This is Not a Psychotic Episode

(A reminder… this is a reposting from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his, the ones/zeros and pixels are mine. And the pictures. Oh, and the subheads. I added those, just to help break up the page.)

“This is a cleansing moment of clarity.”

— Howard Beale, “Network!” (1976)

Network!, in case you’ve never seen it, is the movie that gave us the expression, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

The gist of the plot is that low-rated network anchorman Howard Beale suddenly comes unhinged before his TV audience, and as his apparent mental deterioration advances, his bosses and coworkers try to exploit it for ratings gain.

And for me, seeing Network! it was kind of like getting saved.

I had been a television reporter for less than a year, but I was already sensing something was not quite right about the way things were. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it — and no one seemed to notice it but me.

So, naturally, I thought it was me. And so, for that matter, did everyone else. My ‘attitude problem’ was starting to get me into trouble.

And then, out of the clear blue, along comes Howard Beale with the explanation:

“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! So, turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!”

When the lights came up at the end of the movie, there seemed to be about three of us in the theater who ‘got it.’

The others were looking at each other with quizzical stares: ‘What the hell was that about?’

But no matter. At least I knew at last I wasn’t alone.

Up the Rabbit Hole

Beale’s rants made perfect sense to me. He was the first person in the business, real or unreal (as if in television news, there were a difference), who did make sense to me — the first person who saw it the way I saw it.

There was a hitch, though: Howard Beale was going crazy.

“I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly I had been plugged into some great electro-magnetic field.

“I feel connected to all living things, to flowers, birds, to all the animals of the world and even to some great unseen living force, what I think the Hindus call prana.

“It is not a breakdown. I have never felt more orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth. And you will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

Yeah, that’s crazy, all right. Or is it?

I don’t know what author Paddy Chayefsky wanted us to think when he put those words in Beale’s mouth.

But personally, I don’t think Howard Beale was going crazy; I think he was going sane.

He said it himself: “I just ran out of bullshit.”

Psychiatrist David Viscott, in his self-help bestseller Emotional Resilience, wrote about real-life cases not unlike Beale’s:

“Eventually, there comes a day of awakening and reckoning. Your epiphany is both inevitable and totally unexpected.

“In the moment of your illumination, you finally see yourself as you are and are forced to surrender to the truth lest your false illusions forever obscure your best self.

“Until you reach such a day, you often live a self-deceptive way of life. You try to convince yourself that what you have chosen is what you really want.”

I do know exactly how that feels. I’ve been there myself.

Inside the Looking Glass

Ever see one of those promos where the news anchor dashes to the News ActionCopter — off, presumably, to cover The Big Story?

But as soon as he gets in the copter, they turn off the camera. He climbs back out and returns to his office. The pilot shuts down the engine, and the rotors coast to a stop. There is no ‘Big Story.’ It’s just a promo — an ad that pretends the anchor is taking off to chase down the news. (One of my favorites is one in which the anchor jumps into the copter, looks at the pilot and dramatically points at the sky. Like, where the hell else are they going to go?)

The purpose of these ads is to persuade viewers that anchors are out there every day, in dramatic hot pursuit of the news. Even if they aren’t.

Or the promo where the anchor and some anonymous behind-the-scenes staffer look at a script together? The anchor points to some word on the script, gesturing as broadly as a vaudeville performer so you’ll be sure to notice. Then they look at each other, nod, and dart off in opposite directions.

At one station in New York, they hired actors to play the newsroom staff, because the real producers and editors weren’t as glamorous as the station wanted viewers to think they were.

That scene in Broadcast News — in which news producer Holly Hunter feeds interview questions through a headset to affable but dimwitted anchorman William Hurt — is a lot closer to reality.

But I’m not telling you anything you haven’t figured out for yourself: TV news is, for the most part, just an ongoing advertisement for itself. An entertainment program, loosely based on the day’s events.

That ‘News ActionCenter’ is no more real than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. That’s why they call it a newsset.

Row upon row of monitors cover the walls, but many are just transparencies in cardboard cutouts. Fake.

A sweeping vista of the city skyline ties it all together, supported by pillars of impossibly blue plastic marble or stapled-on brushed aluminum. Fake.

If you could go in the studio, and walk behind the backdrops, you’d see that it’s all just laminated plywood and painted two-by-fours, with extension cords and power strips scattered everywhere. Fake.

The spontaneous question and answer session between anchor and reporter at the end of a live shot? Scripted. Fake.

A reporter walks down the road, talking to the camera and sometimes pausing reflectively, as if looking for a word. Where is he walking to? Nowhere. It’s fake. What’s the word he’s looking for? The one he memorized, along with the pause. That’s fake, too.

You would assume, I suppose, that there is some ‘jumping off point’ at which TV news leaves behind the fakery and melodrama for reality. I think there was, at one time. But eventually, I got to where I couldn’t find it.

“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.”

The Awakening

And I told myself for years that the phoniness and fakery and false sincerity and exaggerated drama were just part of the cost of doing business. The other guys were doing it, too, and doing it more flagrantly than we were. We had to stay competitive. But somewhere in the back of my mind, it kept nagging at me.

I knew it was crap to say ‘reports are coming in at this hour,’ when the ‘reports’ had come in the form of a single anonymous, unverified telephone tip, or a snatch of a conversation picked up off a police scanner.

I knew it was misleading to hyperbolize every trivial complaint or allegation with adjectives like ‘shocking,’ ‘outraged,’ and ‘dramatic.’ (It also meant that when really serious stories came along, we had no words left to adequately describe them. We’d used them all up overstating fender bender car wrecks, broken tree branches, kids getting into fistfights at school, shoplifted cigarettes, and the like.)

I knew it was ridiculous to dress up in heavy parka, scarf, earmuffs and wool hat in 55-degree weather and stand on the side of a central Oklahoma highway and talk about the ‘scary road conditions’ that were ‘paralyzing traffic’ — in Amarillo, Texas.

There was a newscaster in my home town who, according to local reports, briefly became a house painter after his career publicly and spectacularly flamed out.

And when I first heard that, I thought, ‘Wow. What a way end up.’

In retrospect, it seems like not such a bad thing at all.

The paint, after all, is real. The brush is real. The house is real. If you paint houses, you actually paint houses. You don’t apply a few strokes for a camera, then leave while an assistant finishes up, and a promotion team crafts an advertisement describing what a caring and conscientious painter you are.

In fact, I considered becoming a maintenance man at an apartment complex for much the same reason. I had opportunities to do other things (and as it turned out, I took one), but the idea of doing simple, honest work that really was what it appeared to be was appealing after 25 years of often pretending to be doing something I wasn’t, and creating carefully-worded portrayals of a world that really didn’t exist.

And I would like to think that, even though he was a fictional character, Howard Beale eventually had to confront the same reality — that he had been living in a dramatic, exciting, but basically unreal world, and had been trying to fool people into believing that his false world, and not their own, was real.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing.

“We are the illusion.

“So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now.

“Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now.

“Turn them off!”

I turned off my television in February of 1999, and it hasn’t been on since.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)