Network: The Other Cold War

Kathleen Fitzpatrick | Special In-Depth Section Network: The Other Cold War Kathleen Fitzpatrick Pomona College The movie community is now getting clobbered by TV, and lashes out at anybody in its bewildered petulance. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (320) Film subjects and forms are as likely—or more likely—to be determined by the institutional and cultural dynamics ofmotionpictureproduction than by the mostfrenetic ofsocial upheavals. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (322) In 1961, Newton Minow, the Kennedy-appointed chairman ofthe Federal Communications Commission, issued a challenge to the National Association of Broadcasters: I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. (Barnouw 300) Fifteen years later, another television critic, as equally implicated in the medium as Minow, issued a remarkably similar catalog of the televisual experience; his variant ended, however , in a slightly different challenge to the American people: "Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players." The critic was Howard Beale, martyred hero of Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky's Network. And the challenge was deceptively simple: "Turn off your television sets," Beale cajoled. Though few followed his instructions, Beale captured the attention of a nation. In this paper, I will argue that, first of all, Peter Finch in Network, (1976). Beale's challenge is nowhere as simple as it seems, that buried within this challenge can be found the history of the difficult relationship between film and television. Moreover, I hope to suggest through my reading of the film that the intimate ties of the medium of television—and thus the film industry's depictions of television—to the Cold War make Network's message, and the peculiarities of its timing, as public a statement as Minow's, and one far more ideologically loaded. It is of course a commonplace to suggest a connection between the rise of television and the Cold War. From the beginnings , as Erik Barnouw brilliantly narrates in his history of the medium, broadcasting was connected at its root to American military dominance. During World War II, despite the hold that had been placed on the development of television itself, there was nonetheless in production "a navy item closely related in technology to television, but with a name not yet to be spoken, even in a whisper—radar" (Barnouw 89). The most influential of broadcasting executives were directly involved in the war effort , including "Colonel William S. Paley with Psychological Warfare, and Colonel David Sarnoffwith the Signal Corps"(93). And during the 1950s, broadcasting would come, via the Voice of America and the United States Information Agency, and under the guidance of John Foster Dulles, to be used directly but covertly for military purposes. Vol. 31.2 (2001) 1 33 Fitzpatrick | network: The Other Cold War Television's birth as a mass medium can be linked directly totheendofWorldWarn,1 but so can the beginning oftelevision's difficulties. "The peace that had ended World War II," Barnouw points out, "and with it the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, had also ended the homefront truce between left and right. War had been replaced by 'cold war'—at home, by a hunt for traitors, who might be anyone, even your neighbor" (106-107). By the end of 1947, the industry's second full year of broadcasting, it was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As Barnouw argues, the entire history and form of television were determined by the war and the red-hunts that followed : "These were formative years for television. Its program patterns, business practices, and institutions were being...