In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky wrote a remarkable screenplay that makes me wonder whether he belongs in the historic pantheon that includes Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and Isiaah.
In his amazing story, a news broadcaster named Howard Beale grows tired of spreading “bullshit” (his term, not mine) and announces, on the air, that he is going to kill himself on live television in seven days. Of course, his ratings hit the roof.
The network “suits”, those who live and die for ratings, believe the man has gone insane and initially consider pulling him off the air. Ultimately, because of the voyeuristic mobs who sit like slugs watching television news, they decide to market Mr. Beale as “the mad prophet of the airwaves”.
If you’ve not seen this show or if you’ve not watched it in decades, this might be the perfect time to download it from a streaming service and watch it. Sidney Lumet directed it. It stars Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, and Robert Duvall. It was nominated for ten Oscar awards. Finch and Dunaway won the Oscars for best actor and best actress. Paddy Chayefsky won the 1977 award for writing the best screenplay. In case you’re wondering, ROCKY won the best movie award.
But, returning to my recap of the movie, the most-remembered scene from the movie is when a manic Howard Beale exhorts his television audience to open their windows and yell, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”. In response, crazed Americans throughout the nation push their windows up and scream on demand.
It’s all great fun, culminating in Howard’s murder on camera because his rating slip.
But I don’t see either of those scenes as the climax of the film.
Towards the end of the show, Howard goes on a rant, telling his audience to overwhelm his network with telegrams demanding that they not sell out and become part of a giant conglomerate run by Arabs.
This puts him in conflict with the Bosses.
My favorite scene is the one where Howard is confronted by the head of the network and he is lectured on how things work. This is what the CEO says to him:
There is no America.
There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT ...
and DuPont, Dow,
Unión 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 linear programming charts, statistical decisión theories,
and compute price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments like us.
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 worid...
It sounds a lot like a lecture at the World Economic Forum. It sounds exactly like what Klaus Schwab has been telling his disciples for more than fifty years.
One of his Young Global Leaders, Vladimir Putin, is staging a war against another of Schwab’s Young Global Leaders, a comedian named Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The world watches in anxious anticipation, wondering when Poland, NATO, and the United States will inevitably be pulled into the conflict.
China, of course, is now allied with Russia and it is likely that, just as in the days of Genghis Khan, the Mongel hordes will roar from the Steppes to conquer the New World Order.
What will be, will be. There’s no point in investing ourselves emotionally or financially in the production.
Many people are aware that, in the West, eight mega-corporations control almost all business and three organizations (BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard) own 80% of all the stock of these corporations.
Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street: The Puppet …
https://truthbasedmedia.com/2021/08/21/vanguard...
The religion of global warming plus the fact that our impossible-to-repay national debt have not stoked enough fear into the proletariat and that is why COVID-19 was cooked up and distributed around the world. The media-created animus between the USA and the Russians and Chinese has distracted the masses sufficiently to allow most to ignore the actual danger of a Mideast war. Biden is setting the stage for that war by siding with the Russians and Iranians against Israel. At the same time, he has managed to align our longtime ally Saudi Arabia with Russia.
History records dozens of instances where children became kings. Joe Biden is possibly the first dementia-ridden fossil to be put in place by a corrupt cabal of power-crazed disciples of Klaus Schwab. Orwell created a fictional Big Brother who kept the masses in a state of frenzy with a "two-minute hate". Biden and company have kept us frothing at the mouth with the media's 24/7 "constant hate". Today we are programmed to hate Russia. Tomorrow it might be Saudi Arabia. In lieu of any pending crises, we may go back to being panic-stricken because of the Fauci Flu. We are the victims of an oligarchy and its effective use of the media for mind control.
Unless Zelenskyy decides to give part of his country to Russia, the war will escalate until we are either ruined by debt and nuclear war or else Bill Gates will control all of America’s farmland and we will be given the choice of starvation or being force-fed mRNA-contaminated food.
Maybe we should just enjoy our personal lives and quit pretending that the governments and their news media are telling us true stories. The Great Powers are playing a violent game of chess and we are simply pawns, “useless eaters” as the creator of Planned Parenthood called us.
Great article Chuck, The book and film NETWORK is an inside examination of the corporate state, written so expertly that one is taught truths through entertainment.
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Paddy Chayefsky also wrote the novel Altered States. The novel and the film are based in part on John C. Lilly's sensory deprivation research conducted in isolation tanks, under the influence of psychoactive drugs like mescaline, ketamine and LSD. It marked the film debut of William Hurt and Drew Barrymore.
It is an amazing tour de force of mind blowing imagagery and concepts. The makeup special effects by Dick Smith were industry changing, influencing such effects artists as Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin.
Dick Smith Make-Up (Movie Magic episode) -- https://youtu.be/A3Vfz-Iu2v4?t=2
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