If you've ever seen the 1976 movie Network, you'll know the unforgettable scene in which TV news anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) has a mental breakdown while on-air. Posted on 02/24/2015 6:15:45 AM PST by shove_it
If you've ever seen the 1976 movie Network, you'll know the unforgettable scene in which TV news anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) has a mental breakdown while on-air.
Ignoring the teleprompter, he breaks into one of the greatest soliloquies of American cinema, a wandering but coherent rant about the banks, crime and unemployment.
Finally, he urges his viewers to throw open their windows and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!"
Today, Network feels as fresh and vital as it did 36 years ago, and not just because Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight won Oscars for acting in it.
It's because the movie predicts everything about modern media in the 21st Century—from reality TV and YouTube to Glenn Beck and the tabloid news format. And it did so 20 years before the internet even existed.
It's spooky how much the movie got right about the direction of the news business specifically, and the media generally...
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
It is a no-excuses must-see.
bttt
Which 2 and 1/2 Men? The funny one with Charlie or the unfunny one with gay people everywhere?
Beats me - I’ve never seen either of ‘em.
The scene where they're all fighting over the "Linear programming" maximal spreadsheet says it all.
Faye Dunaway is HOT!
It’s a great movie but it didn’t predict anything.
Reality TV already existed. Tabloid TV already existed abroad and already had plenty of precursors here too. And it sure as hell did not predict Youtube.
Was
didn’t even know She was Sick,
how sad.
"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 immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational 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."
We know him as Glenn Beck.
I liked the scene where the militant Angela Davis look-alike was getting granular with details of her TV contract.
It is happening everywhere on TV. Gay people everywhere. A thousandfold higher percentage of representation than exists in real life.
Hell, even "The Walking Dead" has a new gay couple. I may stop watching it for that reason alone.
You left out the best line of that monologue. Howard Beale's response:
BEALE: "I have seen the face of God."
JENSEN: "Mr. Beale...you may well be right."
Yeah.
We call it Rollerball ...
Yes, Beatty’s boardroom soliloquy is posted above at #7 on a YouTube link. It opened my eyes to the “new world order” almost 40 years ago. It’s well worth watching.
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