I salute Itzkoff for zooming in at book length on Network, a movie that—as he writes—“used the resources of one mass medium [cinema] to indict another [television] and, beyond it, the degradation and emptiness of contemporary American life.” Large claims can be made for this rather shaggy and confused piece of filmmaking, precisely because it scarcely knows what it is: jeremiad or black comedy or … ? It’s interesting to learn from Mad as Hell that Network was not universally acclaimed upon its release, in 1976. Indeed, it got right up the noses of some reviewers. In New York magazine, John Simon complained of the film’s “sanctimonious smugness and holier-than-thou sententiousness.” Pauline Kael gave it a stinker of a review, as did Frank Rich. They weren’t entirely wrong, these critics, but from a distance of almost four decades, we can see that they had—to use an expression of Christopher Ricks’s—got “hold of the right thing by the wrong end.” In its whirling gestures, its madness and bullshit philosophy, Network opened something up, caused a kind of visionary rent in the fabric. On the other side was the future.

Network begins with a voice—The Voice, in fact, expository, pipe-smoking, celestial-paternal, narrating from the cloud of authority. “This story is about Howard Beale, who was the news anchorman on UBS-TV … Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share.” He had been, in other words, Cronkite-solid, a loyal organ of The Voice. “In 1969, however, his fortunes began to decline.” To abbreviate: his wife died, his HUT rating tanked, booze took hold. “On September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two weeks.” So this is Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, and he’s about to blow.

Was Paddy Chayefsky—not the subtlest of artists—the first to intuit that The Voice was going insane? That within its resonant and dominating timbres lurked a strain of increasing madness? He can’t have been. But nobody dramatized the ensuing breakdown better than he did. “I must make my witness,” mutters Beale as he flaps past a security guard en route to his desk at the UBS studio. His raincoat is drenched and shapeless, his hair is flattened, he looks feverish: the city has been raining on him its special pride-dissolving, bum-creating rain. But he is indeflectible. Technicians back away liked awed votaries. He grips the desk, raises his eyes toward the camera. He’s going out live. “I don’t have to tell you things are bad,” he begins. “Everybody knows things are bad.”

When the rest of Network has fallen away, with all its leaden satire and creaky mood swings and unchewable mouthfuls of Chayefskian dialogue, when we have forgotten William Holden’s droopy, tobacco-tanned face and Faye Dunaway’s Giger-esque cheekbones, this scene remains. It is indelible. “I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street,” continues Beale, folksily grave. “All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, goddamn it! My life has value!’ ” He’s reverberating now, building to a Shakespearean passion. “So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ ”