Imagine a world, if you will, where news and entertainment were synonymous and information was provided by corp-ocracy for the sole purpose of generating profit. What's that sonny, you say that's today? Well I guess 50 years ago before the death of the fairness doctrine and the rise of citizen's united, this future hellscape was far off. Now we live in a world where the Diane Christensen's of the past 50 years have been realizing her reality, from the metastasis of Fox News into OAN, News Max and the paint-huffing Blaze to the rise of
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.
*cough*Amazon*cough* But also every other major tech company, the trending of the media companies into few and larger megacopos and Cyberpunk is right around the corner. Just waiting for one of those stupid trucks to break down on my street and become inadvertent art/loot crate.
Oops I was channeling my inner (or possibly outer) Howard Beal. Ultimately what this movie is really about, in my humble red opinion, is the co-option of everything by capital. First, it exploits his grief and then anger with losing his job (which, you know, is only important in a capitalist society), because the capitalist implementation of media means the most salacious content gets the highest ratings and therefore the most advertising money. So in this trend, Dunaway's Christensen after appropriating Howard's populist anger into a somewhat goofy but still very angry news show complete with a psychic (but also with some disheveled newsman vibes like Stewart on The Daily Show or Cody Johnson on Some More News), continues in this trend also co-opting a Black Panther stand-in, the ELA, in all their communist terror. This was at the height of the 'red terror' plane-jackings in the 70s I believe and also the 1974 leftist kidnapping of Patty Hearst (but before she began claiming that her actions with the SLA were coerced, which I think explains the cagey unwillingness to parody Hearst directly, using a stand-in instead).
Anyway where was I? I'm mad as hell, but I also hit the bong a bit.
Oh right so Diane C. after inexplicably trading in the young dude for the old dude and conquering the ratings world has I guess left the business over-leveraged which displeases the capitalist overlords, since Diane's kink is more about winning the game of capitalism (as befits the managerial class) but the actual capitalists want a return on their money and Howard fucks with the money when he directs his populist anger at the Saudis with whom business daddy is trying to get into bed. So Howard gets a new religion courtesy of the capital class about the fundamental nationless-ness of capital, but Howard's new depressive cynicism is not a ratings winner, since depression is not very salacious, so Diane ultimately enlists the help of the ELA who has found their capitalist groove, since they now have contracts with the network and participate in capitalism, thereby aligning their interests with the managerial class who needs to increase ratings. So they murder Howard live on air, since in the end, even the will of an individual capitalist is subservient to the will of capital writ large.
That's what this movie is really about: removing the guardrails on the media industry and showing how quickly it would all spin out of control. Good thing that didn't happen.