The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sidney Lumet · a film · 1976 · about 121 minutes · written by Paddy Chayefsky
Mode
Satire of an institution played as prophecy and farce; the network picture turned on its own medium
Mythos
The prophet who hears a voice, preaches, is converted by a higher power and is martyred by those who profited from him; the temptress who cannot love
Phase
From an announcement on the evening news to a killing on a studio set, in three movements: the breakdown, the show, the conversion and its end
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 121 minutes, in English; a documentary narrator at the opening and the close; much of it speech, in speeches built as arias
Register
From a control room slowly understanding what it hears to a communist revolutionary arguing over distribution fees; rain and lightning over the city, green-shaded lamps in a long boardroom
Scale
One network, its executives and its prophet, a nation addressed through its screens
Governing Proposition
A news reader announces on the air that he will kill himself, and the network that employs him finds that his breakdown holds an audience. The wager of the film is that a medium paid for by attention will turn anything that holds attention into a programme, rage, prophecy, revolution and a man’s death among them, and that a satire can carry that law from a newsroom to a boardroom murder without once changing its key.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins as a report. A narrator, in the even voice of a news documentary, introduces Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, a news reader at a network, and before there is a scene there is a frame: what follows is told the way television tells things. Then Beale, on the evening news, announces that he will kill himself on the air. He reads it as a news item. In the control room no one reacts at first, and the film holds on the slow understanding of what they are hearing.
The announcement is the first joint of a spine that does not loosen. It brings the network a rise in its ratings, and the rise hands the news division to Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway, an executive who lives by the ratings books. Max Schumacher, played by William Holden, belongs to the older news; Frank Hackett, played by Robert Duvall, to the corporation above it. Between the three of them Beale’s breakdown becomes a matter of business.
Sidney Lumet directed the film from an original screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky; Howard Gottfried produced it, Owen Roizman photographed it, Alan Heim edited it, Elliot Lawrence wrote the music and Philip Rosenberg designed it. It was made at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and released in the United States by United Artists in November 1976, in colour and in English, about 121 minutes long. There is one version, and the film as released is the whole of the work. It moves in three parts: the breakdown and the first broadcasts, the show that is made of them, and the conversion that ends it.
Movement II
Woken in the night by a voice he cannot place, Beale goes out to say what it tells him. On the air, soaked from the rain, he tells his viewers to go to their windows and shout. The film cuts to the city’s apartment blocks: figures lean out into the storm and shout into it, under lightning. It is the height of the film, and it is double. The people are crying out against what has been done to them, and they are crying out what the network wants them to cry.
Diana makes the prophet a property. The evening news becomes a show, with Beale at its centre and a soothsayer among its features, and the ratings climb. Beale preaches, and at the end of each broadcast he collapses, a man falling as the applause sign lights. The network bills him as a prophet and sells the time around him. His madness, which began as a private ruin, is now a format.
Chayefsky writes his speeches as arias, rising, turning and returning, and Finch plays a man coming apart and lit from within at once. Lumet stages the speeches plainly and lets them run. Some run long, and some say the same thing twice. The film is dominated by speech, and the speech is built to be heard: it is the medium of the satire and, as the story will show, the medium of the network too.
Movement III
Diana’s appetite reaches revolution. An armed band, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, and Laureen Hobbs, played by Marlene Warfield, of the Communist Party, are signed to a programme of their own, the Mao Tse-tung Hour. The comedy is a negotiation: a communist revolutionary argues over distribution fees and her cut, and the Great Ahmed Khan is part of the bargain. It looks like a digression from Beale’s story. It is the gun on the wall.
Max and Diana begin an affair, and she offers him youth. On a weekend at the shore she talks through their lovemaking in the language of programming, and the film’s law reaches the bedroom: everything is a share of the audience, and she cannot feel what is not. The point is made, and then made again, and the Holden and Dunaway scenes are the stiffest in the film.
Max goes home and tells his wife that he is leaving her. Louise Schumacher, played by Beatrice Straight, has one scene, played in daylight in her living room without music, and her grief is complete in minutes. It is the one moment the network’s law does not reach. Max and Louise belong to an older drama, in which a man’s love can be weighed against the network, and the film does not decide whether he escapes that law or only leaves.
Movement IV
On the air Beale exposes the CCA deal. It is the one broadcast that touches the corporation’s own business, and it brings him before Arthur Jensen, the chairman, played by Ned Beatty. Jensen receives him in a long boardroom lit by a row of green-shaded lamps, with Beale seated in the dark at the far end of the table.
Jensen preaches. His voice rises to a sermon and drops to a whisper. The nation, he says, is already a fiction; the real order is the flow of money among corporations, currencies and dollars, the “primal forces of nature”; and Beale has meddled with them. It is the longest speech in a studio picture given to a corporate chairman’s metaphysics, and Beatty makes this one scene the centre of the film. The prophet, who heard a voice in the night, has now heard a higher one.
Beale is converted. He takes Jensen’s cosmology to the air and preaches it, and the audience that shouted from its windows turns away. The ratings fall. The network has a star it cannot sell and cannot fire. The prophet’s rage was only another input to the order he raged against, and his new gospel is the one input that order cannot use.
Movement V
Max leaves Diana. His farewell speech names what the film has already shown, that she cannot feel, and names it a third time. The Schumacher thread ends where it began, outside the law of the network, in a register the rest of the film has not used.
Unwatchable and unfireable, Beale must be killed. In a boardroom the executives settle it as a programming matter, and the instrument is already in place: the Ecumenical Liberation Army, set up earlier as comedy, will kill him on his own set. The satire has moved by small steps from plausibility to an assassination ordered in a boardroom, and it plays the last step straight.
Beale is shot on the air. The film cuts to banks of monitors, where his death is one picture among commercials, and the narrator returns in his documentary voice to close the report. The form has been television all along. Finch was awarded the Academy Award for the part after his death in January 1977; Dunaway, Straight and Chayefsky’s screenplay won as well, and the film was nominated for Best Picture. Fifty years on it is watched less as a satire of 1976 than for what it foresaw.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and the screenplay’s economy, the spine is required at every joint. Beale’s announcement that he will kill himself on the air brings the ratings that hand the news division to Diana; the broadcast to the windows makes him a property; his exposure of the CCA deal brings him before Jensen; Jensen’s conversion makes him unwatchable; unwatchable and impossible to fire, he must be killed. The Mao Tse-tung Hour, set up as comedy, is the instrument already in place. What gives is the Schumacher thread. Louise’s one scene is compelled; the affair, at its length, is not: the weekend at the shore, the lovemaking narrated as programming and Max’s farewell speech make one point three times.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it has held: a medium paid for by attention converts anything that holds attention into programming, and those who run it lose the power to feel what is not a share of the audience. Beneath it lies Jensen’s harder truth, that the nation is already a fiction, that the real order is money moving among corporations, the “primal forces of nature”, and that the prophet’s rage is one more input to it. The film shows the conversion working on its audience at the windows in the rain. What holds it a tenth below the bar of the Epochal Gate: much is told rather than uncovered, and a truth announced at this volume is less disclosed than one left to be found.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The register is satire, feverish and loud, and the elevation comes as exalted dread. The summits are several and exact. Beale on the air, soaked from the rain, sends viewers to their windows, and the cut finds the city’s apartment blocks, figures leaning out to shout into the storm under lightning. Jensen’s voice rises to a sermon and drops to a whisper in the long boardroom while Beale sits in the dark at the end of the table. Beale falls after each broadcast as the applause sign lights. Louise’s scene, in daylight and without music, rises by grief alone. Held at the figure by frequency and kind: long stretches of boardroom satire are clever and level, and some of the height is rhetoric rather than image.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The prophet is partly built. Woken in the night by a voice he cannot place, Beale goes out to speak what it tells him; the people take up his cry; a higher power converts him, in a boardroom made a chapel, to a corporate cosmology; and the powers that profited from him have him killed. That sequence bears weight. Diana is a Mephistophelean figure, a temptress who offers Max youth and cannot love. The particular stays particular: a soothsayer on a network set, the ratings books, a revolutionary hour with distribution rights. What holds it six tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the archetypes are pointed at rather than inhabited, the prophet is a joke the film half believes, and the Faustian frame is spoken rather than built.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is close. Kazan and Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) had already made a television demagogue out of a man’s rage and shown his makers using him. Chayefsky came from live television drama, Marty (1953) among it, and had written a satire of an American institution in an apocalyptic rant in The Hospital (1971); Dr. Strangelove (1964) had set the register of cold farce. The turns are real: the institution itself makes the protagonist, the satire moves from plausibility to a murder ordered in a boardroom and played straight, and a studio picture gives its longest speech to a chairman’s metaphysics. What holds the axis lowest: the stake was moderate, a star picture by a prestige writer on his proven path, and the swerve is one of degree on a road already open.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. A narrator in the voice of a news documentary opens and closes it, so that the whole story is a broadcast, and the last line lands because the form has been television all along. Beale’s appearances are shot as broadcasts, on sets and through monitors, and his death becomes one picture among others on a bank of screens. What holds the figure is how much of the film is a container for speech: a large share of it would keep most of its knowledge on a stage, and the Schumacher affair takes the form of the studio melodrama and fills it rather than using it.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The evidence runs across fifty years, and it is of an unusual kind: the film has been read again as each new form of television arrived, reality programming, the anger of cable news, the politics of rage broadcast, and each time it has seemed to have foreseen it. Jensen’s speech has been read as a description of globalisation, and Beale’s cry has been taken up in earnest by movements of left and right, which is the film’s own subject happening to it. Questions stay open: whether it despises its audience or pities it; whether Diana is a portrait of a generation or a misogynist figure; whether its radicals are satire or racial caricature. Held at the figure because the yield is mostly the world changing around it; formally it gives less on return.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Field: the American cinema of the 1970s, a crowded field. Intrinsic force is real but rhetorical: the film made television, and the corporation behind it, the subject of a studio picture in a register of prophetic farce, and gave a writer’s voice a dominance over a major film that few writers had. It did not reorganise how films are made; its grammar is Lumet’s efficient realism, and its invention lies in the script. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Beale’s cry passed into common speech and political use; the film became the standard reference in writing on media for half a century; its line runs through Broadcast News (1987) and The Truman Show (1998); its screenplay is taught. The reach is wide in culture and narrower in cinema.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty years. The form is whole: one version, as released, and later restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, in revivals, on television and every home format, in the teaching of film and of journalism, and beyond cinema in a cry that is still quoted. The fabric is the charge the axis names. A topical satire of 1976, with its panic over Arab money, its parody of an armed radical cell and its three channels of network news, is fixed to its moment in its particulars. Against that, the particulars have aged into prophecy more than into period, and the film is watched for what it foresaw. The topical surface keeps it a tenth above the bar of the Epochal Gate.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight in the script and the acting. Chayefsky’s speeches are built as arias, rising, turning and returning, and are written to be heard. Finch plays a man coming apart and lit from within at once; Dunaway’s Diana is fast, funny and empty; Beatty makes one scene the centre of the film; Straight’s grief is complete in minutes; Duvall’s Hackett is a corporate animal. Lumet stages speech fluently, and Alan Heim’s cutting keeps a talking film moving. The charges fall where they matter: Holden’s scenes with Dunaway are stiff and the writing there grows explanatory; the speeches run long and some say the same thing twice; much of the camera is serviceable rather than load-bearing; the radicals are written as cartoons.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Louise Schumacher in her living room, told by her husband that he is leaving her, and the Mao Tse-tung Hour’s negotiation over distribution fees, with a communist revolutionary arguing for her cut. One law governs most of the film: everything becomes programming. It reaches into the bedroom when Diana talks ratings during sex, and Beale’s madness, Jensen’s theology and the boardroom murder obey it; the narrator applies it to the film itself. The range is wide, from domestic grief to farce to murder. The strain is the Schumacher thread. Max and Louise belong to an older realist drama, in which a man’s love can be weighed against the network’s law, and the film is not sure whether he escapes that law or merely leaves.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The medium and its audience; the corporation and the market, in the CCA deal and Jensen’s speech of currencies and dollars; the state, as a fiction under money; revolution, in the Ecumenical Liberation Army and the Communist Party, bought as content; the family, in the Schumachers’ marriage; work, in the news division and its dismantling; consciousness, in Beale’s breakdown and Diana’s emptiness; and something like the sacred, in Beale’s voice and Jensen’s cosmology, held as parody. They are integrated through one law. What holds the axis lowest: the public is a crowd at windows and never people, labour beyond the office is absent, history is a line in a speech, and the sacred is a joke the film will not commit to.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.4. Fifty years in which a topical satire has aged into prophecy rather than period; a disclosure that has held, that a medium paid for by attention converts everything into programming; and a making whose weight is carried by speeches built as arias and by its acting.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 7.6. A turn of degree on a road that A Face in the Crowd and Chayefsky’s own earlier satire had opened, with a moderate stake; and a film whose public is a crowd at windows, whose labour stops at the office door and whose sacred is a joke. Just above them, The Living Form at 7.7: much of the film is a container for speech.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 and The Swerve at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.0 from a sum of 96.0, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Network as released in the United States by United Artists in November 1976: the one version, about 121 minutes, in colour and in English, from the narrator’s opening to the closing report. Directed by Sidney Lumet for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from an original screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky; produced by Howard Gottfried; photographed by Owen Roizman; edited by Alan Heim; music by Elliot Lawrence; production design by Philip Rosenberg; with Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty, Beatrice Straight, Wesley Addy, Marlene Warfield and Conchata Ferrell. Four Academy Awards, for Finch, Dunaway, Straight and the screenplay; nominated for Best Picture. No print or script was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and only one phrase is quoted. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the name of the actor who speaks the narration, the year of the film’s entry in the National Film Registry, the screen time of Beatrice Straight’s part, the stages by which the film’s lighting changes as it proceeds, the order of the minor scenes, and the number of scenes and shots and the share of dialogue.