“I don’t have to tell you things are bad,” Network’s news-anchor protagonist, Howard Beale, tells us, looking directly at the camera. “Everybody knows things are bad.” He was speaking to the audience of his fictional TV network, but was in reality talking to audiences in 1976. He could have been talking to today’s viewers, though, as in 2025, there’s a growing feeling around the world that things are going from bad to worse.
Entire regions of the world are in danger of being subsumed by warfare, if they’re being consumed by climate catastrophes resulting from the Earth’s H๏τtest decade in recorded history (The New York Times). People are struggling to pay their bills, amid what the International Monetary Fund has described as a global cost-of-living crisis. Meanwhile, the world economy teeters on the brink of its third recession in 16 years (via J.P. Morgan Research). It’s as though this is what Network predicted when Howard Beale’s legendary movie rant first premiered.
Howard Beale’s “I’m Mad As Hell” Rant In Network Articulates How Many People Feel Today
Global Unhappiness Has Never Been Higher Than It Is Today
As Beale so perfectly surmises, things are “worse than bad – they’re crazy.” His speech taps into precisely the sense of despair and anger people would have felt during the global recession of 1975, a sense even more people are apparently feeling even more acutely today. When Beale talks about everybody being “out of work or scared of losing their job”, the US dollar buying “a nickel’s worth,” the air being “unfit to breathe” and food being “unfit to eat”, his words carry more weight today than when actor Peter Finch spoke them in his last – and best – film performance.
If people are looking for solutions, Howard Beale can’t give them one, but he can at least articulate how they feel.
According to Gallup polls in recent years, global unhappiness has risen sharply over the past decade, which is unsurprisingly given the poverty, precarity, warfare, and general political and social instability spreading around the world. If people are looking for solutions to these problems, Howard Beale can’t give them one, but he can articulate how they feel. He famously incites millions of Americans to shout out of their windows in unison, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This sentiment clearly expresses the dissatisfaction a huge proportion of the world’s population seems to feel today.
Network Is Even More Relevant Today Than It Was In 1976
The Movie Touches On Various Themes Of The Present Epoch, From Political Demagogy To Fake News
Network’s Howard Beale rant prefigures the unprecedented economic problems, environmental destruction, and geopolitical instability that the world faces today with astonishing clarity. It even hints at phenomena such as the Covid-19 pandemic, which in a sense did make the air unfit to breathe, and is thought to have been spread to humans via a food market. Yet this rant isn’t the only aspect of a movie that Jim Carrey describes as “phenomenal” which is even more relevant today than when it was released.
The way in which all of Beale’s speeches throughout Network appeal to his audience demagogically in the most direct terms, and the way his messages are manipulated by the TV network he works for, foreshadow the era we live in. Today’s epoch is marked by widespread fears about the rise of fake news, social media monopolies and political demagogues, who are alleged to engineer news content and political messaging according to their own interests. Network brilliantly illustrates how these actions might take place in the context of a major media corporation.
It’s no wonder that the movie is held up as one of the greatest satires American cinema has ever produced. As topical as it is timeless, the significance of Network as a work of film will only continue to grow the more it reflects the world we live in.
Sources: The New York Times; International Monetary Fund; J.P. Morgan Research; Gallup
