Six minutes from 1976
Ned Beatty, who died Sunday at age 83, appeared in more than 160 movies and television shows, mostly in minor but memorable roles—none more enduring than his bravura performance in “Network,” the 1976 film that earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Beatty was hired a week before filming; his scene was shot in a day, and he appears on screen for just six minutes near the end of a two-hour movie. But his boardroom rant as Arthur Jensen, the chairman of an over-leveraged conglomerate that owns a television network, captured the zeitgeist not only of that time, but of ours as well, laying bare the undercurrents that pit nationalism and populism against globalism and corporatism.
Beatty as Jensen rages at his network’s anchorman Howard Beale for thwarting an acquisition by the Saudis. More than four decades later, it remains one of the greatest and most resonant monologues in the history of American cinema.
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone,” Jensen roars at Beale, the mentally ill mad-as-hell TV host played by Peter Finch. “You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy … . We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale … . The world is a business.”
The movie was intended as a cultural critique amid the fallout from Watergate, Vietnam and stagflation. With its dark satire of TV culture, “Network” is mostly remembered as an indictment of the corrupting temptations of chasing ratings. The film presciently anticipates the rise of reality TV, as well as cable news programming that focuses more on entertaining and agitating than informing.
The corporate consolidation that seemed so lamentable in 1976 when Beatty’s character personified it on the screen feels quaint compared with the conglomerate realities of 2021. There are glimmers of Beale in the personas of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as well as flickers of Jensen in Rupert Murdoch at News Corp.
Few Americans ever learned Beatty’s name. He was not related to the much more famous Warren Beatty, but many moviegoers came to recognize his face. He played Lex Luthor’s sidekick Otis in “Superman,” U.S. Rep. Doc Long in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and Dean David Martin in “Back to School.”
But Beatty’s six-minute turn in “Network” remains his masterpiece, and its message is just as sharp now. “The nations of the world today,” he rails, are IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. If that corporate roster sounds a bit dated, it is difficult to consider its 21st-century version, studded with social media and Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, and conclude that Beatty’s message is any less relevant.