicals called the
Ecumenical Liberation Army who
go around taking home movies
of themselves robbing banks.
Maybe they’ll take movies of
themselves kidnapping heiresses,
hijacking 747’s, bombing bridges,
assassinating ambassadors.
We’d open each week’s segment
with that authentic footage,
hire a couple of writers to
write some story behind that
footage, and we’ve got
ourselves a series…
“Did you see the overnights on the
Network News? It has an 8 in New
York and a 9 in L.A. and a 27 share
in both cities. Last night, Howard
Beale went on the air [as a newscaster] and yelled
‘BULLSHIT’ for two minutes, and I
can tell you right now that tonight’s
show will get a 30 share at least.
I think we’ve lucked into something…
“I see Howard Beale as a latter-day
prophet, a magnificent messianic
figure, inveighing against the
hypocrisies of our times, a strip
Savonarola, Monday through Friday.
I tell you, Frank, that could just
go through the roof…Do you want to figure out
the revenues of a strip show that
sells for a hundred thousand bucks
a minute? One show like that could
pull this whole network right out
of the hole! Now, Frank, it’s being
handed to us on a plate; let’s not
blow it!”
Television in the “real world” isn’t all the way there yet, but it’s close.
In
Network, Diana Christensen personifies the news. She is the electric,
thrill-seeking, non-stop force that is terrified of silence.
She
lives and feeds on adrenaline. So does the viewing public. Nothing else
ultimately matters. Ratings are the top line and the bottom line. The
individual and his thoughts are completely irrelevant.
Howard
Beale, over the cliff, a news man screaming on-air about the insanity
of the news, is perfectly acceptable, because the audience is simply
responding to Beale’s inchoate outrage and their own. Nothing deeper is
explored. What could have resulted in a true popular rebellion is
short-circuited. Beale becomes a crazy loon, a novelty item. Yet one
more distraction.
When,
in a brief interlude of clarity, he begins telling his audience about
the takeover of society by mega-corporations and mega-money, his show
droops. Ratings collapse. Diana is no longer interested in him; she
wants to sack him.
However,
Arthur Jensen, the head of the corporation that owns the television
network, wants to keep Beale on the air, as a messenger of the “galactic
truth” about the beneficial integration of all human activity under the
rubric of global money and global power. He converts Beale to his
cause.
Diana sees only one way out of this ratings disaster: kill Beale; on-air; during his show. And so it is done.
~~~
Network
also shows us the audience becoming actor, player, participant. The
audience is jumping out of its skin to be recognized, courted, and
adored as a mighty rolling force embodying no particular meaning.
Audience
wants to be a star. Audience wants to BE news; audience wants its
actions to be shown on television. That establishes its legitimacy.
Nothing else is necessary.
Diana knows it, and she is more than willing to accommodate this frantic desire, if only her bosses will let her go all the way.
The best film ever made about television’s war on the population, Network stages only a few minutes of on-air television.
The
rest of the film is dialogue and monologue about television. Thus you
could say that, in this case, word defeats image. Which was scriptwriter
Paddy Chayefsky’s intent.
Even
when showing what happens on the TV screen, Network bursts forth with
lines like these, from newsman Howard Beale, at the end of his rope,
on-camera, speaking to his in-studio audience and millions of people in
their homes:
“So,
you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth.
Television’s a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a
carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers,
singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.
We’re in the boredom-killing business… We deal in illusions, man. None
of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after
night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to
believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think
that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do
whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the
tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the
tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are
the real thing. We are the illusion.”
It
is Beale’s language and the passion with which he delivers it that
constitutes his dangerous weapon. Therefore, the Network transforms him
into a cheap religious figure, whose audience slathers him with absurd
adoration.
Television’s enemy is the word. Its currency is image.
Beale
occasionally breaks through the image and defiles it. He cracks the
egg. He stops the picture-flow. He brings back the sound and rhythm of
spoken poetry. That is his true transgression against the medium that
employs him.
The modern matrix has everything to do with how knowledge is acquired.
Television,
in the main, does not attempt to impart knowledge. It strives to give
the viewer the impression that he knows something. There is a
difference.
The
impression of knowing is a feeling, a conviction, a belief the viewer
holds, after he has watched moving images on a screen and listened to a
narrator. THIS is what the viewer prefers. He wants no part of
knowledge.
A
basic premise of modern age is: “everything is (connected to)
everything.” This fits quite well with the experience of watching video
flow.
Example:
we see angry crowds on the street of a foreign city. Then young people
on their cell phones sitting in an outdoor café. Then the marble lobby
of a government building where men in suits are walking, standing in
groups talking to each other. Then at night, rockets exploding in the
sky. Then armored vehicles moving through a gate into the city. Then
clouds of smoke on another street and people running, chased by police.
A
flow of consecutive images. The sequence, obviously, has been assembled
by a news editor, but most of the viewing audience isn’t aware of that.
They’re watching the “interconnected” images and listening to a news
anchor tell a story that colors (infects) every image: “This is
revolution for democracy, created by the technology of cell phones…”
Viewers thus believe something. Television has imparted a sensation to them.
Therefore: a short circuit occurs in the mind.
When
you export this pattern out to a whole society, you are talking about a
dominant method through which “knowledge” is groped and held close.
“Did you see that fantastic video about the Iraq War? It showed that Saddam actually had bioweapons.”
“Really? How did they show that?”
“Well, I don’t remember. But watch it. You’ll see.”
And that’s another feature of the modern acquisition of “knowledge”: amnesia about details.
The
viewer can’t recall key features of what he saw. Or if he can, he can’t
describe them, because he was inside them, busy building up his
impression of knowing something.
Narrative-visual-television
story strips out and discards conceptual analysis. To the extent it
exists, it’s wrapped around and inside the image and the narration.
Paddy
Chayefsky made his pen a sword, because he was writing a movie about
television, against television. He was pitting Word against Image.
When a technology (television) turns into a method of perception, reality is turned inside out. People watch TV through TV eyes.
Mind control is no longer something merely imposed from the outside. It is a matrix of a self-feeding, self-demanding loop.
Willing Devotees of the Image WANT images, food stamps of the programmed society.
The triumph of Network is that it makes its words win over pictures, IN a picture, IN a film.
~~~
A
pandemic, the false pandemic I’ve been rejecting in many articles, is
delivered through video flow and narration. Stacked and cut images.
There
is no challenge to the flow in any basic way, through the intrusion of
actual knowledge, because that would shut down the parade of images and
nullify the reasons for broadcasting them in the first place.
The
old theater adage, “the show must go on,” when adapted for television,
becomes, “the flow must go on.” Once its course is set, there can be no
turning back.
The television audience, imprisoned in homes, rides the river...
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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