"I'M MAD AS HELL...AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

[jus_the_facts]

HOWARD BEALE: "We are no longer an industrialized society; we aren't even a post-industrial or technological society. We are now a corporate society, a corporate world, a corporate universe. This world is a vast cosmology of small corporations orbiting around larger corporations who, in turn, revolve around giant corporations, and this whole endless, eternal, ultimate cosmology is expressly designed for the production and consumption of useless things . . . "

--from the 1976 movie Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky




....And when the twelfth largest company in
the world controls the most awesome
goddamned 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! Tele-
vision is a goddamned amusement
park, that's what television is!

Television is a circus, a carnival,
a travelling troupe of acrobats and
story-tellers, singers and dancers,
jugglers, side-show freaks, lion-
tamers and football players.

We're in the boredom-killing business!
If you want 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 believe this illusion
we're spinning here.

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 illu-
sions! So turn off this goddam
set! Turn it off right now! Turn
it off and leave it off. Turn it
off right now, right in the middle
of this very sentence I'm speaking
now --

At which point, HOWARD BEALE, sweating and red-eyed with
his prophetic rage, collapses to the floor in a pro-
phetic swoon.

...Television continues relentlessly on.

[valerief]

1. That'll be one of the first movies banned. nt

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Chayefsky was the real mad prophet.

I saw this when it came out and thought it was the most important film I'd seen to date. My girlfriend hated it - she'd wanted to see Rocky. We broke up 3 months later.

Howard Beale, speaking for Paddy Chayefsky, nailed it.

[ewagner]

5. My favorite from when it

was first released.

Last year I found the "Anniversary Edition" DVD and watched it over and over and over....

Paddy Chayefsky was a genius...

He knew where TV would go if left unchecked....and he was right.

[Freddie Stubbs]

3. Beale was killed on live TV

[warren pease]

4. And then Ned Beatty, as master of the universe Arthur Jensen, sets Beale straight...

In one of the great moments of unvarnished truth ever seen in America:


Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immutable, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- 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.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

[jus_the_facts]

9. "...all boredom amused." That they've pretty much accomplished....this not so much...

"....And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- 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." :banghead:

[Starbucks Anarchist]

6. One of my favorite movies.

:thumbsup:

Trivia: Peter Finch (Howard Beale) is the only person to win an acting Oscar posthumously.

[supernova]

7. Mad As Hell clip here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08

Still give me goodbumps! :D

[jus_the_facts]

8. I picked up the DVD at the library yesterday....s'been a while since I'd seen it...

....oh the humanity. :banghead: