One per month or so I have a tourist Wednesday, which includes going into Manhattan to watch a Broadway matinée. I usually buy at the box office, and rarely is there a queue, and often shows have so-called rush seats available for less than the prices in Times Square.
Last week I paid $40 to see Bryan Cranston in Network. Now, $40 is a lot to most people, but I find that a bargain to see one of the great actors of our time. We can certainly spend the same on a meal out.
Cranston did not disappoint. He has to work incredibly hard throughout the performance, and the energy he displayed and the character he portrayed were both utterly remarkable. I find the most wonderful thing about the best actors is how they can put on such mastery so many times per week. Live theatre is not TV or film, where you have the luxury of several takes and each scene is finished just once. This was a run-of-the-mill Wednesday matinée with a rather lifeless audience, yet Cranston gave of his brilliant best. I was mesmerised.
The play itself was also remarkable and I am still thinking about it nine days later. It is a wonderful vehicle for Cranston, with an utterly compelling central plot line about a newscaster becoming deranged.
The play was not flawless. The playwright includes some secondary plot lines and makes some efforts to develop secondary characters. Probably this is for the very practical reason that poor Cranston needs a break off stage every so often to recharge. But it almost seems as though the heart of the playwright is not in these secondary aspects, and, despite perfectly good acting, they failed completely to interest me. The overall effect became rather spotty, like an amateur show with too many long breaks while they changed the scenery.
I was also a bit frustrated by the technology. The play was written in the 1970’s and set there also. The modern interpretation is also set in the 1970’s, but included all sorts of technological gimmicks from more modern times, such as multiple screens and pixelated effects. Perhaps it was because my $40 seat was rather to the side of the auditorium, but for me these didn’t really work. And some aspects, such as having a sort of green room cum café on stage populated by audience members, seemed somehow inappropriate for the 1970’s but still dated for the 2010’s.
Still, the main plot line is riveting and it is that is still bouncing around my mind. It displayed real trends of the 1970’s and made an extreme projection from them. The brilliant thing is that these extreme projections are a very accurate reflection of exactly what has happened between the 1970’s and today. It is rare that something that tries to predict a dystopian future gets it so spot on.
The trends are manifold. Start with the ubiquity of television, which led to competition between networks and commercial pressures, as well as the power to influence people. The result was the breakdown of the original TV model in which news was somehow considered a public service and managed separately. From the 1970’s news came under the same pressure for ratings, and also pressure to promote the interest of corporate owners. Another result was that the homely, reliable figures like Walter Cronkite and Kenneth Kendall were pressured to be more entertainer than impartial journalist.
This all overlapped with other public trends. Attention spans became smaller at the same time as choice became larger and stress greater, so shallow sound bites and celebrity gossip became the news of choice for most.
Another trend is that the world became smaller, giving an impression of unmanageable complexity, just as people craved simplicity. There were always many wars, many intractable issues, many seeming contradictions, and few obvious solutions, few unalloyed heroes or villains and few happy endings. But somehow we could convince ourselves of the opposite, with the help of a bit of propaganda, censorship and genuine ignorance of things beyond our shores.
This last trend had a special impact in the US, since its self-assessed track record of being the good guy and always winning was being revealed as the lie that it always was, just as Hollywood was trying ever harder to perpetuate that lie, since that is what sells movie tickets.
Put all this together, and it still took a wonderfully prescient playwright to portray what could happen. Cranston has read straight news for 25 years, but has to read ever-more-simplified segments that still did not resolve pleasantly. Under ratings pressure, he is fired, but he has no other life so goes a bit wild and breaks from his script, saying “I’ve run out of bullshit”. A smart youngster in the commercial department, now merging with news, spots that the public would be entertained by more of this, and gets support from spineless executives to ride the Cranston horse further and further into deranged chaos. So long as he stays angry and mad, gains viewers, and does not veer from the message of the new Saudi money at the top of the channel, everything holds together - until it doesn’t.
Of course this more or less accurately predicted what happened to news since 1970. Fox News and its rivals rely on selectivity, anger and over-simplicity while promoting the political and commercial interests of owners. It garners ratings and eventually shapes politicians too, with the logical reduction ad absurdum being a Trump presidency. Social media has taken all the trends and amplified them further.
Perhaps most revealing to me was the tagline that the Cranston character descended to: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore”. Here, mad means angry, though the character is mad in the other sense too. The line brilliantly sums up how many people feel about the world. They are not ready for its complexity and look to people who offer comforting simplicity. It is not a bad way to sum up the mood of 60 million voters in November 2016. What a wonderful testament to a brilliant plot that is, and ample reason to revive it, despite the flaws.
Part of my thinking since watching Network has been to put myself in the position of a playwright now, imagining the world in 2040. I have not found this simple.
We have to start by adding in the new trends that had not developed by 1975. The first of these is social media, and its power to personalise. In the 1960’s we all watched the BBC (and its subtle propaganda). In the 2000’s we separated into three or four tribes with our own censored news from Fox or someone else. In the 2030’s we will have our own personal news – to an extent this has happened already, but it must accelerate.
Then, two other trends are more encouraging. I believe education has progressed, so that the next generation is more discerning and more able to judge fact from opinion and to embrace some complexity. At the same time that same generation is becoming more respectful of humanity in all its diversity and more at ease with themselves, and so less prone to anger and bigotry.
Put this together and you get a more nuanced picture. We will all get our own news, but the menu will cater to the curious as well as the angry, and more of us will be able to find content to help us develop and solve things rather than just rant, and more of us will be able to see through and reject corporate or other propaganda.
You already start to see this with Netflix. Hollywood’s stuff starts to look tired: it plays to the largest segment, but that segment gets smaller. Netflix can play to hundreds of subtly different segments, and content overall has improved as a result. The same will happen with news.
There will of course be missteps along the way. The excluded angry will find personalised material to make them yet more dangerous. And technology will make democracy and popularity move more quickly than most are ready for. Reputations will be made and lost in an instant, and instant plebiscites will lead to some horrible mistakes as majorities bully the oppressed.
But we will get through this and come out the other side better. I think my hypothetical play would be rather optimistic in tone. Of course, that means that my boss would probably toss it into the garbage as not being ratings-friendly enough.
However my play and other plays turn out, they will star no finer lead actor than Bryan Cranston.
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