Image credit: A Vintage Television Set by Naula Ayisabun Aningore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The executive who turned news into entertainment
In Network, released in 1976 and directed by Sidney Lumet, Faye Dunaway plays Diana Christensen, a young television programming executive who discovers that a newsman’s breakdown can be the biggest hit on television. The newsman is Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, a veteran anchor who, on learning he is to be fired, announces live on air that he will kill himself on his final broadcast. The announcement shocks the network, but it also lifts the ratings, and Diana sees an opportunity. She proposes turning Beale’s rage into a show, a nightly platform for his furious sermons against modern life, and she fights for that show with a brilliance and ruthlessness that make her both the film’s villain and its most compelling character.
Dunaway won the Academy Award for Best Actress for this performance, her first and only Oscar, and it is easy to see why. Diana is not a caricature of a career woman. She is a fully imagined person whose tragedy is that she has replaced feeling with programming. She speaks in ratings, shares, and demographics. She treats human beings as formats. She has an affair with Max Schumacher, played by William Holden, the older news chief who once believed in journalism, and she cannot understand why he is hurt when she treats their relationship as another item to be scheduled. Dunaway plays Diana’s incomprehension without cruelty. Diana is not evil in the simple sense. She is hollow, and Dunaway lets us see the hollowness as a kind of wound, even as we condemn what Diana does with it.
Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lumet, and a prophecy
Network was written by Paddy Chayefsky, who won an Oscar for his screenplay, and directed by Lumet with a ferocious, theatrical energy. The film satirises a fictional network, UBS, but its target is the whole culture of television: the pursuit of ratings at any cost, the confusion of news with entertainment, and the willingness of corporations to sell anger as a product. Dunaway is at the centre of that satire, because Diana embodies it most completely. She invents a show featuring a radical group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, robbing banks on camera. She negotiates with terrorists as if they were talent. She argues, with perfect logic, that a mad prophet is good television, and therefore good business.
Lumet films Diana in offices, control rooms, and apartments that all look like sets, because for Diana, life is a set. Dunaway moves through those spaces with a restless, almost athletic energy, always talking, always pitching, always calculating the next move. Her costumes, sharp suits and bold colours, are armour, and her voice, fast and precise, is a weapon. Yet Dunaway also shows Diana’s vulnerability, particularly in her scenes with Holden. When Max leaves her, telling her that she is incapable of love because she has turned every emotion into a script, Dunaway does not collapse into tears. She argues, she pleads, and then she goes back to work, because work is the only language she trusts. That final, chilling return to the office is one of the film’s most memorable images.
A performance that predicted the future
When Network was released, many critics thought it was an outrageous fantasy. A newsman would never become a prophet on live television, a network would never turn a breakdown into a hit, and audiences would never mistake anger for truth. In the decades since, the film has come to look like a prophecy, and Dunaway’s performance has gained a new relevance. Diana Christensen is now recognisable as a type: the executive, producer, or influencer who understands that outrage drives attention, and that attention drives money. Dunaway played her in 1976 without the benefit of hindsight, and she got the character exactly right, because she understood that Diana’s genius is also her blindness. She can see what audiences want, but she cannot see what it costs them, or herself, to give it to them.
The film’s other performances are superb: Finch as Beale, posthumously winning the Oscar for Best Actor; Holden as Max, the conscience of the film; Robert Duvall as the corporate boss Frank Hackett; and Beatrice Straight, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for a single, devastating scene as Max’s wife. Dunaway holds her own in that company by being the film’s engine. Without Diana, Beale would be a sad man having a breakdown. With Diana, he becomes a phenomenon, and the film becomes a warning. Dunaway makes that transformation feel inevitable, because she plays Diana’s ambition as intelligence, not as madness.
Love without feeling
The affair between Diana and Max is the film’s emotional core, and Dunaway plays it with a painful honesty. Max is older, married, and idealistic, and he falls for Diana because she is brilliant and alive. Diana falls for Max because he represents something she does not have: a history, a set of values, a capacity for ordinary feeling. But she cannot sustain that feeling, because she immediately tries to turn it into a story. She talks about their affair in the language of television, as if it were a programme she could produce. Holden’s quiet devastation in those scenes is matched by Dunaway’s frantic energy. She is not a cold woman. She is a woman who has never learned another way to be close to someone, and Dunaway lets us see both the intelligence and the damage in that.
That complexity is why Diana Christensen remains controversial. Some viewers see her as a feminist hero, a woman who succeeds in a man’s world by being smarter and tougher than everyone else. Others see her as a monster, a person who sacrifices human beings for ratings. Dunaway’s performance allows both readings, because Diana is both. She is a pioneer and a warning, a woman who broke through a glass ceiling and discovered that the room on the other side was empty. The Oscar recognised that achievement: a performance that is funny, frightening, and sad, often in the same scene.
Why Diana Christensen endures
Diana endures because she is still with us. Every time a news story is shaped for maximum outrage, every time a personal tragedy becomes content, every time a corporation treats anger as a product, Diana Christensen is in the room. Dunaway gave that type a face, a voice, and a human cost. She did not play Diana as a villain to be booed, but as a person to be understood, and that understanding makes the film’s satire more disturbing, not less.
Watch Network for Chayefsky’s dialogue and Lumet’s direction, but watch Dunaway for the performance that won her the Oscar and defined her career. Notice how fast she talks, how little she pauses, and how, in the rare moments when she stops, something like fear crosses her face. Diana Christensen is Faye Dunaway’s most famous creation, and her most prophetic: a woman who could sell anything, including a man’s madness, and who discovered, too late, that she had sold herself as well.