"Network" Speech to Howard Beale on now on TCM. Watch it if you've never seen it.

[Hissyspit]

Genius.

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 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."

Beale: "But why me?"

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

Beale: "I have seen the face of God."

Jensen: "You just might be right, Mr. Beale."

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork4.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sySuIXG_IM

Max Schumacher to Diana Christensen: "I feel guilty and conscious-stricken and all of those things that you think sentimental but which my generation calls simple human decency.

And I miss my home,because I’m beginning to get scared shitless. All of a sudden it’s closer to the end than to the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features.

You’re dealing with a man that has primal doubts, Diana, and you’ve got to cope with it. I’m not some guy discussing male menopause on the Barbara Walters show.

I’m the man that you presumably love. I’m part of your life. I live here. I’m real. You can’t switch to another station.

...

Like everything you and the institution of televisión touch is destroyed. You’re televisión incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.

War, murder, death -
all the same to you as bottles of beer.

And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy.

You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you.

[Bozita]

1. Thanks, watching now.

[Mimosa]

2. Still valid, important, after all these years!

Paddy Chayefsky was a genius. His screenplays -including 'Marty' and 'Network'- will endure. :)