COMPARE: Howard Beale vs. Glenn Beck

Stomping,

You say: "Beck's a douche."

Right. Right. And, actually, that's a great jumping off point for showing exactly how Beck is a douche.

For example, I point out that Beale and Beck both want people to get mad. But with a difference: Beck riles folks up to clog the arteries of public discourse; to show up at public Q&As to shout down the rational. When Beale says, "Don't write to your congressman: I wouldn't know what to tell you to write," he's expressing a sort of subconscious awareness that, indeed, a dawning willingness of the listener to buckle down and *feel* something is its own reward. It's a door through which the listener must step on the road to discovery. Beck would pretend to tell you toward which unseen others (e.g., "Progressives") you must need to direct your anger.

First, get angry. Then ask yourself, "Why am I angry?" That's Beale's approach, and a sight less douchey.

I would not be at all surprised if Beck took a gun to his head and blew his brains out on live TV some day. That guy is crazy!

We need a Howard Beale now.
I detest the corporate rule that our country has become.
I can't even post a comment on Huffington Post that is critical of Joe Scarborough. Arianna is a frequent guest on the network. Arrgh!
Need I say more, because I certainly can?!?

Not at first but ultimately Beale preached the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen, which believes that corporate interests benefit the masses (who are cogs within it, nothing more than piston rods).

To address the question more directly - Howard Beale was crazy. Glenn Beck is not and knows exactly what he's doing.

Howard Beale didn't give a damn about corporate interests - Beck is practically their puppet.

Did we watch the same movie? did you stop watching before Jensen's speech?

Ghtx,

Appreciate the thoughts... But I will say that it seems Chayefsky wrote Beale's character a little more carefully than that. To just call him "nutso" is, I think, to have missed something.

But maybe, now that I reflect a bit more, I get your point. Is your point that Beck is ultimately conniving whereas Beale is being perfectly sincere in his over-the-top, feed-the-public-rage thing?

The idea that Beck is ultimately insincere is a very interesting idea. The implications are a bit scary, and a pattern emerges. The idea of so many people taking an obviously insincere guy seriously is very scary. Scarier still: Compared with Bush Jr., Beck is a piker.

Watching from a long way away, the thing that amazes me is how people like 'blowthis' have come to identify as 'pinko commies' people espousing positions that were right-wing Republican not all that long ago. At the time of Reagan and moreso Nixon there was a view that Reps, Dems and Western Europe were all part of the democratic, free-market Free World, basically all on the same side, even though there were political disagreements about the size of the state. Since then what has happened? Pretty much everyone has moved to the right. The Reps have pushed further and further for lower taxes for the wealthy and the Dems have basically gone along with this. Most Western European countries have privatised major industries, deregulated, seen corporate pay rise and taxes reduce - so that in the USA and Europe the average gap between CEO pay and that of the lowest paid workers is way bigger than it was 20 years ago. But the right wing is pushing further to the right. It now sees the levels of taxation and public services that (e.g.) Reagan advocated as socialist. Cold war allies are now pinko commies, even though they have all moved to the right since the time they were regarded as fellow-capitalist friends. This view is hysterical and has no sense of historical perspective or basis in reality. It's scary watching this - it looks like the decline of American civilisation, and Network is not a bad explanation for the cause of it.

"GN pwns your commie pink asses every night?" A brainwashed Faux News tool pipes in. Proof that couch potato dependent thinking is at epidemic proportions in the United States.


When I read that Glenn Beck models himself after Howard Beale, I was perplexed and angry. Beck is NO Beale. Maybe “post-Jensen brainwashing” Beale.....but not pre-Jensen brainwashing. The only thing Beck and Beale may have in common is their audience, who enjoys the raving rants (in Beale's case, it was ranting until he passes out...in Beck's case, it's ranting until he cries). But Beale vented about the corporate stronghold on our country, the ties we have with the Saudis, the apathy of Americans ("just don't take away our steel belted radials and toaster ovens, and you can do anything you want to us!"), among other things. Beck works for Fox News: A network that stands fully behind needless preemptive wars. Somehow I don't think Howard Beale would have been a big supporter of wars against nations that never attacked us. If I give any kind of credit to Beck, it's the fact that people who've never heard of Howard Beale have looked him up and watched this great movie.

Howard Beale is described in Network as "denouncing the hypocrisy of our times" and "articulating a popular rage." The time for Beck to do that was between 2003 and 2008, when the former administration embroiled us in a war against a sovereign nation that never attacked us and posed no threat to us (based on manipulated Intel and cover ups, fabricated behind closed doors with war profiteers, special interest groups and Think Tanks accountable to no American voter in the room), called anyone who criticized the falsified Intel leading up to the Iraq invasion (including members of Congress) a terrorist supporter (in true fascist McCarthy style), gave billion dollar no bid contracts to a corporation formerly headed by the Vice President, developed the Patriot Act as a means to wiretap American phone calls and slapped the "war on terror" label on it, gave tax breaks to the millionaire CEOs of the country, as well as breaks to corporations who offshore middle class jobs...the list goes on. Now is the time Glenn Beck decides to "articulate the popular rage?" Where was he over the past eight years? Hibernating? The man is NO independent. He's a Neocon-controlled tool.

If Beck really wants to align himself with a renegade like Howard Beale, he should be backing Ron Paul, Ralph Nader or Bob Barr's future campaigns, get off Fox News, and take a stint at NPR or PBS, which are also special interest driven, but not as woefully as Fox News. Of course that would mean a pay cut. And this guy's ego is too huge to take a pay cut (Beck makes O'Reilly seem modest....)


Dude means nice guy. Dude means a regular sort of person.

Pazuzu,

Thanks for your thoughtful post.

I've seen the bits on the Daily Show, et.al., and you have to admit that those bits, excerpted though they may be, reveal Beck to be less than honest.

But I hear where you're coming from. I've seen other, more seemingly cogent bits of Beck, and I think that's what led me to consider the Beck/Beale comparison in the first place.

Beale's (fictional) background was in "respectable" journalism. So it's poetic that what he does is foray into riffing on the ocean of *beep* that he sees himself floating above. Although this was a natural tack for Chayevsky--with his '60s radical hipster bona fides--it also happens to be well tuned as a general story.

On the other hand, Beck's background is in goof/shock/prank pop entertainment. I feel that Beale's present-day shtick sort of ups the ante on his earlier work. He doesn't do what Beale "did": Beale tried to strip you of your presumptions, but in a more universal, thoroughgoing way. Despite your protestations that Beck is more open-ended than left-thinking people will allow, there's little-to-no question but that he obviously has a stake in getting viewers to adopt specific views that dovetail with Fox's hard-right orientation: Government is bad; negative emotional response to iconic projections of "progressivism" is wisdom; and much more. All very suspect stuff.

But you raise a good point: There comes a point with "prophesy" when the rubber has to meet the road. In other words, it's one thing when what you say is true, but another when it's _so_ true that it can be depended upon as an actual predictor of future events. On this point, you may be onto something.

Side note: You mention Beck's emotionality. It always struck me as an act, as well as intellectually disingenuous. Exactly what is it that Beck fears/trembles America is losing sight of? Does he fear the loss of a mighty, economically and militarily strong America that commanded the respect of other nations; and fear of her enemies? Don't forget that much of what he worships is an America painstakingly molded and whipped into shape by post-War liberal reforms and very-big-indeed government regulatory control and social investment. It was this elite social control that built a strong middle class, strong infrastructure, and relatively wisely educated and socialized polity that would be fit to meet, head-on, the looming red menace. You know: The one that we were told was the next big challenge of the century, and which Rocky and Bullwinkle taught us not to take so seriously.

[deleted]

Pazuzu, Beck, "... says what he says."

Well yes. Tautological. No content to your comment. He "says what he says" means nothing.






KIAI ... please.

Hoeech,

Actually, yr joke is sort of insightful. I'm reminded of the scene in "Thank You for Smoking", where Nick has been threatened with vigilante justice, and he and his "MOD Squad" buddies get into an argument, complete with veiled acrimony, over who among them should most deserve to be killed.

I haven't watched Beck extensively, but I'm pretty sure that, at one point or another, he's darkly, melodramatically alluded to the idea that he must surely be a target, as was Christ and other Speakers of Truth.

And that sheds light on another difference: Beck is self-conscious about what he does. Beale was gloriously un-selfconscious about what he did; at least, for a while he was.

In fact, one would want to say that Beck is plainly self-conscious; the only problem is that so many people watch him, you sort of wonder why more people are not put off by the fact that he's trying so hard. I guess it's sort of like tuning in to one of those wacky radio morning shows, and you sort of wonder how bored commuters must be, that they'd willingly listen to such rubbish. And, of course, that's where Beck cut his teeth.

Even where one might get the impression that Beck is pulling off a kind of un-selfconscious attitude, it's so laboriously manufactured.

Glenn Beck is definitely not Howard Beale.

Glenn Beck is "Lonesome" Rhodes ("A Face in the Crowd").

"Glenn Beck is definitely not Howard Beale.

Glenn Beck is "Lonesome" Rhodes ("A Face in the Crowd")."

Screenwhisperer has NAILED it!

As reasonable as Pazuzu appears to be, he seems to willfully ignore the fact that Beck is the opposite of Beale in that he purposefully tells a certain segment of the population exactly what they want to hear. He only uses the Beale approach as the veneer, the mask under which he deliberately and painstakingly manipulates and plays on the fears of those most likely to become unquestioning slaves to his party line. I've seen him laugh at those who reject or dismiss him, and with good reason: they're not his target audience anyway, so why should he care what they think of him? His moments of "rationalism" serve two purposes: 1) Filler, since he can't be ranting 100% of the time and keep his stamina up, and 2) A smokescreen, that his supporters can point to as "proof" that he is a rational man. Beck's danger is not that he is a "nutjob" like Beale, but that he is something Beale may appear to be but clearly isn't: amoral.

See if you can spot the single tiny comment Pazuzu makes in one of his posts that reveals that he already had a strong belief system that Beck is clearly playing to.