I'm Mad As Hell, and I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore
Watched this movie NETWORK again for the first time in a long time. I was struck by how real the 1976 speech given by Howard Beale on the air sounds today.
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 work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.
[shouting] You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
[shouting] 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
Peter Finch and Ned Beatty are just awesome in this movie. Beatty's first big role (getting raped onsreen in "Deliverance") was a risky career move -- he's an underappreciated and underused great actor! Clearly one of the best scenes in the movie is Beale's screed on the whole television generation. It includes this great line: "We'll tell you any shit you want to hear." It explains Bush for me.
"Network" was really a documentary almost from the git-go. But seeing it again, I realized that the one thing that used to seem unbelievable over-the-top satire - the planning and execution of the on-camera assasination of Beale - now seems perfectly plausible.
Facing cancellation, Beale announces; I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks' time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I had going for me in my life, I've decided to kill myself. I'm going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. 50 share, easy. In fact, there was a newswoman in the late 1970's in Florida who blew her brains out on TV. Her name was Chris Chubbuck - and her line was something like " "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts in living color, we bring you another first, an attempted suicide."
UPDATE: Rook has just commented about another suicide in 1987 on television. R. Budd Dwyer was the Pennsylvania State Treasurer, convicted of corruption, who arranged for the broadcast of his suicide to a nationwide audience during a press conference.
In 1988, Steve Albini's band Rapeman released an EP called "Budd", addressing Dwyer's suicide directly.
In 1995, the rock band Filter had a hit with the song "Hey Man, Nice Shot", which, although not explicitly mentioning Dwyer, was "inspired" by Dwyer's suicide, according to band members.
The rock band Camp Kill Yourself, or cKy for short, used a drawing of Budd Dwyer's suicide for the cover art of their first full-length album.