Afterwards, the domestic gods of TV became angry: they wished to sup on the blood of prophets & soothsayers...
No other culture claims as much the sovereignty of television as the United States. This is because no other culture has been so damaged or inundated by television as the United States: americans take their TV quite seriously.
Network is a film in the hollywood fashion of boasting and bragging about its intelligence of highminded clandestine matters that to common people will seem extraordinary and ahead of their time (the kind of 'social truth' films that tend to sweep awards.) In truth, the film's maxims (which now seem so readily evident) demonstrate how notoriously retarded the attention span of the public has been: TV is a religion that vocalizes the repressed desires of the many to unite in congregation with others, on the condition that they remain private individual beings. TV fails as a pseudo-religion because the idolater who inhabits the realm with a million other aggressive pacifists, cannot actually see the Other; and so the television watcher inherits a kind of solitary madness at seeing his own dark face instead: his thoughts are scattered and destroyed along with the ruins of his own shattered, unrecognizable visage. The tube speaks back stupidly, like a rude guest who doesn't listen but keeps yacking away with wild eyes.
TV as a religion is not a new conception, but its disclosure is a latent one: television inhibits the desire to acknowledge what it in action is. The self-importance of Network derives from the fact that it is a film about TV; from its vantage point, Network plays at its privileged understanding of the medium, since as a film it is parallel to, but not contained by, the television realm.
Only cinema may comment on television, because cinema is self-aware. Television by its very nature is incapable of understanding its own force: television only increases, without recourse to reflection. Cinema, on the other hand, has the capacity to pretend at being TV, and yet still be cinema, the anti-TV.
Moreover, no television program in the world, much less in the US, will ever achieve such a dramatic impact on the viewer as to cause him to head to the window and scream out, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" Here we glimpse Network's idealism, and more especially its supercilious gesture to television. (Because only cinema is really capable of causing people to scream out their windows.)
TV doesn't inspire activity or passion: it placates even as it degrades; television causes such a slumber of the mind that even if a man were to shoot himself on television, or much worse, even if he were to transform into a 'mad prophet of the airwaves' and actually tell the truth; even then the audience would clap at his fainting spells, the game show theme music would charge in, and the public would watch with nary an agitated eye nor an uneasy stomach. This is because television supersedes the collective sense of reality by replacing it with a patina of unreality. Cinema will either transform reality or embrace it; television intends to substitute it with an intelligence alien to our own: a kind of information-reality that abjures dialogue and distracts our faculties from memorization. Cinema works to be memorable; television works to be discarded for the next instantaneous feed.
The prophet commands the public: "You've got to shout out, 'I'm a human being damnit! My life has value!'" But the prophet doesn't know what the public does know: human life is meaningless if it can't be turned off...
So the prophet pleads with them: "Turn off your sets! Turn off your screens! Take off your masks!" But the public keeps watching him ask them to turn him off; they don't turn off their sets, they keep watching: the public feels as if they cannot turn off the set; they feel as if the television actually held life dear; as if turning off the television would be akin to killing a man...
So it was that the mad prophet of TV, who spoke out against the Lanes who controlled the airwaves, was the first (but probably not the last) incident when a man was actually killed on television... for having low ratings; that is, he was sacrificed for asserting that life was more vital than life on TV; thence, his TV life was traded for his real life: almost as the pagans had done with their gods, his real life was burned like fat & skin concealing bones to the TV deities, while his TV life was preserved as the authentic article of his existence, as the meat which the pagan would eat in the domestic splendour of his home is kept and stored...
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NOTE: not all TV is television; there is no question that Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, among the greatest achievements in television history, was wholeheartedly a serial work of cinematic eminence. What counts is the closed form of the image when transmitted, not exactly its source medium or causation; by 'closed' I refer to the signature of impermeable craft that a complete work of art exhibits, which by reason of its wholeness is capable of an unmitigated resonance beyond its borders - like a sounding bell, which must be physically faultless & integral; i.e. Walter Benjamin's aura.
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