Diana Christensen, programming executive at a television network in Network (1976), is a brilliant, tireless and terrifyingly effective woman. Her mission is to raise the ratings, and for her there is nothing else: when she discovers that a veteran anchor, Howard Beale, has gone mad on air and the public adores his delirium, Diana sees not a human tragedy but a programming opportunity. She turns a man's mental collapse into a weekly spectacle, and her logic of ratings leads her, barely batting an eye, to orchestrate Beale's murder on screen when his numbers fall. For Durkheim's anomie, Diana is the portrait of deregulated ambition in an industry of prosperity: the professional whose only compass—the share—has no ceiling, and who by following it has erased, one by one, all the other norms that would make her human.
// The theoryAnomie does not strike only in misery
The most counterintuitive finding of Durkheim about anomie is that it does not strike above all in crises of poverty, but also—and with particular virulence—in those of prosperity. When an activity grows rich and expands at great speed, the old rules about what is legitimate to desire and how far become obsolete, and desire, suddenly without a ceiling, becomes deregulated. Diana lives exactly that anomie. She works in an industry—commercial television of the 1970s—drunk on audiences, profits and growth, where the only measure of value is the rating, and where therefore it is never enough: every ratings record only sets the goal for the next one. In that environment, Diana's desire has become infinite and has swept away every moral limit in its path. The theory stresses that her problem is not ambition—a virtue in her milieu—but the absence of an "enough" to contain it. Diana is not cruel out of hatred or sadism; she is cruel because her only norm, the audience, recognizes no boundary, and she has followed it to the point where broadcasting a murder seems to her, simply, good programming. It is the anomie of success, not of failure.
Desire measured without a ceiling
Diana illustrates a central mechanism of Durkheimian anomie: what happens when desire is anchored to a measure that, by its very nature, has no ceiling. The audience can always rise one more point; profits, grow one more quarter. A desire tied to such a goal never finds rest, because each achievement instantly becomes the new floor from which more is demanded. Durkheim described precisely this torment: to pursue something limitless is to condemn oneself to perpetual dissatisfaction, and that dissatisfaction, far from restraining conduct, deregulates it. Diana does not enjoy her successes: she leaves them behind the moment she attains them, already hurtling toward the next. And because her only compass is that ceilingless measure, all other considerations—Beale's dignity, the truth, human life—become, literally, irrelevant: they do not appear in the only indicator that counts for her. Here lies the difference with Merton's anomie: Diana does not fail to reach success, she reaches it in abundance; her pathology is that success itself, measured without limit, has devoured every other norm. The anomie of prosperity is not failing to arrive: it is that arriving never suffices, and that in that goalless race everything else is lost.
// The subjectThe woman who only knows how to exist in prime time
The film shows in three scenes that Diana's deregulation does not stay at the office. With Beale a hit, she looks for another and cuts a deal with a terrorist group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, for a reality series, The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, fed with exclusive footage of its actions: if it draws an audience, every norm is expendable. The second takes it to bed. In her affair with Max Schumacher, the veteran head of the news division, Diana talks ratings while they make love and, at the climax, cries out that the network is getting more publicity than Watergate. Max leaves his wife of more than twenty-five years for her, and ends up walking out: he tells her she is television incarnate, indifferent to suffering and insensitive to joy. The third is the executives' meeting. Beale's sermons are depressing the audience, ratings slip, Arthur Jensen, the conglomerate's chairman, refuses to fire him, and Diana and Frank Hackett decide to have the Liberation Army kill him on air. For Durkheim this is the malady of infinite aspiration: a desire with no ceiling that no longer tells living from programming. She is responsible for what she does, but the film frames her as the symptom of a world where the only norm left is "more".
Diana Christensen
Get the map of theories for free
Subscribe to the criminal archive —one case a week, no spam— and I'll send you The map of theories: the great currents of criminology on a single sheet.
// The riftNeither TV monster nor blameless cog
The rift with Diana is choosing only one of her two faces. One reading makes her an individual monster, a cold and soulless woman—and thus ignores that her coldness is the perfect product of a system that rewards it. The opposite reduces her to an innocent cog, a mere victim of the logic of the share, erasing that it is she who decides, again and again, to cross every line. Durkheim's anomie makes it possible to hold both: Diana is fully responsible for her acts and is legible as the expectable result of an industry in anomie, where deregulated desire is not a defect but the requirement of the job. The theory does not exonerate her (not everyone at her network orchestrates murders); but it does illuminate the ground that produces and rewards the Dianas. The honest reading does not choose between blaming the person or the system: it understands that the anomie of prosperity works precisely this way, manufacturing individuals who freely choose horror because their world has erased all the norms that would have prevented it. Diana is at once the hand that pulls the trigger and the proof of what happens when a culture decides that nothing is enough.
That Network was written in 1976 and today seems like a documentary about our television and our social media is the irony that makes it prophetic: Diana's anomie was not a satirical exaggeration, it was a forecast. Durkheim would recognize the landscape—an entire civilization anchored to ceilingless metrics, chasing a "more" that never arrives, erasing in the race the norms that made it human—.
When "never enough" becomes the norm
Diana Christensen matters because the anomie of prosperity she embodies is, perhaps, the most contemporary of all the pathologies Durkheim described. We live surrounded by ceilingless metrics—audiences, followers, sales, growth, "likes"— that promise satisfaction and deliver perpetual dissatisfaction, because they are designed so that it is never enough. Diana is the warning of where anchoring human desire to an infinite measure leads: to the erosion, one by one, of all the other norms—truth, dignity, life—that do not appear in the indicator. The lesson of Durkheim, and of Network, is that a culture that turns "never enough" into its central norm produces neither happiness nor endless progress, but deregulated individuals capable of justifying anything in the name of the next share point. To recover the question Diana no longer knows how to ask herself —"what for? how far? at what cost?"— is not to renounce ambition: it is the condition for ambition not to devour us.
Three key takeaways
- Diana Christensen embodies Durkheim's anomie of prosperity: in an industry drunk on audiences and growth, her ambition has become deregulated to the point of erasing every moral boundary—willing to broadcast a live murder if it boosts the ratings.
- Her pathology is anchoring desire to a ceilingless measure (the audience): such a desire is never sated, and in the goalless race all other norms—dignity, truth, life—become irrelevant. It is not Merton's failure, it is the success that never suffices.
- Neither isolated monster nor innocent cog: she is responsible for what she chooses and at the same time the product of an industry in anomie that rewards limitless desire. She matters because her evil —"never enough" made norm— is that of a culture of ceilingless metrics like our own.
Sources · further reading
- Durkheim, É. (1897). El suicidio. Alcan.
- Durkheim, É. (1893). La división del trabajo social. Alcan.
- Postman, N. (1985). Divertirse hasta morir. Viking Penguin.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Diana Christensen?
Diana Christensen (“—”) is a villain from Network, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. She is willing to broadcast a murder live if it boosts the ratings.
Why does Diana Christensen become a villain?
Diana Christensen and Durkheim's anomie: the executive whose ambition has become deregulated in an industry drunk on prosperity, until every boundary between the broadcastable and the monstrous is erased. The anomie of success, not of failure.
Which criminological theory explains Diana Christensen?
Diana Christensen's case is analysed through Anomie (Durkheim). Durkheim warned that anomie strikes hard in prosperity, when desire loses all limits. Diana Christensen, from Network, embodies it: a television executive so consumed by the pursuit of ratings that she has erased every moral boundary, willing to exploit an anchor's madness and even to orchestrate a live murder. The deregulated ambition of an industry with no "enough".
