#1 Movie of All Time...

Network is my #1 movie of all time. I have some idea what the rest of the top 5 are, but couldn't tell you them in order confidently off the top of my head. I can confidently say that for me, Network is #1. I first watched it in college, possibly during my time in Australia in junior year, or maybe I already had it on a HDD by then and brought it with me. I've watched it every few years since then, carrying it with me throughout my 20s and 30s.

It's aged well, and new prophetic tendencies seem to emerge each time I rewatch it. Back in the 2000s, it was the rise of the 24/7 news cycle, the corporatization of media, and the emergence of reality television as a genre. The blurring of the line between fact and fiction, news and entertainment. In the 2010s, what stood out to me was the film's treatment of the power of populism and outrage, and Arthur Beale as a proto-Trump figure, complete with angry mobs and billionaire puppetmasters. The corporate cosmology of Arthur Beale continues to march forward in our feudal system of "Big _____" lords and worker peasants.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Network is a 1976 American satirical comedy drama film directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky. It depicts a television network struggling with poor ratings until the nightly live broadcast of its longtime news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) inadvertently showcases his breakdown into increasingly psychotic behaviour, which makes his show a surprise hit. Alongside Finch (in his final role), the film stars Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Robert Duvall, Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty, and Beatrice Straight. Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and released by United Artists on November 27, 1976, Network was a commercial success, earning $23.7 million on a...

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Select Rants, Sermons, & Speeches from the Movie

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air's unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.

We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything's going crazy. So we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, 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.

INT. Max'S APARTMENT – LIVING ROOM – MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25TH. Max and his wife, Louise, in the middle of an ugly domestic scene. Louise sits erect on an overstuffed chair, her eyes wet with imminent tears; Max strides around the room. He is clearly under great stress.

LOUISE (shrilly)
How long has it been going on?

MAX (prowling around the room)
A month. I thought at first it might be a transient thing and blow over in a week. I still hope to God it's just a menopausal infatuation. But it is an infatuation, Louise. There's no sense my saying I won't see her again because I will. Do you want me to clear out, go to a hotel?

LOUISE
Do you love her?

MAX
I don't know how I feel. I'm grateful I still feel anything. I know I'm obsessed with her.

LOUISE (stands)
Then say it! Don't keep telling me you're obsessed, you're infatuated. Say you're in love with her!

MAX
I'm in love with her.

LOUISE (erupts)
Then get out, go to a hotel, go anywhere you want, go live with her, but don't come back! Because after twenty-five years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain we've inflicted on each other, I'll be damned if I'll just stand here and let you tell me you love somebody else!

(now it's she striding around, weeping, a caged lioness)

Because this isn't just some convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or some broad you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it?, your last roar of passion before you sink into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the great winter passion, and I get the dotage? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling till you slink back like a penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it! If you can't work up a winter passion for me, then the least I require is respect and allegiance! I'm hurt! Don't you understand that? I'm hurt badly!

She stares, her cheeks streaked with tears, at Max standing at the terrace glass door, staring blindly out, his own eyes wet and welling. After a moment, he turns and regards his anguished wife.

LOUISE
Say something, for God's sake.

MAX
I've got nothing to say.

He leads Howard down the steps to the floor level, himself ascends again to the small stage and the podium. Howard sits in one of the 200 odd seats. Jensen pushes a button, and the enormous drapes slowly fall, slicing away layers of light until the vast room is utterly dark. Then, the little pinspots at each of the desks, including the one behind which Howard is seated, pop on, creating a miniature Milky Way effect. A shaft of white LIGHT shoots out from the rear of the room, spotting Jensen on the podium, a sun of its own little galaxy. Behind him, the shadowed white of the lecture screen. Jensen suddenly wheels to his audience of one and roars out:

JENSEN
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have 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, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, 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?

(pause)

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 pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and 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 by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and 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 to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

HOWARD (humble whisper)
Why me?

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

Howard slowly rises from the blackness of his seat so that he is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light shooting out from the rear of the room. He stares at Jensen spotted on the podium, transfixed.

HOWARD
I have seen the face of God!

In b.g., up on the podium, Jensen considers this curious statement for a moment.

JENSEN
You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

The Full Script