The 1976 film Network, written by Paddy Chayevsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, was an early satire of the decay of the news media into just another form of entertainment and cultural manipulation[1] ; it was also, however, a satire of the capitalist corporatized world. Along with Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face in the Crowd, the film was both editorial and prophecy. The first studio to which Chayevsky and producer Howard Gottfried brought the project, United Artists, rejected the film as too controversial; eventually it was produced  by MGM, which in the end allowed United Artists to control the international release.

Network carefully traces the threads that bind business, media and government together into a whole, the assumptions of post-capitalism the ideological glue. Towards the end of the film, television personality Howard Beale (Peter Finch) uses his power to stop a significant Saudi Arabian investment in CCA, the multinational corporation which owns the UBS television network on which Beale’s show appears. Infuriated, CCA chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) summons Beale to his presence to present to him the gospel of the New Capitalism and the New World Order. It is hard to believe that such a scene (or such a film) might be made or released today; as the narrator notes, its message may be “very depressing” (certainly United Artists first thought so). Nonetheless, it continues to ring true.

1. It should be remembered that the most famous scene from the film, the “mad as hell” sequence, is meant to be a frightening example of the ease with which the populace can be manipulated; the character of Max Schumacher (William Holden), the ethical and moral conscience of the film, is terrified by it. [↩]