Saw Network (again) on DVD Last Night. A great movie IMHO. One again, I was stuck at the almost Shakespearean-like speeches throughout the film. Some, like Caroline Schumaker’s tragic denunciation of her husband upon learning of his affair are timeless. Others, like Howard Beale’s fits of rage and Arthur Jensen’s ironic praise of capitalism are more than a bit dated. I wonder, if Paddy Chayefsky had been born 25 years later, what would the screenplay look like.
Howard Beale: The populist madman and anchor of the UBN news.
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad.
Everybody knows things are bad.
It’s a recession.
Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job.
The dollar buys a nickel’s worth.
Corruption reigns supreme.
Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter.
Gangs are running wild in the street.
And there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do and there’s no end to it.
Judgeships are being purchased in Brooklyn. Greedy trial lawyers & lazy public employee unions are strangling our cities.
We sit in front of our computers while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 14 homicides and 62 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
We know things are bad. Worse then bad, they’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore.
We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller.
And all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our own homes.”
“Let me have my microwave and my TV and my Dell PC and I won’t say anything.”
“Just leave us alone.”
Well I’m not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot.
I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.
I don’t know what to do about the recession and the tax burden and the corruption and the terrorists and the crime in the street.
All I know is first you’ve got to get mad!
You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value.”
So I want you to get up now.
I want all of you to get up out of your chairs.
I want you to get up now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell,
“I’m sickened by what we’ve become and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Mr. Jensen: The Libertarian Utopian and CEO of the UBS Network.
“Foreign investors 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 Despots, there are no Communists.
There are no Third Worlds, there is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems!
One vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars.
Petrol-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 sub-atomic 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 Red Chinese talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx?
They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, min-max 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, in 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.”