“When the fight begins within
himself, a man's worth something.”
- Robert Browning, 1855

Network(1976)

Movie Network(1976)


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 --
* * *
I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to
protest. I don't want you to write your
congressmen. Because I wouldn't now what
to tell you to write. I don't know what to do
about the depression and the inflation and
the defense budget and the Russians and
crime in the street. All I know is first you
got to get mad. You've got to say: "I'm
mad as hell and I'm not going to take this
any more. I'm a human being, goddammit.
My life has value."

So I want you to get up now. I want you to
get out of your chairs and go to the window.
Right now. I want you to go to the window,
open it, and stick your head out and yell. I
want you to yell: "I'm mad as hell and I'm
not going to take this any more!"
* * *