Introduction
“I am gross and perverted
I’m obsessed ‘n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I am a tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule and regulate you…
I am the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I am the slime oozin’ out
From your TV set” [1]
Let’s face it: television is an inviting target for satire. Despite declining viewership, the average North American still watches around three hours a day. Most of us cannot remember what we’ve watched and feel the time we spend in front of the tube is wasted…yet we cannot seem to tear ourselves away. Television, more than any other medium, drives our culture: it’s the subject of after-dinner and office cooler conversation, people schedule their lives around the favorite shows, its stars are the fodder for a thriving tabloid sub-culture.
Twenty years ago, Paddy Chayefsky took aim at the institution in a film called Network. Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his portrayal of Howard Beale, a network news anchor who, having been told he would be replaced after decades of service to the fictional UBS television network, declares he will kill himself on the air. The film is about the behind-the scenes maneuvering to determine whether he should continue to be on television, with Diana Christenson (played by Faye Dunaway), a young executive in charge of the entertainment division of UBS who believes Beale could get phenomenal ratings, facing off against the aging head of the news division of the network, Max Schumacher (William Holden), who is vehemently opposed to the exploitation of his old friend.
More recently, To Die For, written by Buck Henry, took a different approach to the subject of television. The screenplay for his film follows Suzanne Stone Maretto (played by Nicole Kidman), a beautiful but shallow and not very bright woman who is driven to be on television, even if it means doing the weather on an insignificant cable access station. When her husband tries to push her in the direction of having children, which threatens her dream, she enlists the aid of three teenagers to kill him. Based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, which was based on a true story, To Die For unfolds as a series of interviews with various characters involved with Stone-Maretto.
Although they share a common subject and can both be considered satires, Network and To Die For are radically different in tone, approach, and overall effect. These differences are the subject of this essay. But first, a word from our sponsor…
What is Satire?
“Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire ‘derides’; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt existing outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (as in ‘personal satire’), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in Rochester’s ‘A Satire Against Mankind,’ 1675, and much of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the whole human race.” [2]
Satire is believed to have originated in the ancient Greek playwrighting contests. Lasting seven days, each author invited to the festival dedicated to Dionysus, which celebrated the changing of the seasons, wrote a cycle of four plays. The first three were tragedies, the fourth, a special form of comedy known as a satyr play. Satyrs, woodland creatures that were largely man, but had the hooves, horns and tail of a goat, were followers of Dionysus, the god of wine, and had a reputation of being sexually hyperactive; satyr plays were celebrations of the physical excesses of human beings, particularly gluttony and lust, often tempered with criticism of those excesses. “Only one complete text of this genre survives — Euripides’ Cyclops — together with fragments of a few others: but this meagre evidence at least suffices to indicate that this genre was devoted to burlesque and to parody, and that the subject matter mocked could be drawn from one or more of the three tragedies which had just been performed…” [3]
This mocking form of comedy had (and continues to have) an important social function: “…every society has its laws, taboos and moral regulations which preserve or are felt to preserve the social structure, yet on occasions become intolerably restrictive.” [4] Carnival, Saturnalia or the Festival of Dionysus allowed the anti-social impulses arising from this restrictiveness to be given a (limited and socially sanctioned) voice: “On such special occasions the most scandalous things could be said about the laws and the political dealings of the state; socially depressed classes like slaves — and women — could be given freedom of speech, and even the gods themselves could be mocked…” [5]
Since then, satire has developed into its own literary genre. Expanding upon Abrams’ definition of satire, we can see that it has three distinct characteristics: an object of attack; a comic device, and; an ideal world against which the real world is measured.
The object of attack is what is being scorned or ridiculed in the work. In Dr. Strangelove, for instance, the object of attack could be said to be the military, which propagated the nuclear “balance of terror.” The object of attack is not always obvious because the plot of a work may seem to be about something completely different. How To Get Ahead in Advertising, for example, is ostensibly about one advertising executive’s emotional breakdown; it is possible for a viewer to concentrate on this aspect of the story and miss the criticism of the advertising industry.
The comic device is the aspect of the work which evokes laughter. Satire is not, itself, a comic device; it relies on other forms of comedy (slapstick, exaggeration, absurdity, etc.) for its laughs. Thus, “…satire is distinguishable from other kinds of literature by its approach to its subject, by a special attitude to human experience which is reflected in its artistic conventions. It is in fact very difficult to distinguish it [satire] clearly from other literary forms on any other basis; first, because it does not clearly form one of the traditional ‘genres’, and secondly because it may assume a bewildering variety of sub-forms.” [6]
People often assume that when certain comic devices are combined with certain kinds of subject matter, it must be with satiric intent, but this not necessarily the case. The combination of politics and parody is often found in Mad Magazine, for instance, or on Saturday Night Live, but there is very little analysis of politicians, their policies or the institution of American politics — the humor is usually aimed at the personal foibles of the politicians and does not achieve any meaningful scorn. This kind of humor could be called political comedy, but it is rarely political satire. (A film such as Bob Roberts, a parody of political documentaries which holds right-wing politics up for scorn, is a good example of true political satire.)
The final element, an ideal world against which the real world is compared and found wanting, reveals satire to be a highly moralistic art form. (It is ironic that many people, missing the ironic commentary of many satires, accuse their creators of propagating the values they are actually criticising.) Satire holds institutions and society up for ridicule because they do not live up to their fullest potentials. Consider Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: for the first few pages, he argues that the children of the poor should be sold to the rich for food. He develops this argument in several startling ways, suggesting when the meat on the children would be tenderest, for instance, or offering recipes for how they could best be cooked. Then, in the last page or two, he reveals that, as a member of Parliament, he had suggested several measures to alleviate the problems of the poor, including income supplements and guaranteed housing, all of which had been rejected by politicians. Such possible government actions are the ideal against which Parliament’s inaction is being judged. Although the ideal may be found within a work of satire, it often has to be assumed because it is not directly stated; the ideal of a world without nuclear weapons is never directly stated in Dr. Strangelove, for instance, but it is reasonable to infer it from the action of the film.
Abrams also makes a useful distinction between formal and indirect satire. Formal satire takes the form of a direct address to the audience: A Modest Proposal, for instance, takes the form of an address to the audience. Indirect satire, by way of contrast, arises out of the actions of characters in a narrative. [7] Since film is primarily a narrative form, most satires in the medium are indirect.
“We’re Mad as Hell…”
The object of attack in Network is, of course, television, but specific aspects of the institution. Everybody involved with television is obsessed by ratings; the film opens with a narrated message about ratings (“In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin in television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share.”) [8] and closes with a narrated message on the same subject (“This was the story of Howard Beale who was the network news anchorman on UBS-TV, the first known instance of a man being killed because he had lousy ratings.”). [9] The quest for ratings defines characters (Diana Christenson claims “All I want out of life is a 30 share and a 20 rating.”) [10] and permeates every aspect of their lives, as in the hilarious sequence where the scenes seem to be of a romantic encounter (a candlelit dinner leading to fumbled gropings outside a motel room and a sexual encounter within), but all Diana can talk about are the problems she’s having with various programs in her department. [11]
If the quest for ratings is the object of attack, the comic device most frequently employed in Network is a form of exaggeration known as reductio ad absurdum, literally reducing a subject to its most absurd. Reductio ad absurdum is a rhetorical device, used by the ancient Greeks to win debates by showing how an opponent’s arguments could lead to bizarre conclusions if taken far enough. For example, early in Network, after Howard Beale threatens to kill himself on the air, he and Schumacher discuss the possibility that he might be allowed to stay on the air:
We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. Hell, why limit ourselves! Execution of the Week — the Madame Defarge Show! Every Sunday night, bring your knitting and watch somebody get guillotined, hung, electrocuted, gassed. For a logo, we’ll have some brute with a black hood over his head. Think of the spin-offs. Rape of the Week…
(getting caught up)
Terrorist of the Week?
I love it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, murder in the barbershop, human sacrifices in witches’ covens, automobile smashups. The Death Hour! A great Sunday night show for the whole family. We’ll wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.” [12]
The irony is that that is exactly what UBS’ lineup, anchored by Beale’s newscast, becomes. The logical, though absurd, result of the quest for higher ratings is to put a delusional psychotic (Beale after he starts hearing voices in the middle of the night telling him what to say) on the air as the anchor of the news and giving a group of terrorists their own show (The Mao Tse Tung Hour).
The ideal against which this grasping for ratings is compared is the news division of the network, which, we are told more than once, regularly loses tens of millions of dollars. News has a noble function, to inform the public of the most important events and issues of the day, a function which is not compromised by ratings. Except…
This ideal has been compromised in the quest for ratings, as Christenson, lecturing Schumacher, makes clear: “I watched your six o’clock news today. It’s straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half on that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park. On the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crimes, sports, children with incurable diseases and lost puppies. So I don’t think I’ll listen to protestations of high standards of journalism. You’re right down in the street soliciting audiences like the rest of us.” [13]
If the current news division looks good only by comparison to the entertainment division, a true ideal is suggested by a scene in which Beale and Schumacher talk about their early days in television news working with Edward R. Murrow, a legend of American broadcast journalism. Those days were, perhaps, early enough in the history of broadcasting that journalistic values were not compromised by the need to seek high ratings. On the other hand, because we learn of those days through people’s memories, we may not get the whole story; other compromises of news integrity may have been in play at the time which they have conveniently forgotten so that they may sentimentally remember the past. Chayefsky is not offering any simple views.
The institutional critique of television is only part of Network‘s satirical attack, however, for violent programming cannot garner huge ratings if people don’t want to watch it. Thus, the television audience, and the whole culture of which television is an important element, is implicated in the satire. After he hears the voice commanding him to use his position as a television personality to tell the truth to the American people, Beale exhorts his audience to go to their windows and scream “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” [14] Schumacher watches in disbelief as people in his neighborhood do exactly that. In a telling stage direction which was only partially realized in the finished film, Chayefsky describes the people shouting at their windows as sounding “like the Nuremberg rally;” [15] the willingness of people to follow others is giving a chilling resonance with this reference to German fascism.
The responsibility of the audience for the state of television programming is stated directly in an extraordinary monologue given by Beale which I would like to quote at length:
“So a rich little man with white hair [Ruddy, chairman of the board of the network] died, what’s that got to do with the price of rice, right? Why is that woe to us? Because you and sixty-two million other Americans are watching me right now, that’s why! Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube! There is a whole and entire generation right now who never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel. This tube is the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes and prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddam force in the whole godless world!… And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddam propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this tube? So, listen to me! Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! If you want the truth go to God, go to your guru, go to yourself because that’s the only place you’ll ever find any real truth. But man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We’ll tell you Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true. But you people sit there — all of you — day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We’re the illusions. [16]
This monologue contains both the object of attack (people spending too much time watching television) and the ideal world (the lives people live when they’re not watching television).
It also has an additional object of attack: the multinational system of capitalism of which the network is a part (“…when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddam propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this tube?”). At the beginning of Network, UBS is owned by an entertainment conglomerate called CCA; later in the film, CCA is itself bought by a larger consortium of firms which, it turns out, are financed by Arabs flush from selling oil, primarily to Americans. The implication is that television is being used by corporations to divert attention from what they are doing in the marketplace.
Finally, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, Chayefsky indicts the medium itself as propagating inhumane values. He does this by using the character of Christenson to personify the medium. Schumacher, who sees his May-December romance with her falling apart, powerfully makes this case when he says: “You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy.” [17] The ideal against which this is compared is honest human emotion; Schumacher refuses to give in to television’s madness “while I can still feel pleasure and pain and love!” [18]
The Neutron Bomb of Modern Comedy
“Suzanne used to say that you aren’t really anybody in America if you’re not on TV. ‘Cause what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching. And when people are watching it makes you a better person. So if everybody was on TV all the time, then everybody would be better people.” [19]
The film To Die For is a more personal form of satire, which makes fun of people who are obsessed with being famous, personified by Suzanne Stone Maretto. Obsession is a common trait of comic characters, and here Stone Maretto’s dialogue is full of comic exaggeration based on her obsession. Talking about love affairs between teenage boys and older women, for instance, leads to this bizarre digression: “I thought it was kind of silly — not because I’m a prude or anything like that — but because I think it’s a waste of time to be with somebody that you can’t learn from — preferably someone who has a knowledge of one’s field of endeavor. A perfect example of this kind of situation would be John Tesch, the co-anchor of the always popular “Entertainment Tonight” and his lovely wife, Connie Selleca, who — after a long day’s work at their various studios — are able to spend evenings at home sharing their mutual expertise in lighting, make-up, camera angles and so forth. That, to me, is what relationships are about.” [20]
Stone sounds like the kind of person Howard Beale railed against in Network. However, she is the only one in To Die For — the larger community is not implicated in the excesses of television culture; the main character’s husband, both their families and most of the other people in the film lead “normal” middle class lives. In fact, middle class values (hard work, having a family) are held up as the ideal against which Stone Maretto’s obsession is compared.
The only characters whose interest in television mirrors Stone-Maretto’s are the three lower class teenagers she recruits to murder her husband. “I thought she was a goddess of some kind — like Lady Di before she dumped the Prince and went nudist and everything, I mean,” says Lydia, a young girl who worships Stone-Maretto. [21] She uses a reference to somebody she saw on television to explain her admiration for somebody she knew who was also on television. Here, again, though, by placing the children outside the middle class mainstream, Henry’s criticism does not implicate the larger culture.
There are a couple of moments in the film when the television industry itself comes under satiric criticism. On her honeymoon, Stone-Maretto attends a television convention (unbeknownst to her husband), where she meets Hal Brady, an executive who seems to have been in the industry a long time, who tells an incredibly crass, sexist story about a well known (though unnamed) female television personality. The lack of concrete details about Brady’s position undermines the possibility that he represents the television industry; the story actually is an important plot element inasmuch as it inspires Stone-Maretto to do whatever it takes to get ahead in television. Nonetheless, the scene strongly suggests the industry itself is crass and sexist.
The other scene comes late in the movie. After the murder, arrest of the two teenage boys and suspicion of Stone-Maretto, Ed Grant, the station manager, proudly shows off footage she shot of the teenagers: “That’s the piece ‘Geraldo’ used. With a little editing. And it was on ‘First Edition.’ And ‘American Justice.’ We made a few bucks on this one and got a nice credit.” [22] This line shows how television exploits human suffering, not excluding that of people who work in the medium.
Although interesting, these two short scenes are tangential to the main story, which focuses very clearly on a single individual’s obsession. Television is not really the object of attack of the film. In this regard, To Die For is the neutron bomb of satire, destroying individuals but leaving institutions standing intact. Nor is it alone in this regard: most of what passes for satire in North America these days, from Mad Magazine to Saturday Night Live, follows this mold.
To Die For also trips up on the style of its presentation. A large part of the story is told in interviews with the main characters which are mild parodies of television talk show conventions. (A parody “imitates the serious materials and manner of a particular literary work, or the characteristic style of a particular author, or the stylistic and other features of a serious literary form, and applies them to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject.” [23]) It is ironic that, in the end, virtually every major character in the film gets more television exposure than Stone Maretto, whose only goal in life is to be on television. However, the device cuts both ways. As Linda Hutcheon points out, “As a form of ironic representation, parody is doubly coded in political terms: it both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies.” [24] At the same time as it mocks Stone Maretto’s great desire to be on television, the film reinforces her belief that you’re nobody if you’re not on television.
Henry is not the only screenwriter to fall into this trap in recent years. Oliver Stone’s version of Natural Born Killers is, in part, a satire of television, which Stone portrays as an amoral medium which exploits human suffering (a message not too different from Chayefsky’s). However, Stone’s use of every cinematic trick in the book (including slow motion, front and rear projection, intercutting a wide variety of film and video formats, morphed images), which is meant to represent the flow of media images, undermines his satiric intent by making the film visually exciting. Instead of being repulsed by the subject, we are fascinated by the way it is presented.
Network also contains parody, in particular a nasty take-off of network news featuring soothsayers, somebody calling herself Mata Hari and, of course, Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves. The parody reinforces the satire, rather than working against it, however, because it is not the primary mode of discourse in the film; for the most part, Network is presented as a straight narrative drama.
In fairness, I should point out that Henry does not consider To Die For a satire because “I don’t see it as being widely outside any known reality as we see it on television, particularly these days… I don’t see it as such a gross manipulation of events, either in character or dialogue, that you could say, ‘These are wacky, wild characters saying wacky, wild things that people don’t usually say.'” [25] However, it seems to me that the film fulfills (however minimally) the criteria for satire.
In addition, although exaggeration is certainly one possible aspect of satire, wackiness of character or dialogue isn’t necessarily. Satire usually revolves around a single plot complication or a single exaggerated character which must then be realistically dealt with by the other characters. In Network, for instance, all of the characters have realistic motivations, and the main characters have a lot of depth; once we’ve accepted the one potentially unrealistic plot twist (that a madman would be given national exposure on TV in order to boost a network’s ratings), everything else follows quite logically. So, here too, I must disagree with Henry: the closer a satire can stay to reality, the more powerful it will be.
Comparing the Two Films
It is axiomatic to say that a work of art is the product of its times. Network, made in 1976, is heir to the radical politics of the 1960s and early 1970s, which involved the questioning of America’s social institutions. The film even features a radical left-wing group — The Ecumenical Liberation Army — patterned after the Symbionese Liberation Army, the kidnappers of Patty Hearst. (Like everybody else in the film, they are corrupted by their connection to television; there is a very funny scene in which the radicals argue with network representatives and a member of the Communist party over clauses in the 37 page contract to bring their exploits to television as The Mao Tse Tung Hour.)
Chayefsky seems especially astute when he has Diana Christenson claim: “…the American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp. And nothing helps. So…the American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” [26] She champions Howard Beale because she feels he is able to do just that. (Given the response of audiences to the film, Chayefsky seems to have brilliantly captured the public’s mood.)
To Die For, made 20 years later, reflects its time: institutional analysis is out, personal responsibility is in. The film is inward looking and, despite its flashy exterior, very conservative in the way it approaches its subject. As Alexander Pope once wrote, though, you don’t use a cannon to hunt butterfly; satire is a powerful weapon, and should only be trained on powerful subjects. Suzanne Stone Maretto and people like her seem too insignificant to be the primary subject of a satirical work.
Both of the films involve a murder. In Network, distraught executives decide to kill Howard Beale when his ratings drop drastically but the owner of the network refuses to allow them to take him off the air. Although their solution seems extreme, it is, in fact, a logical outgrowth of all of the actions their characters have taken to that point in the film. Killing Beale reduces their need for high ratings to its most absurd; the humor, and horror the audience feels comes from knowing exactly why they acted the way they did.
In To Die For, by way on contrast, we never know why Stone Maretto decides to kill her husband; he was suggesting they start a family, which would derail her career as a television personality, but the conflict between them on the subject didn’t escalate to the point where she would need to kill him. In fact, we never know why Stone Maretto is so obsessed with being on television in the first place. In one scene, there is a hint that she felt upstaged by her sister; in another scene, a throw away line suggests that she is too close to her father. Perhaps she strove, through television, to get his approval, or possibly just to get the attention she felt always went to her sister. But these suggestions do not add up to a proper character.
“I prefer certain mysteries,” Henry claims, “that are not preferred by most people who makes movies, particularly studio people. Production people don’t want the audience asking questions for which there are no answers. The American tradition is to sew it up, and to say, ‘Everyone did this because of that.’ It is not the same in European movies, where things happen because they happen, and no one can fathom the complicated minds of those who do both good and evil. And I don’t like to know all the answers, and I appreciate films in which all the answers aren’t given to me. So either that’s my reason or that’s my cop-out, depending on your point of view.” [27]
While there is much truth in what Henry says, it doesn’t make the lack of motivation in his film acceptable. The European films he refers to usually give a lot of clues as to their character’s motivations, which the viewer must sift through to come to his or her own conclusions; To Die For, by way of contrast, gives the viewer virtually nothing to work with. Leaving some questions in a film open is not the same as being obscure about motivations. We come to a work of art, after all, to see a coherent, more comprehensible version of reality than we experience in real life; if we want to see senseless brutality, we can watch the evening news. By not giving us a deeper understanding of its main character, To Die For misses a great opportunity to humanize its satire.
One final difference between the films is where they position their main female characters, both of whom could be characterized as moral monsters. Diana Christenson is frightening because she has power, as head of the entertainment division of a television network who is given control of the news. Stone Maretto, on the other hand, is pathetic because of her marginalization; even the people who run the cable access station where she gives the weather consider her a joke.
Conclusion
“[T]rue satire demands a high degree both of commitment to and involvement with the painful problems of the world, and simultaneously a high degree of abstraction from the world. The criticism of the world is abstracted from its ordinary setting…and transformed into a high form of ‘play’, which gives us both recognition of our responsibilities and the irresponsible joy of make-believe.” [28]
This likely seems like a lot of intellectual effort to prove that To Die For is not Network, as if the fact wasn’t obvious to reasonably intelligent people. I believe, however, that what makes the two films different is worth paying close attention to because of the way it reflects differences in art practice which have developed in the decades between when the two films were produced.
Societies constantly evolve. What was once a challenge to the social order may some day be a part of a new order. Feminism, for example, was once seen as a threat to institutions dominated by men; today, most people accept that its ideal of equality between women and men are a worthy social goal. The fight against racism is another example; the fight against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is an example of a change in social attitudes which society is still undergoing.
Satirical art can be an important means by which problems with social institutions can be brought to the attention of the public, part of the process by which society changes. The current emphasis on personal attacks rather than institutional analysis is part of a larger current in today’s society to avoid tackling the real problems facing us.
Notes
1) Frank Zappa, “I Am the Slime,” from the album Over-nite Sensation (The Zappa Family Trust d/b/a Munchkin Music, 1973).
2) M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edition (Orlando, Florida: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1985), 166.
3) Lynne Wickham, A History of Theatre, 2nd edition (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 33.
4) Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London: World University Library, 1969), 23.
5) ibid.
6) ibid, 12.
7) Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 166/167. This is one of the main reasons satire, as the man said, is what closes on Saturday night. True satire takes effort on the part of the audience to be fully appreciated. However, today’s audiences go to films primarily to escape their lives for a couple of hours, and do not want to work to tease meaning out of what they are watching.
8) Paddy Chayefsky, Network, in The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky, The Screenplays, Vol. II (New York: Applause Books, 1995), 117.
9) ibid, 222.
10) ibid, 162.
11) ibid, 189-192.
12) ibid, 119/120.
13) ibid, 159.
14) ibid, 174. This catchphrase became very popular in the 1970s after the film came out, and could be found everywhere on t-shirts and bumper stickers.
15) ibid, 176.
16) ibid, 183/184. Another of the many ironies in the film is that Chayefsky uses a madman to verbalize his themes, a device which does not diminish their power.
17) ibid, 216.
18) ibid.
19) Buck Henry, To Die For, in Scenario (V2 N2, Summer, 1996), 149.
20) ibid, 137.
21) ibid, 111. This is one example of the controversial politics of To Die For. The fact that lower class kids are so enamored of Stone-Maretto because she is on television suggests a class difference in the way people respond to television which is not borne out by the facts, which consistently show that television viewership is equally distributed among classes. If poor people seem more interested in television reality than people in higher classes, it likely has to do with the fact that it reflects a reality to which they can aspire (although few will ever achieve), while members of the middle class merely get their reality reflected back to them. This more complicated analysis is not, however, what To Die For is about. It can also be pointed out that, by giving Stone-Maretto a choice between television personality and suburban housewife, the film painted a false portrait of the choices women face in their lives. And, finally, the stereotypical image of Italians as having connections to the Mafia dismayed some of my Italian friends.
22) ibid, 143.
23) Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 29. It no longer seems to be necessary for the subject of a parody to be a serious work; these days, any work of art, whether high or low, is fair game for parody.
24) Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 101.
25) “Adapting To Die For: A Talk with Buck Henry,” in Scenario (V2 N2, Summer, 1996), 152.
26) Chayefsky, Network, 139.
27) “Adapting To Die For,” 152.
28) Hodgart, Satire, 11.
This article first appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Volume 3, Number 3, Winter 1996.