Getting Beyond ‘Mad as Hell’: Here’s hoping for a civic afterlife

On December 14, Time magazine announced its 2011 “Person of the Year.” And as it’s occasionally done in the past (Remember the choice of “You” in 2006?), the mag opted for a broad zeitgeist capture as opposed to settling on just one person. This time around it’s The Protester.

“Is there a global tipping point for frustration? Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough,” Rick Stengel wrote in Time’s intro to the 2011 “Person of the Year” section.

 

There’s something about that phrase that sounds a tad familiar. Maybe a little Howard Beale-ish? You know: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” from the 1976 Network movie that’s among the most quoted and mischaracterized films of all time.

In the role that won him a posthumous Oscar, Peter Finch was Beale, a news anchor at a fourth-place TV network who was slipping in the ratings and losing his grasp on reality after the death of his wife. When he learned he was going to be fired, the slide from mere depression into psychopathology accelerated, and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who also won an Academy Award, had a field day trashing everything from phony Marxist revolutionaries to old fart/young babe affairs to Saudi Arabian-financed corporations. By the end of the movie, when Beale is assassinated on camera by the Marxist phonies desperate to protect their leverage in their own TV program negotiations, the landscape is littered with the remains of Chayefsky’s broadsides. Nothing and no one is left standing.

Yet our memories of the movie tend to re-imagine Chayefsky’s neutron bomb as a rifle shot targeting corporate greed in general and television in particular. We invoke Beale’s challenge to throw open our windows and shout, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more!” as a kind of declaration of independence, as speaking truth to power. Out from under the thumbs of the oligarchs and into freedom’s wide open spaces. Finally.

Chayefky, who practiced a brand of satire so dark that it would be pure nihilism were it not for its hilarity, must have loved that. No characters in Network were treated with more contempt than Beale’s audience. They’re depicted as the fickle, easily manipulated consumers of the drek Chayefsky satirized, obedient multitudes provoked by a psychopath on TV to declare how mad they were at, well, TV and all the stuff that TV provoked in them.

To be fair, Time  was conscious enough of the pitfalls to steer clear of undiluted (and un-ironic) protest romance. “Because,” as Kurt Anderson puts it in the main “Person of the Year” piece, deciding what you don’t want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say.”

Read the rest of the post on PlaceShakers, where Ben Brown talks about how all the protest romance effects urban design and city planning.