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Intershame Weblog The Foresight of "Network" |
Film Accurately Predicts Future
09/04/2009
For those who have never seen, let along heard of the 1976 movie "Network", you should. It's a remarkable film that so acurately predicted what we're seeing today, it's almost freaky.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network is about a fictional fourth national television network emerging in the United States (ABC, CBS and NBC being the only networks at the time). This struggling network, UBS, turns it's news division over to the entertainment division in order to help boost ratings. This shift allows UBS to give Howard Beale, an aging news anchor, his 2 weeks notice making room for an anchor who can get better ratings. Instead of leaving his news desk quietly, Beale announces live on the evening news that he is going to "blow his brains out" during his broadcast the following night. His suicide threat generates such high ratings that the network decides to give him his own show where he can rant and rave about anything he likes.
Chayefsky wrote a film about a network willing to take advantage of a mentally ill man by placing him on the air and allowing him to make a fool of himself every night all in the name of ratings.
Sound familiar?
Here's a sample of the film's fictional "The Network News Hour staring The Mad Prophet of the Airways, Howard Beale"...
And here is what is on a very non-fictional network today...
Life imitating art in ways it never should.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network is about a fictional fourth national television network emerging in the United States (ABC, CBS and NBC being the only networks at the time). This struggling network, UBS, turns it's news division over to the entertainment division in order to help boost ratings. This shift allows UBS to give Howard Beale, an aging news anchor, his 2 weeks notice making room for an anchor who can get better ratings. Instead of leaving his news desk quietly, Beale announces live on the evening news that he is going to "blow his brains out" during his broadcast the following night. His suicide threat generates such high ratings that the network decides to give him his own show where he can rant and rave about anything he likes.
Chayefsky wrote a film about a network willing to take advantage of a mentally ill man by placing him on the air and allowing him to make a fool of himself every night all in the name of ratings.
Sound familiar?
Here's a sample of the film's fictional "The Network News Hour staring The Mad Prophet of the Airways, Howard Beale"...
And here is what is on a very non-fictional network today...
Life imitating art in ways it never should.
Comments
- 988 days agoWow, I have to be honest I hadn't made the connection between the two but I think you may be on to something. It reminds me a bit of the old Morton Downey show as well.
- 986 days agoYou 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.
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