Last week I published the second edition of “Essai by Essay,” my book of essays about Michel de Montaigne. As part of the editing process, I made revisions to nearly all of the pieces in the original book, including the essay “On Solitude” from Montaigne’s first book.
I’m not sure if the new version fully captures this, but I’m beginning to edge closer to Montaigne’s view of solitude, which can be best summed up by these two sentences:
We have lived enough for others; let us live at least this remaining bit of life for ourselves. Let us bring back our thoughts and plans to ourselves and our well-being.
I’ve written many words through the years about what Montaigne meant by his, but what meaning do they hold for me? For me, there are a number of issues converging at once.
Living enough for others resonates. I still have obligations, family and professional, that I cannot step away from … but I can limit how much of myself I’m wiling to surrender. There’s no need for me to perform my abilities anymore. I know my role as a father and there’s no need for me to exceed my professional mandate, to voluntarily take on tasks that others have ignored.
So, I accept that part of Montaigne’s argument. However, the “remaining bit of life” part of Montaigne’s formulation seems to me like a trap. I doubt that I’m anywhere close to the end of life, and even if I were, full-on retirement would not suit me. However, horizons do tend to close later in life. I no longer expect to achieve more or, if I did, to be properly recognized for the achievements.
Bringing back thoughts and values to myself is what I have done with my writing projects, especially over the last three years. It’s interesting that Montaigne also ties this to personal well-being. That might be the most interesting formulation here, but also the most difficult, because personal well-being is increasingly dependent on social constructs.
Technically, nothing prevents us from retreating to a tower with paper and pen, musing on the things we’ve read and seen. But we don’t tend to express ourselves in such a low-tech manner these days, we use technologies. And when we communicate, we express ourselves within a financial and technological system that shapes the boundaries of what Charles Taylor called a “social imaginary.”
We can still find joy in images and words that extol the natural world, even when those images are brought back to us from satellites and spacecrafts. But that is not the world we come into contact with day by day. We have to plan escapes to experience the natural world, few of us wake up each day immersed in it.
So, we live in a financial/technological world that is designed to shape shift constantly, and that world is increasingly difficult to comprehend. The ever-changing nature of this world works to prevent us from having a coherent worldview.
Given this, perhaps the best we can do is to remain true to our core beliefs. Yesterday, I finally got around to watching Terrence Malick’s 2019 film “A Hidden Life,” about an Austrian farmer during World War II who refused to pledge loyalty to Adolf Hitler, even at the price of his life.
At several points during the story, characters remind the protagonist that his personal refusal amounts to nothing—no one knows what he’s doing, people don’t actually believe the oaths they give, his refusal to serve just means another must take his place and his death will to nothing to change the reality of the moment. All of these arguments are true, yet ultimately irrelevant to him. He holds firm to the view that a human being cannot be free without the ability to live to values.
Consider the alternative, holding onto nothing, adjusting your life purely to the rhythm of the world. This is what the financial/technological world asks of us. And these systems have now created alternative narratives about the world we’re moving into:
The financial. The United States is $40 trillion in debt and the situation is getting progressively worse. The Trump administration is asking for a 50% increase in defense spending, last year’s tax cut bill further eroded our tax base, and we are less than 10 years away from the Social Security trust fund running out and massive automatic payment cuts being implemented.
The technological. AI companies tell us that we are only a few years away from a massive leap in capabilities for AI systems that will lead to an exponential leap in the performance of these systems. Elon Musk is saying that people shouldn’t even bother to plan for retirement because money will become meaningless soon.
How can an individual who “goes with the flow” navigate these overwhelming and conflicting realities? Do you protect yourself and build up your personal savings, or will that money be meaningless soon? Do you acquire new workplace skills or prepare for a non-work future? Most of all, do you assume that other people, smarter than you, will solve the world’s great problems?
We cannot trust that these are foundational realities to shape our thoughts around—they are ideological, often self-serving interpretations of facts that force us towards the conclusions that the narrative shapers wish us to follow.
I call this narrative cramming — full visions of the future that try to force individuals to accepting a point of view about the world because there’s no alternative. One form of it is the “Primal Forces of Nature” speech in the movie “Network,” where a corporate executive named Arthur Jensen demands that Howard Beale accept the reality that the flow of petrodollars is the only force in the world that matters.
Narrative cramming is important to the solitude discussion, because belief systems like these make it impossible to step away from the world and focus on our lives. The narratives are intended to disrupt personal choice and opinion. They are screaming at you that continuing with whatever we consider to be our everyday joyful existence cannot continue. The world has bigger, more important plans.
Just having thoughts about the world will not help. Ideology will only give us a guide for accepting or rejecting the given narratives. Ideologies give comfort, but they do not ease the anxiety of an age built on disruption and risk. We can only govern ourselves and that governance is built on values.
Why can’t we also apply our values to politics? For one, the world of power and money does not care about our values, it only cares about our compliance. Especially in the United States, where we live under a binary partisan system, our opinions only matter to the extent that we validate one side and, ideally for them, also help fund their campaign endeavors. Politicians eagerly seek public opinion to win support, but don’t expect to find wisdom in the process, just means to manipulate.
But even more important than the nature of contemporary electoral politics, it is important to understand that values often shift with realities. To be sane in the contemporary world is to hold contradictory opinions about the right steps to take, depending on reality.
Go back to those two scenarios. In the financially-centered scenario, we are indeed in a situation where a debt crisis is looking dangerous and perhaps inevitable. If this is the case, the only rational course is to become a limited government conservative. We need to cut our spending drastically — including to national defense, by the way. And we probably also need to implement a wealth tax to capture the extreme wealth of billionaires, without expecting any new government services from that revenue. The new taxes would be intended purely to keep commitments we have already made. This is, actually, the course New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani finds himself in right now, unable to implement campaign promises like free buses, but desperately in need of the revenue sources he pointed out to pay for the promises.
Then there’s the technologist’s vision. If the AI evangelists are correct and we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution that will lead to abundant wealth and resources for everyone, then everything the American left is considering to improve the quality of life, including the proposals from Mayor Mamdani, are woefully inadequate.
If money is no longer an object, concentration of wealth and power is the only issue to consider. If money is not an object for anything we need, then it should be shared freely, not just within our borders, but globally. People will still find other ways to compete in this new world. We’ll still have religions and regional rivalries. Politics will not dissolve. But money no longer needs to keep score in society, we can do that in other ways. The techno-utopian vision is as close to Marx’s definition of communism that we could hope to achieve. In this future, we won’t need a market (or efficiency) to take care of human needs.
These two scenarios set the terms for the future of American politics, because finance and technology have dominated the world since the end of the Cold War. And these two forces are telling us that, in the very near future, we are facing either an extended period of difficult, painful austerity similar to what the UK has lived through the past 10-15 years — or we’re entering a period of superabundance that, for those who believe in an egalitarian form of government, demands we take the most radical action possible to limit the concentration of wealth and power.
Perhaps there is a third vision of the world out there — or some hybrid of these scenarios, but it’s important to point out that no one left-of-center has come anywhere close to articulating what an alternative future might look like, and time is running out for the left to have a meaningful voice in the future. What the left seems to be embracing right now is a belief that we can continue to muddle through America’s debt problems, incrementally improve government services like health care and education, protect Social Security and restore some level of institutional reliability and competence to our government — and maybe use the increased productivity of the AI era to pay for these small changes in a way that somewhat limits the power and wealth of the technologists.
The closest the Democratic Party came to making this approach sound workable and appealing was in the second term of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton seemed to have moved the Democratic Party to a place where it could benefit from both financial and technological growth. The nation was also running a budget surplus. And the final major war of Clinton’s term, against Serbia, was won without a single American casualty.
The problem with Clinton’s co-optation approach is that it simply doesn’t work. The prosperity of the late 1990s was not enough to put Vice President Al Gore over the finish line and keep these policies in place. The American people preferred lower taxes to balanced budgets and a turn towards technologically-supported business practices like outsourcing came rushing in during George W. Bush’s deregulation friendly era.
The Democrats have only returned to power since then as a result of global catastrophes — the lost Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008, then the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The Democrats have never been rewarded for a stay-the-course approach to American politics. The American people are not satisfied with the status quo and don’t believe in fighting for it, even at the risk of inviting authoritarianism through the front door.
Absent a vision, the people perish. The left’s greatest failure since the end of the Cold War is its inability to articulate anything that approaches an alternative to the dominance of the financial and technology sectors. The left’s naive belief that it could co-opt Wall Street and Silicon Valley—and that money people would never embrace the authoritarian right, even if doing so could massively improve their short term wealth and power—has created the current crisis.
Which brings me back to where we began, in Montaigne’s solitude. An individual cannot reshape the world through their own values or with their own narrative. As Tolstoy argued persuasively, the values of a culture are shaped by the simple, everyday lives and choices of individuals, not the grand plans and campaigns of Great Men.
We have no way of knowing if the grand narratives before us are true and we are helpless to find alternatives absent the ability of political leaders to stop seeking narrow victories and instead focus on articulating an alternate vision of our future. As individuals, we can do nothing but plant our personal flags in the ground.
These flags are built on faith, morality, ethics, hopes and dreams. We don’t plant them with any false hope that they will change in the world. Our best hope is that if people choose to think for themselves and not surrender to what the wealth and power of the world want them to do, our own story will emerge.
Tolstoy believed that this force rose up to defeat Napoleon’s invasion—not the maneuvers of generals or visions of Tsars. And it is what George Eliot had in mind when she wrote of the “unhistoric acts” of those who faithfully lived “a hidden life.”
We cannot expect a messiah or an ideology or a technology to save us. We are left to our values and our stubborn refusal to let anyone speak for us. If we have optimism about anything, it should be in the power of our collective embrace of values, our ability to shut ourselves off from the narratives of the world and stubbornly declare that our humanity matters.
This day began in darkness. I don’t wish to waste words on the disgusting statements by President Trump over the last few days, threatening genocide in Iran. This has been a purely evil war, the first I can remember where every participant has acted in an appalling manner.
There are no good guys here. The war never should have begun. The actions taken by U.S., Israeli and Iranian leaders have been shameful, and none of them deserve to lead their people.
I found myself today not knowing what to write, not just for myself, but In a professional capacity. How could I anticipate the world two months from now, given what was promised this evening? Fortunately, events took a turn for the positive. Forgive me if I’m skeptical—does anyone trust the three countries in question to hold up an agreement for the two week length of the cease fire?
But the lack of catastrophe is a relief. Even before the good news, I had committed myself to spend the evening watching a couple films that seemed appropriate, even if I didn’t know why.
The first was a 2012 documentary by Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf called “The Gardener.” I bought this film as part of a box set of Makhmalbaf films called the “Poetic Trilogy.” I was expected something similar to the other films that I watched earlier, “Gabbeh” and “The Silence,” but this one came more than 15 years after the others.
“The Gardener” is about the Baha’i faith, which was founded in Iran in the 19th century. It’s a fascinating belief system, with the most logical theology I’ve ever come across. Baha’i faithful believe that God is mostly unknowable, but has regularly expressed some elements of divinity through prophets. That means this faith accepts all others that came before it and considers faith to be progressive, one building upon the other.
Even though Baha’i is an Iranian faith, it is not one of the accepted religions of the Islamic Republic. Iranians protect the religious rights of Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. But Baha’i faithful, unofficially believed to be around 300,000 total, have been persecuted throughout the Revolution.
The film takes place at a beautiful Baha’i temple in Haifa, Israel, and Makmalbaf frequently notes the irony and importance of that fact. He uses Baha’i as a metaphor for what has gone wrong in the Middle East and how peace would be possible if the faith’s precepts were widely appreciated and accepted.
But it’s not really a political film. Much of the film literally concerns gardening, or more specifically, how the act of taking care of a well manicured garden is an act of faith. The movie is also—very typically of Iranian cinema—a meta movie, where Makmalbaf and his young adult son debate religion and politics and appear to be making competing movies on the same subject.
It’s not Makmalbaf’s best film, but it was the perfect movie for me to watch tonight.
I followed it up with “A Hidden Life,” Terrence Malick’s 2019 epic about an Austrian farmer who was drafted to serve in World War II, but refused to pledge his loyalty to Adolph Hitler, leading to his imprisonment and ultimate execution. In plot, the movie seems like the ultimate bummer, but there’s something deeply spiritual and moving about the protagonist’s act of resistance.
The movie ends with the beautiful quote from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch:”
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”.
I don’t want to go more deeply into the film for the same reason that I didn’t want to write too much about “The Tree of Life” a couple days ago — descriptions fall woefully short of capturing Terrence Malick’s artistry.
But I also want to let that George Eliot quote sit there and sum up the day. We continue to believe that the world is defined by Great Men who drag us into great historic missions, and mostly force upon us destruction and hatred. The world is too beautiful for them to dominate our thoughts and tamp down our hopes.
Let us celebrate the good people who live those hidden lives. And let us hope for more days of peace.
I devoted Easter Sunday to a handful of religious themed movies, starting last night with Martin Scorsese’s 2016 movie “Silence.” It’s a story about two Christian missionaries in 17th century Japan who arrive from Portugal and take on a mission to find Father Ferreiri, a lost missionary rumored to have given up his faith.
The movie feels a bit like “Apocalypse Now” in its setup, but soon becomes enmeshed in everyday Japanese life in a fishing community of Christians desperate for priests. They step into their role and have faith-affirming experiences. But then the inquisitors start to become a problem.
I won’t give away the whole plot of the film, I’ll just jump to one scene that I think reveals the most important truth of the film. The young missionary, Father Rodriquez, played by Andrew Garfield, finally comes into contact with Father Ferreira, played by Liam Neeson.
It turns out he had turned away from the Catholic Church, partly because of threats of death against his parishioners, but also because he had become disenchanted with the course of Christianity in Japan. Here’s the crucial scene:
Ferreira: Rodrigues, please listen. The Japanese only believe in their distortion of our gospel. So they did not believe at all. They never believed.
Rodrigues: How can you say that From the time of Saint Francis Xavier, through your own time, there were hundreds of thousands of converts here.
Ferreira: Converts?
Rodrigues: Converts, yes!
Ferreira: Francis Xavier came here to teach the Japanese about the son of God. But first he had to ask how to refer to God. Dainichi he was told. And shall I show you their Dainichi?
He points to the sun in the sky
Ferreira: Behold…there is the SUN of God. God’s only begotten sun. In the scriptures Jesus rose on the third day. In Japan… the sun of God rises daily.
“Silence” is based on a historical novel, so I don’t know if this story accurately portrays Christianity in Japan, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of story Michel de Montaigne might share.
Today, I started my viewing with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew.” Pasolini, who was gay and a Marxist, clashed regularly with the Catholic Church throughout his career, but this film was beloved by the Church — it was an extremely faithful adaptation of the Matthew Gospel.
But it’s also a really angry movie and I’m not sure if the church understood the film’s context well. Matthew is the Christ story that focused most of the social justice aspects, and Pasolini puts a heavy emphasis on Jesus’s attacks on wealth (while mentioning relatively little about his non-violence.)
It’s also a fairly amateurish movie. Pasolini was a famous essayist and poet before he took up film in the early 60s. Federico Fellini famously said that he should have stuck to writing. Pasolini’s visual style in this film is clumsy and the acting is atrocious all around. He gets better at these aspects as his career goes on.
The main thing I took away from the film today is the that Jesus story is pretty strange. We know nothing about his life from the time he was a small child until he started preaching around the age of 28. It’s hard to figure why he gathered a following, given that he wasn’t aligned with any church. The disciples seem like a random selection guys who showed up at his sermons, and the image of them all trekking through the Holy Land give the movie a hang-out movie vibe. The scene where Jesus walks on water and meets his disciples at sea is one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes in religious movie history.
Next up after “St. Matthew” was a return to Scorsese, his 1988 classic “The Last Temptation of Christ.” This has been one of my favorite movies for a long time, but I had to downgrade it a bit after watching again today. It might be Scorsese’s strangest film, filled with odd hallucinatory bits and strange casting — especially Andre Gregory (that’s the Andre from “My Dinner with Andre”) as a John the Baptist who seems to be running a hippie commune; and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, in a surprisingly low-energy turn for him.
The movie’s main conceit is the manufactured plotline that Jesus grew up with Mary Magdalene and the two are hopelessly in love with one another, but the fact that they can never be together drove her into prostitution. This pretty much drives Jesus insane, he is at war with his human drives and has guilt over what has become of Mary M. (There’s one other manufactured plot point — that Jesus built crosses before he started his ministry. Most of the historical evidence of the era indicates that crosses were improvised structures and were not manufactured by craftsmen.)
Like “Silence,” this movie is an adaptation of a novel, and explicitly details in the opening credits that it is not based on the Gospels. This gives writer Paul Schrader, a frequent Scorsese collaborator who also wrote “Taxi Driver,” to throw in numerous hallucinatory elements and make Jesus seem much like an existential conflicted protagonist of 20th century cinema. The Scorsese/Schrader Jesus can’t decide what he wants to preach — it’s one love day, then he brings a sword the next, then he leads his disciples to the brink of burning down the Temple in Jerusalem, but then loses his nerve.
It can feel like a strange way to approach the Jesus story, but in fairness to Scorsese and Schrader, the various tales of Jesus are confusing and sometimes contradictory. He does shift emphasis in his sermons rapidly, which always makes me wonder why the disciples just roll with it. He also at times performs miracles readily, but when he could use one to convince non-believers, he refuses. The hallucinatory nature of the story also makes sense when you put it in context of the film’s highly controversial last half hour.
“The Last Temptation of Christ” goes into an extended fantasy sequence towards the end where Jesus, guided by a young girl guardian angel who turns out to be Satan, imagines a domestic life with various women and lots of children. The trippy nature of the film plays into this plot device — we’ve already become accustomed to hallucinatory elements.
The highlight of the hallucination sequence is a moment where Jesus meets Paul, the former persecutor of Christians who is struck by a light on the road to Damascus and basically creates Christianity. Paul, echoing the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevski’s “The Brother Karamazov” informs Jesus that his Church does not need him, that he’s far more powerful as a symbol. Soon after, the Disciples come to visit and inform Jesus of the terrors of the world that resulted from him walking away from his death and resurrection. Jesus then repents, returns to the cross and declares “it is completed!”
Well, I’ve already written too much and have two more movies to go. The first was a rewatch of “Dekalog One,” the heartbreaking story of a young boy’s death and a father’s over-reliance on technology. I followed it up with another story about grief, the 2011 Terrence Malick film “The Tree of Life.” It’s a movie that pairs remarkably well with Kieslowski’s meditation, but I screwed up and watched the extended version of the film, which even Malick advises is not the definitive version of the movie, he prefers the 45 minute shorter cut known as the Theatrical Release.
The longer version of “The Tree of Life” is far darker than the theatrical version, and that’s unfortunate, because the theatrical version is a nearly perfect blend of darkness and light. It’s a very spiritual film, and I think it capped off the day well.
My thought going into the day is that these films might give me some insights on religion and spirituality — so I obviously came into it somewhat receptive. The movies mostly made me even more puzzled about the gap between the physical and spiritual dimensions of life.
I’m happy to announce that I’ve just published the second edition of my Montaigne Project book ESSAI BY ESSAY. You can buy right now on Amazon in either ebook or paperback format. If you have Amazon Prime, the book is free — so please check it out.
Why did I decide to revise the book so soon after its publication? Two reasons—first is that ESSAI BY ESSAY was one of the first self-published books that I brought to market, and for that reason it was bit rough around the edges. There were pagination issues, some of the editing tools I was using created some awkward passages in the text, and since bringing out this book, I’ve brought several more books to market and learned quite a bit in the process.
In other words, this edition simply looks better and will read better. But this edition also reflects new thinking about Montaigne that has surfaced for me since I finished the book. I started using some machine language tools to create my own translation of Montaigne last year, and that made me see some of the essays differently, especially the works early in book one. The first 20 pieces in ESSAI BY ESSAY are my most radically rethought in the project.
I also spent a good deal of time on the Book 3 essays, because they feel most meaningful to me. Montaigne was integrating so many thoughts in those last essays about La Boetie’s involuntary servitude ideas, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism and his highly original thoughts about embodied consciousness and experience. The more time I spend with Montaigne’s later writing, the more work I feel is necessary on my reflections.
The second edition feels much closer to my philosophical stance towards Montaigne. However, I did notice while shaping it that this book doesn’t fully reflect how personal the Montaigne Project was in its 14 year span. Book 2 of the second edition feels closest to my original vision for the book, and is also the most personal.
All of this is to say that I don’t consider the Second Edition to be a definitive work about the Montaigne Project. I will continue to revise the work, putting some of my personality and reflections back in. I’m also hoping at some point to swap out the various Montaigne translations used in the text with my own.
Eventually, I also hope to wrap each Montaigne book, explaining how the first is mostly about La Boetie and his ideas, the second is an elaboration of Pyrrhonism, and the third is where everything comes together in an anti-system, where Montaigne’s lived experience leads to a philosophy of and for one.
After that disturbing blow up on air, you’d think that UBS executives would be thinking “we messed up letting Howard go back on the air, now we need to send him away, get him some professional help, and not let him back in.”
Well, that’s only partly how they responded. Yes, they are upset and yes, they don’t want him back on the air again. But the way this is executed is surprisingly casual.
We are now introduced to Frank Hackett, played by the incomparable Robert Duval, who is described by Chayefsky in the script as “Executive Senior Vice President of UBS, 41 years old, of the new cool young breed of management/merchandizing executives.” Hackett is the character who seems most familiar in today’s world—just your typical MBA looking to make a clearly chaotic network more profitable.
To Chayefsky, this guy is the devil incarnate, which just tells us how much business management theories and language have permeated American culture over the past 50 years. He seems too normal now.
As he walks into the news division’s common area between offices, we hear another character named Zangwill say “so far, over 900 fucking phone calls complaining about the foul language.” Hackett replies “shit.” This is another cultural change since the mid-70s, we take casual cursing for granted. But it was serious business on television in those days, enough to lead to significant fines from the FCC.
A meeting begins in Max Schumacher’s office. Nelson Chaney, the President of UBS, is also in attendance along with Schumacher, Hackett, several other executives, and Howard Beale, who is sitting morosely on the couch. Hackett tells Beale that he’s off the air. But again, no steps to throw him out of the building are taken.
They turn on three televisions to see how the other networks handled the event on local New York City 10 p.m. newscasts. Beale led all three local newscasts. Schumacher informs everyone that a replacement anchor is traveling up from Washington and will take over the show tomorrow. He will make a statement noting that “Howard has been under a great deal of personal stress.”
That’s the closest we get to concern about Howard’s condition. Hackett now gets off a call and changes subject: there’s a stockholder’s meeting the next day, and he wants answers prepared for them. Hackett then tells Schumacher that he has surprised in store for him. “I’ve had it up to here with your cruddy division and its annual thirty-three million dollar deficit.”
This was common in the broadcasting business for much of its history. Television news wasn’t expected to be profitable, it was considered a form of public service that the major networks performed in exchange for having a federal license. This began to change in the 1980s, just as “Network” predicted, and the 1988 film “Broadcast News” did an excellent job of detailing the repercussions of the mass budget cuts that followed.
Schumacher responded to Hackett’s threat by saying “keep your hands of my news division, Frank. We’re responsible to corporate level, not you.” This will become another major conflict in the film in the scenes ahead. For now, UBS President Chaney tries to soothe the disagreement.
Before we forget that Howard is still there, Max tells him that he will be staying at his house tonight. But just so we know this isn’t about showing personal concern for a friend, Schumacher adds “there’s bound to be press around yours.”
These days when someone is fired from a job, HR escorts them out of the building immediately and the fired employee is typically not allowed to re-enter the building. But UBS apparently is going to permit Howard Beale to continue doing his job until the clock runs out.
So he’s back in the newsroom the next day going through his normal routine, as is everyone else. They hold a new meeting, going over that day’s stories. Howard goes to makeup. He comes out to the anchor desk. A stage worker asks him how he’s doing and he responds “I’m still alive.”
The scene now goes to the control room. We see one employee sitting in the back of the room talking to his secretary about her personal life. He asks her how she keeps getting involved with married men. Such a question would be out of bounds in today’s workplace as well. Contemporary viewers will find the next line even less social acceptable. The newscast’s director hears the talk about the colleague, an attractive woman, probably in her mid to late 20s, turns towards her and chimes in: why look on the outside for married men, why not me?
If you think “Network” is being satirical about this, you can look no further than a more serious film of the era—“All the President’s Men—for validation. In this highly solemn re-telling of the Watergate investigation featuring Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, there’s a subplot where the reporters ask a colleague if she is still dating an employee of President Nixon’s “Committee to Re-Elect the President” (also known as CREEP.)
The colleague says no, she just broke up with him. Woodward and Bernstein then coax her to reconnect with this man so she could acquire a list of CREEP employees. While Woodward tells her to forget about the request and apologizes for making it, in the next scene we see her dropping off the list of employees on his desk—the assumption being that she reconnected with (and possibly slept with) her old boyfriend to acquire the list.
What’s clear from the cinema of the early 1970s is that the culture was integrating women into the workplace, but the sexual politics of the old, dying era was still dominant. In “Network,” the sexual joke was made by a man with power making a deniable pass at a coworker. In “All the President’s Men,” the supposed good guys of the story were so driven by journalistic ambition that they would sacrifice the values of a colleague to get what they wanted.
Back in the control room, we see Howard Beale continuing the newscast. Howard Beale announces that he will be leaving the network in two weeks because of poor ratings. At this moment, a man next to the director asks him what he said to their coworker. The two men start laughing. We also see that the side conversation in the back of the room continues.
All of this is going on while Howard Beale decides to announce on the air that on his final broadcast, he’s going to kill himself, blow his brains out right on the air. The control room, distracted by their jokes and soap operas, don’t even hear Beale say this.
But when they cut to commercial, everyone freaks out. People bark questions and orders at Beale. No one bothers to ask him how he’s doing or to offer any direct help or support, they just vent anger at him. While our culture can still do more to fight the stigma of mental health distress, we have no doubt made progress since the early 1970s. In companies confronted with situation like this today—whether the outburst came on the air or in a meeting—the response would be more compassionate, partially for legal reasons.
The decision is made to take him off the air immediately. This leads to stage hands physically trying to remove him from the desk, but not before the camera briefly goes live, showing Beale struggling with them. A “technical difficulties” screen is inserted soon afterwards.
This will be a theme throughout “Network”—characters acting as if the entire world revolved around their concerns, no one all that interested in the world around them or their fellow human beings. Tom Wolfe labeled people of this era the “Me Generation” for good reason.
Network begins on a real day, in a real city, with real network newscasters sharing real news.
We’re told it’s the story of Howard Beale, the anchor of the (fictional) United Broadcasting System. UBS would be the fourth network in a system of three — CBS, NBC and ABC.
Clips of the evening telecasts show us news of Patty Hearst having a court hearing, an energy proposal from President Ford and a broken truce in Beirut. But the lead story, from Howard Beale, is that shots were fired at President Ford in San Francisco.
This actually happened on that day. Sarah Jane Moore, a woman who the Secret Service had evaluated and released in early 1975 and who was arrested the day before on an illegal weapons charge, fired one shot at President Ford before being wrestled to the ground by a bystander named Oliver Sipple.
Howard Beale’s report underscores the chaos and confusion that often surrounds breaking news events:
Police arrested a man with a six-shot revolver in his possession, although there is some confusion about this. Our last reports indicate the attempted assassination may have been made by a woman. In any event, this is the second attempt on the President’s life in eighteen days, and we will have a comment to make about that later on in the program.
While we’re seeing Howard Beale talk about this matter of grave national importance, the voice over is more interested in Howard Beale’s personal life and ratings. This will be a constant theme throughout the film, that the trivia of the TV industry and personal lives is constantly overshadowing the massive social changes underway — as if we need the business data and soap opera to distract us from the horrors of the world.
For a film about television news, the characters in “Network” spend very little time talking or caring about it. Sure, there will be rants and opinions about the troubled times they live in, but it’s a movie nearly empty of political content. Presidents, terrorists, heiresses, they are all the same in the broadcasts that make up the film. When a populist political message takes hold at one point, the real powers that be immediately step in to deflate it — and get back to the real business of television, business.
The news for Howard Beale on this day is not that someone took a shot at the President, it’s that he was about to be fired. The news division lead Max Schumacher informed him of his two weeks notice while taking him out for drinks.
They are two old friends and they stay out late. Max shared a story and joke about the George Washington Bridge that he tells again later in the film — and I’m guessing Beale had heard it more than once before this night as well. The punchline of the joke concerns a cabbie who misinterprets a reporter’s request to be dropped off on the bridge as news that he might attempt to die by suicide.
Beale breaks the laughter by announcing that he is going to die by suicide … on the air. Paddy Chayefsky did not invent this idea. On July 14, 1974, a Sarasota, FL news reporter named Christine Chubbuck shot herself on air seconds after saying:
In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood-and-guts news, TV-40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide.
The film does not cite Chubbuck’s sad case directly, but Schumacher responds to Beale’s gruesome suggestion by telling him that he’d get “a helluva rating” if he did it on air. This leads to an extrapolation of the incident to a new style of news program:
MAX
We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. Hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week-the Madame Defarge Show! Every Sunday night, bring your knitting and watch somebody get guillotined, hung, electrocuted, gassed. For a logo, we’ll have some brute with a black hood over his head. Think of the spin-offs. Rape of the Week….
HOWARD
(getting caught up) Terrorist of the Week?
MAX
I love it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, murder in the barbershop, human sacrifices in witches' covens, automobile smashups. The Death Hour!
The darkness of this passage has multiple layers. We know that “Network” takes place in the real world, so we know that they know about the Chubbuck suicide. They are making light of a real-life incident. Then they are actually describing what television news had become, just repackaged. But the third, ironic level is that the rest of the movie will basically be about enacting these ideas, making real the ideas these old newsmen are kicking around in jest.
And then the opening title for the film comes up: Network by Paddy Chayefsky.
“Network” was released in December 1976, but it truly inhabited the United States of 1973-75. It’s challenging for a movie to directly reflect its times. Scripts are written typically a year or two before filming begins. Production time and editing often tack at least another year onto that. And in the case of “Network,” the film was finished roughly six months before its scheduled release date.
Paddy Chayevsky’s script for “Network” was completed sometime in mid 1975 — but a whole lot happened in the U.S. between then and December 1976. Energy prices stabilized after the OPEC oil embargo ended. The country started to recover from a deep recession. An underdog Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter captured the national imagination with a promise to never lie to the American people. And then there was the Bicentennial Celebration and the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, two events that rallied the country around the flag.
Even television started to look a little sunnier. The top two rated TV shows that fall were the 1950s nostalgia comedies “Happy Days” and its spinoff “Laverne and Shirley.” And a few weeks before “Network” hit theaters, the blue collar underdog sports film “Rocky” immediately raced to the top of the box office.
So, in other words, by the time “Network” was released, its time had pretty much passed. It still turned out to be a significant box office hit and won major Academy Awards — three acting Oscars for Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight, plus Best Original Screenplay for Paddy Chayevsky, his third. But it probably came out at least a year too late to have maximum immediate cultural impact.
Instead, “Network” has grown in stature over time for the way it predicted all kinds of major cultural trends — especially the rise of reality TV and the merging of news and entertainment.
But for someone watching “Network” today, nearly 50 years after its original release, fully understanding and appreciating the film, requires a clear glimpse at the times it reflected. “Network” was a darkly comic film that specifically called out to its era like few films ever have. The 1970s gave us many contemporary films that captured the decade astoundingly well — from “The Conversation” and “A Woman Under the Influence” to “Nashville,” “Taxi Driver” and “Annie Hall.” A good case can be made that “Network” topped them all.
So, to prepare you for the scene by scene discussion of the film ahead, here the key cultural benchmarks of the early to mid 70s you need to understand. And I’ll start with one that is fundamental to understanding the film and the 1970s in general — the economic turbulence of the era.
Heading into the 1972 elections, the country began to get its first real taste of high inflation in many years. The combination of the U.S. leaving the gold standard, spending heavily on the Vietnam War and experiencing a slowdown in domestic energy consumption (while Americans continued to burn gasoline freely in big gas guzzling cars) pushed the inflation rates to around 5 percent. President Nixon was so panicked over the political effect of inflation that he imposed national wage and price controls in the summer of 1971. They lasted until August 1973. To head off an oil shortage during the price controls, President Nixon ended import restrictions on foreign oil. Soon, oil from the Middle East began taking up an increasing share of the national market.
This gave the newly-formed OPEC cartel considerable leverage on American foreign policy and almost immediately, they tried to wield it. Saudi Arabia and Libya said they would not increase production to fill American oil needs unless the U.S. pressured Israel to cede lands it captured in the 1967 War. Rebuffed in that effort, the oil producing nations soon began to limit their exports to control the price of oil. Gas stations started to ration fuel purchases and the first gas lines formed.
And then, in October 1973, forces from Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. The U.S. began resupplying Israel with weapons. OPEC responded by doubling the price of oil and limited supplies. Then President Nixon announced a new military aid package for Israel and OPEC responded with a complete embargo on oil sales to the United States and the Netherlands. Then stagflation set hold — high inflation combined with a deep recession. Unemployment rates spiked from 4.6 percent to 9 percent. It was the worst American economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The oil embargo finally ended in March 1974, but the inflationary effects remained significant into 1976. One interesting side note to the long-term effects of this oil-induced downturn: in 1974 the U.S. and Saudi Arabia cut a deal. In exchange for security guarantees, the Saudis agreed to sell all of its oil in U.S. dollars. By 1975, all of the other oil producing states followed suit. The petrodollar had been created — an instrument that still defines the global flow of currency, and is the backdrop for one of the most famous speeches in “Network.”
Here are the factors beyond the economy that influence the era of “Network.”
Vietnam and Watergate. While President Nixon was dealing with this economic chaos, he was also managing his rapidly disintegrating Presidency as the Watergate scandal spread like a cancer. While the Watergate break in occurred in the summer of 1972, few paid much attention to it that year. The Washington Post broke nearly all of the major stories on Watergate in 1972, single handedly keeping the story alive.
At the same time, the Vietnam War finally began to wind down in early 1973 with an agreement in Paris that would lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Nixon administration believed it had negotiated an agreement that would hand over the war to South Vietnamese forces, but the U.S. was no longer able to prop up the South without a direct military presence.
In 1974, both Watergate and Vietnam rapidly unraveled. Nixon resigned the Presidency in August 1974 and roughly nine months later, Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces.
Crime and Urban Decay. Violent crime rates surged throughout the 1960s and leveled off a bit in the early 1970s. But they began to spike again as the recession took root, especially in New York City.
This was exacerbated by a deteriorating fiscal condition in New York City. The new President Gerald Ford refused to assist the City with a bailout after city bonds failed to receive any bids at an auction. This led to the famous New York Daily News headline. Ford to City: Drop Dead.
The Women’s Movement. Between 1964-1974, the number of women in the U.S. workforce increased by 43 percent. By 1977, roughly 60 percent of all women were employed outside of the home. This was also accompanied by a doubling of the U.S. divorce rate from the early 1960s to the late 1970s.
The Patty Hearst case. One of the most bizarre incidents of the early 1970s involved a Cal-Berkeley student named Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Patty Hearst was kidnapped in her home by members of a political sect called the Symbionese Liberation Army, or the SLA. Hearst was tortured by her captors, and was eventually broken — leading her to adopt SLA ideology.
She accompanied her captors on two bank robberies and made a public statement in support of the SLA during one of the heists. Hearst was eventually captured with other SLA members, put on trial and convicted for the crimes she committed. In 1979, President Carter commuted the remainder of her sentence.
While Patty Hearst is just mentioned in passing in the film, there is an SLA-like terror group that takes up major space in the film and it’s important to understand the reference before you see it.
There is so much more about the 1970s that I could toss into this introduction, but I think this is enough to get any viewer started on the film with the proper grounding. It might help to know a little about TV news and broadcasting in general from this era — but in truth, “Network” veers from television reality pretty wildly at times, so it can actually weaken the viewing experience to focus on its accuracy regarding TV news of that era.
It also might help to know that while “Network” takes dead aim at broadcast journalism, in some ways the 1970s was a golden age for journalism — especially considering the ways that reporters uncovered key details of the Watergate scandal. In the Academy Awards that year, “Network” faced off not only against “Rocky” and “Taxi Driver,” but also against “All the President’s Men,” a chronicle of Woodward and Bernstein and their remarkable Washington Post reporting.
The fact that the country could eagerly embrace all four of these films — the gritty, urban existentialism of “Taxi Driver,” the scandal-uncovering triumphs of “All the President’s Men,” the American Dream pugilism of “Rocky” and the black comic social commentary of “Network” demonstrates the complexity of the era. America lived through trauma after trauma in the early 1970s, yet somehow came out of it as optimistic as ever.
It was a country that could shout “I’m mad as hell” and “Yo Adrian” on the same weekend, without contradiction.
The other writing project staring me in the face is the one about “Network.” Actually, there’s an even more daunting third project out there that I don’t even want to write about, but let’s not go there right now.
My preparation for the “Network” project so far has been to re-immerse myself in the culture of 1973-76. I’ve rewatched not just “Network,” but also “All the President’s Men,” “Nashville” and “Taxi Driver.” I’ve also started reading some books about the oil crisis and the popular reaction to it.
There’s something surprising that’s coming up for me, though. My memories of the 1970s as a child were of Nixon’s demise due to Watergate, Vietnam and the oil-crisis induced recession, and a short-term restoration of the Democratic Party after the shellacking the party took in the 1972 elections. But the literature of the era — and the films, for that matter — tell a different story.
Everything in these films hints at the America to come.
From “All the President’s Men,” the massive potential for a President to raise nearly unlimited money and to find unique uses for abundant campaign resources.
“Taxi Driver” raises two issues that will come to dominate American politics: the dark power of vigilante justice as a racist response to urban violence, and the forces set loose on the culture by the sexual revolution, especially the confluence of children and sex trafficking.
“Nashville” features a bizarre disembodied political candidate who communicates via a car loudspeaker spouting populist phrases: not unlike leaders taking to X or Truth Social to declare everything from personal grievances to war updates.
And then there’s “Network,” where so many cultural forces align at once that I need to take a full series to detail them.
My point isn’t that what we are living through right now is a direct echo of the 1970s, it’s something stranger. Nearly everything we are experiencing now feels like a direct extrapolation of forces let loose in that era, forces that few people in America understood as they were experiencing them, but a handful of remarkably adept filmmakers were able to capture in films that have become classics.
It’s all a powerful argument for storytellers to askew period pieces and fantasy genres. Focus on the world you see as it exists — you’ll be surprised just how much you capture.
Now that my Montaigne Project URL is back online, perhaps I should start by discussing what’s up with “Essai by Essay.” I’ve recently pulled the first edition of the book from all retail channels in anticipation of my new version. Originally I thought this edition would include just some minor pagination updates and minor editing.
But the more I get into the project, the more I actively dislike the first edition of the book. I’m doing fairly extensive editing across the essays and expect to be engaged in this work for a couple more weeks, at least.
There’s something else that’s bothering me as well, however. Somewhere along the line, my writing about Montaigne lost me and no longer fits the premise of my introduction. I think it’s right for me to shift my analysis of Montaigne as I learn more, but it’s a mistake to turn the book into purely a chapter-by-chapter analysis of his writing.
This may not be something I can address in the second edition, I might just be better off creating a book that works on its existing terms. At some point, however, I need to return to the original purpose of the project, using Montaigne’s model to bring my own thoughts and experiences to light.
That does not mean another 107 day Montaigne marathon is in order. But a better balance needs to be struck, perhaps in a future third edition.
My next Movies Scene By Scene project will be the Sidney Lumet directed film “Network” by Paddy Chayevsky. It’s not only a brilliant, prophetic film, but also an essential piece of 1970s cultural history, harkening to a time much like ours. boxd.it/1VqG
I am bringing back my old URL for My Montaigne Project so that I can continue work on a couple of projects.
The first is the second edition of my book “Essai by Essay.” I’m already deep into the editing process on the new edition, but I think it would be helpful to slow down a little and workshop some of the chapter revisions, so I’m going to do that on the blog.
The second is my new “Network” project, which will include not just my scene-by-scene approach to the film, but also a cultural history of the early 70s, which I think is essential to attaining a full understanding of the film.
These projects will happen in conjunction, and will likely span over several weeks. We’ll see what comes after all.
By the way, I’ve also converted my danielmconley.com site into an author’s site that I’ll use primarily to promote my books. That URL does have a blog attached to it, but I will likely use it only to announce new publications and, from time to time, link to content here.