NETWORK - A message from the past (watch online)

Written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network details the downward spiral of the fictional United Broadcasting Service, foretelling today’s tabloid television and the desperate quest for ratings demanded by bottom-line-driven corporate masters. The picture opens as despondent UBS news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) concludes his rock-bottom-rated broadcast with the announcement that he is about to lose his job. He then declares that he will commit suicide on the air after his final show, and jokes that it will surely improve his ratings.



"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale... and I won't have it!
Is that clear?
You think you 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-variant, multinational dominion of dollars!
Petrol dollars, electro dollars, multi-dollars.
Reichsmarks, 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?
You get up on your little 21-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 Du Pont, 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 price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, 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."