The room from Network (1976) is real
Trump's tariffs on pause
The end of Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) gave us one of cinema’s most compelling if paranoid visions of the real forces underlying the global capitalist economy. Howard Beale, played with manic energy by a sweaty Peter Finch, has stumbled into a strange job as an anchor for the Union Broadcasting System (a stand-in for the then-dominant Big Three television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS) after an unpredictably populist rant live on-air that UBS realized they could mobilize to get more chuds to tune in for big ratings (Fox News wouldn’t go on air for 20 more years). Although his initial ratings bump produced something of a hot commodity in the film’s broadcasting world, it was becoming apparent that Beale had gained a little too much soft cultural power in the US mediasphere, causing tumult in The Order Of Things. As Beale presses on with his paranoid rantings, The Real Bosses of The World call in Beale for a “meeting” in a powerfully underlit back room where he finds a towering and mysterious figure played by Ned Beatty, avatar for the entire corporate world, to sit him down and explain who really runs the world.
It’s an iconic scene and worth quoting in full.
(Beatty): You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: Why me?
(Beatty): Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Beale: I have just seen the face of God.
(Beatty): You just might be right, Beale.
Earlier today, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the absurd tariffs he announced last week that sent global markets into a chaotic and destructive spiral, reversing the market plunge at least for the time being. The whole thing seemed absurdly fit for our stupid postmodern times, the announcement coming with a giant print-out list of the tariffs that looked like a placard presented at a high-school science fair. The numbers were supposedly arrived at by plugging data into Elon Musk’s Grok, X’s AI, which typically receives input from idiot blue-check gamers to ask for summaries of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or, hilariously, critiques of Elon himself. But for all the nihilistic humor the tariffs made possible, there was a real fear of the destruction they entailed.
Speaking for myself, I found the entire thing darkly comedic as all of the billionaires who thought they were just signing up for a tax cut realized they had handed over their giant money printing machine to Brick from Anchorman. But last night, the bond markets started to respond poorly; suddenly real economists online started to shift their tone from one of shocked bemusement to sheer terror. Briefly, what was happening was an emerging sign of a serious crisis rippling out from the patchwork nature of our global financial system. As traders tried to navigate the possible effects of the tariffs on their holdings by selling off this and shorting that, yields on US Treasuries started to skyrocket. This is a potentially apocalyptic sign; US Treasuries are supposed to be stable and safe places to dump money for investors to ride out market fluctuations, and the price of the dollar and US financial power is implicitly indexed to its strength. Signs of a panic started to appear and people rightfully started freaking the fuck out as investors began running for safety by ditching their lifeboats and building up their bug-out bags (it’s ironic too; conservatives freaking out about our national debt aren’t always just cynically using household economic models to fool people into going along with austerity measures; they think that China, who owns a good amount of US Treasuries, will *supervillain voice* SELL OFF THEIR DEBT AND CRATER THE AMERICAN ECONOMY BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!! And here Trump was making us do this to ourselves. Psychoanalysis is real.).
With the caveat that I’m a humanist who has done my own research into economic and political theory for projects on how markets are mediated in popular culture—I’m no expert on this stuff—I myself was starting to panic last night, scrolling the timeline in bed, even though I told myself I was going to throw on a movie and avoid both big screen and little screen. I’ve been on the record saying that soon there would be a conflict between Stable Capital and Stupid Capital. This was the time for that contradiction to start contradicting. And what was happening? Bill Ackman was tweeting out his own desperate, bargaining phase of acceptance, US “house” economists like Larry Summers were going on TV instead of like, the backrooms where all the world’s levers are to hope that some kind of publicized analysis would be powerful enough to set the boat afloat (look at that—Larry Summers joining the project of Critique as if to banish the Latourians from the department). They even sent Ted Cruz and Tim Scott to Fox News to speak directly to President TV to beg him to stop. And it still didn’t work!
A key strategy of the neoliberal project over the past 50 years was to dismantle the world order which was falling into crisis, where wartime national economies were run in near-command form by leaders they feared had too much power to force economies into what they saw as personal and dangerous visions that put strictures on The Market as a magical force for good, alongside its postwar remnants in the welfare state. FDR and Stalin and Hitler were all viewed as historical disasters because they told The Economy what to do instead of letting it do its thing. Their vision was one where power was distributed into a network of relations, mutually reinforced by the nature of free trade’s competitive advantage (which of course in their vision really meant freedom for Western capitalists to do whatever they wanted). But there was still a sense that somewhere, in a back room, the Real Men Were In Charge, a Ned Beatty who was allowing Howard Beales onto Fox News to stir up skepticism over taxes to the rubes so that they could continue to exploit the world’s economy for their own gain. And yet, here we were, the moment of truth, and they were nowhere to be found.
Of course this room is a metaphor, and I’m not suggesting that they actually met in some conspiratorial Bilderberg Group-style meeting to plan the secret order of the world. But I think everyone did have a general sense that the Real Economy—perhaps less in the accumulated structure of consumers buying cars and more in who determines how the money printer works—is structured to serve specific class ends. This is how the United States has been run since the end of the Bretton Woods system following the crises of the 1970s. It was terrifying to learn that the way this system had matured following the generational passing of twentieth century capitalists to their failsons and debt-addicted clingers-on was a networked, complex system designed to keep the free flow of capital afloat but one that was supposed to be staffed by smart people. But they also simultaneously have been waging war against smart people since the 1990s. The monkeys really do run the zoo, but this zoo has guns and complicated institutions that can be mobilized for destructive ends if the idiots are given the login information.
Thankfully, this afternoon, Trump blinked by announcing a 90-day pause on the tariffs (although he kept the China tariffs, and a general 10% across-the-board intact).
Later in an interview with NASCAR drivers in the Oval Office (jesus man, lol), Trump let slip that it was the panic in the bond market that made him step back from the ledge. He also said that Jamie Dimon “said something had to be done” and that he was visited by 87-year old retired eponymous CEO Charles R. Schwab himself, who he was apparently surprised to learn was actually a guy and not just an investment firm, earlier in the day.
Trump said that Schwab told him that he has been wanting tariffs for “40 years” and he gushed over what he clearly took as an ego-boost and proof he was right all along. I think what really happened is that the room from the end of Network materialized by default, built into the system in the way the neoliberals actually designed. They just got him to fall in line by sweet talking instead of a lecture. It’s fitting that the film was called Network, about a television broadcast network at the moment when broadcasting was about to be deregulated and replaced by a digital network with a functionally different model (distributed across computers rather than emanating out from one transmitting center to be received by the masses of listeners or viewers). In this sense the film was allegorizing our shift into the present moment, perhaps not literally understanding how the world was being remade at this moment, but effectively serving the same purpose by narrativizing a situation in which capital broadcasts poison to the masses with the hope they can fool enough people while keeping the keys to the back room on their keychains.
But you may have noticed that sometime over the past few years most metal key lock systems have been replaced by magnetic swipe cards, from hotels to your work I.D. You can copy metal keys, but it’s a lot easier to duplicate magnetic cards and send them out to more people. It looks like The Room still exists but more people have access to it. As prescient as the film’s vision of the emerging neoliberal order was, it still couldn’t imagine what networked power actually would look like in practice, and the destabilizing danger such a dispositif entails. It should be noted that at the end of the film, they find a way to conveniently dispose of Beale live on air, the entire thing ending in a mess with the damage done but the Real Men still in charge, perhaps even better off than they were before. With the market rebounding after this entire fiasco, you can’t help but feel the whole thing effectively became a giant pump and dump scheme (or dump and pump?). I’m not sure what to make of all of that but I think we learned something about capital’s relationship to the state today and I’m looking forward to the actually smart economy knowers to tell us more in the weeks to come.