All right, what's up, y'all. I hope you're doing well. We're
gonna have fun tonight. Another one of our classic movie analyzes, and actually
a film that we should have already come to. I don't know why I
never got around to this. Sometimes you miss the classics, even the conspiracy
classics. This is definitely a conspiracy classics. So I'm glad that we finally
got around to it. And I've also noticed that when I don't do a
movie, it's typically for the right reason. In other words, there's there's
like providential you know, synchronicity, whatever, because I wouldn't have done the
movie justice. It turns out because I usually learned a lot of information years
later that give me a much better perspective. That was definitely the case with
the Born films. When I first watched the Born films, I thought,
oh, I need to do a deep dive analysis. Years ago. I
remember watching them in the theater, and I knew about m culture at the
time, but I didn't know near you know, one fifth of what I
know now, so it really would have been a subpar analysis. It would
have been unfair to all of you wonderful people. So it's fitting then that
we waited so long to do network, and I'm so, on the one
hand, a little bit embarrassed, but I'm also happy that it took me
so long to do it. And you know, tonight we're gonna have a
great guest with us, so it's gonna be a lot of fun. He's
excellent when it comes to breaking down literature, and a lot of the literature
that I intend to break down he's already broken down. But you're gonna get,
you know, unique analysis from both of us. I'm sure when I
move to and get to some of the things that I wanted to do,
like um, the you know, some of the lit that he's done,
I want to do. I'm not bitching. I don't care. I'm just
saying that, you know, it's gonna be great to do some of that
down the road, like the Melville novel On the Devil. I think he
and I talked about doing this as well. Hey, what's up? What's
up? What's going on now? Much? Let me make sure it sounds
right? Can you hear me? Yep? I got you? Yep,
got you? You're good? Ah am, I you got me good?
Everything's good? All right? Sweet? All right? Yeah, I'm ready
to go with some network. Yeah, I'm fixing this. I'm fixing the
screen. The sizes are all there, we go, okay, cool cool,
all right. Yeah, So I was talking about how, you know,
we had discussed doing confidence Man down the road. Um, I think
that's gonna be fun some Melville. And we haven't done a lot of lit
analysis, just because not a lot of people do lit analysis. So really
it's only been me and Mark Hackard, and I think down the road,
you know, we can probably do some more of that kind of stuff.
Um, can you hear me? Sounds good? Yeah, yeah, sounds
good. I'd love to get into Melville. I did h Yeah, I
know you were just talking about it, but I did Moby dick Um kind
of early on in the life of the Channel. Yeah, I remember I
watched I watched that. Yeah, that's a pretty mammoth work. So,
um, I'd love to go back to some nineteenth century sort of revelatory literature,
right. So um, yeah, so I'm ready to go to Uh,
do you want to kick it off? I got a lot of a
lot of notes, so let's get you to maybe set the stage. And
um, I was telling everybody that this is perfect timing because a lot of
times the movies that I've never gotten to it actually works out perfectly because I'll
have a much better perspective the longer that I wait. You know, so
when we did the Born films, um, I know a lot about it,
kuiltrid. Now, if I'd done the Burn films when they came out,
you know, it wouldn't have been that good. So um, I
think the same with this. I know a lot about this time period of
a lot about the the background and the and the film is full of weird
U seventies era news stories that are quite conspiratorial. And we're going to get
into all of those. But let's let you kick it off. What do
you want us to know when we first think about network? Yeah? So
this, um, this is an amazing film because it's so revelatory. It
has so much in it. If by the way, if I'm glitchen,
um I should I got a good signal, So I don't know if it's
me. If I'm glitchen, just let me know or if my audio goes
out. So you're a little come in a little a little hot, could
you could you turn it down just a little bit. It's a little crackily
and loud, but otherwise you're good. Let's say here, hopefully that's a
little better. Okay, go ahead, yeah. Um. So, so
this is a great film. It's nineteen seventy six and it's by the screenwriter
Patty Chievsky, and it's a pretty mammoth screenplay. And you know, I
think that it's interesting because this one is, um, it's a film that
really everybody should know, but it's one that is sort of rarely talked about.
It's so revelatory, it's it's so it's it's multilayered, it's complex,
and the writing in it especially is just looking at it from a literary standpoint,
the screenplay is amazing. It's so well written, it's almost Shakespearean at
times. The illusions in it, I mean there are Miltonian illusions, Shakespearean
illusions, and there there's there's a a wealth of sort of a pseudo biblical
illusions in it because the language, um, and it's not only biblical,
but it's religious language. So that will tie into I'm sure we're going to
discuss the ecumenical um parts of the of the film and of the screenplay.
I mean, you know, um, references to Valhalla, to the Indian
pantheon. And and that's because the characters in this are sort of compared to
in a way. It's like we have the Heramid structure sort of exposed in
this, and we also have, um, the managerial class and the sort
of media arm that you've talked so much about it. And and this one
is so interesting because it really is like poetry. It's um it's so well
written, and the characters it's multilayered because at times you think you've got a
handle on the way that the movie's gonna go, but you but you don't.
Really. It kind of turns, and that is supposed to mimic the
way that the structure sort of bobs and weaves. And one of the last
thing I'll say is the most interesting thing I think about this is that we
get it's so relevant now. You know that the people kind of talk about
how the film predicts, you know, the the advent of Fox, of
the Fox Corporation, Fox Channel and then later on Fox News, and that
is true to a large extent, but but it is much bigger than that.
So I'm interesting. I'm interested to hear your take on this because it's
a it's a very powerful film. It wanted you know. Of course it
won a bunch of awards. It was up at the Oscars at the same
time as Raw and um. The two films kind of they're so different,
but they kind of swept the awards. And that the story behind the film
is also interesting, um and and that that is not just interesting sort of
for like a you know, a film trivia like Standpoint, But it's interesting
because the movie is um it it works on like it's like a meta satire.
It goes beyond the level of satire into something that's, you know,
sort of hyper reality. So I'm interested to get into it. Yeah,
I have the meta narrative references in my notes as well. And I was
thinking about, um, now he did uh Dog Day Afternoon, And isn't
that about al Pacino and engage in some kind of corruption cop corruption type of
thing. It's been years since I've watched The Dog Day Afternoon, but I'm
trying I'm looking at this the um the plot, you know what I'm talking
about? Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, classic Pucino. Yeah,
what what was the I'm trying to remember the plot. I watched him years
ago, but it's relevant because you know he's doing these kinds of films that
is Sydney Lumett. Yes, yes, Um, Sydney Lumtt is interesting because
he um is sort of a this to me, we I did a stream
on concept and the eighties and the Don Simpson era, and that is you
can see when you watch a film like this that that era is a is
completely reactionary to the auteur sort of filmmaking of seventies Hollywood, because Lumette is
clearly part of this. He's part of this thing. And yet we have
like a you know, like an engineered society. It's not just predictive programming,
but it's like it's like engineered. And we have the gritty reality of
the seventy in the streets and now Paccino like robs this bank and yeah,
you know he he's not gonna take it anymore, just like in this film.
And UM, and so we we kind of go, I think,
what what happens is like you know, artistic eras go in cycles. UM,
and that's planned. Obviously a lot of it's planned, but UM,
we see like the complete opposite happened in the eighties, the same sort of
UM, end point, but through a different kind of mechanism. And uh,
Lou Matt's great. I mean he was directing films into his like nineties.
The last movie he did was, um, this one called The Devil
before The Devil Knows You're Dead with Um Philips s Teymour Hoffman. Great film.
Um, but this one, uh is is interesting. I didn't know
before this that Sidney Lamet was married to both Gloria Vanderbilt, whose son is
obviously Henderson Coomer, who's part of this structure, and he was also married
to Um I forget his first name, his first wife, forget his first
wife's name, but he was a bridesmaid for Princess Grace and Prince Rhanier of
Monaco. It just shows you the like interrelated web that this sort of exists.
Yeah, and uh, you know interesting too because in Shadow Masters by
Daniel Esselin following doctor John Coleman, he talks about the nWo being the ones
that oft Grace Kelly. And that's interesting because it connects into Builderberg. Builderberg
plays a role actually in this movie in the background. People don't know that,
but the entity that is hinted at here, it's kind of a Blackguard,
you know, a vanguard black rock kind of entity, but it's actually
Bilderberg because it's it was Builderberg and Kissinger that was behind the seventies oil crisis.
And so that is one of the news stories that's mentioned throughout the movie,
and it's uh, it forms the background to the rant about you know,
the oil and the price of oil and getting out in the street and
yelling, right, I don't know what to do about the price of oil
and this and that, and that also relates to the narrative later on about
the Arabs taking over and buying everything out. That's part of the OPEC nineteen
seventies oil crisis. And this was actually a thing engineered by Kissinger to establish
that the Saudias and the Gulf cartel that they would buy that they would be
using petro dollar. And so this is covered in Effiliam Endol's books and he
talks about how Kissinger organized this via Builderberg. And that's what's in the background.
So people don't I'm not talking about you, but I'm just saying general
people don't know that's in the background. Operation mocking Bird is in the background
of this movie. The Symbionese Liberation Army is in the background of this movie
with the staged in my view, you know, some kind of weird CIA
operation with Patty Hurst and this made up ridiculous Marxist group, which in this
movie it's it's a trans formed into the Ecumenical Liberation Army, which which is
odd because there's also multiple multiple references to the New Age movement and to the
younger generation with the Faye Dunaway character and how she lives out her life as
a movie and the older generation of this you know, Walter Cronkite era News
executive man that she has an affair with. And then we have the the
pseudo prophet figure of Howard Beale and the Howard Beale Show, which, like
you said, um, it does have some twists and turns. It doesn't
go in the direction that you think. But point being with all of that
was just which we'll get into a lot of that because I actually mentioned the
CIA hearings in the in the news clips that are being played, and I
don't know if that's this. It might be the m Culture hearing is the
Front of the Church hearings, or it could be some other CIA hearing.
UM, I don't recall, but all of this shows us I think,
given what you were saying about Sydney Lumit that you know, he has some
insight or some knowledge of how all of this really works, right, so
he can see into that power structure. And of course Anderson Cooper, as
you said, who is the son of Glari Vannerbelt. I mean, he's
openly known to have been recruited into the CIA for media, right, So
that's how this works. Now. It is interesting that they don't really ever
mention the CIA and connection with the media, but it's there and kind of
a subtle way. I think, given the fact that you know, Mockingbird
was was going on during this time period and it is still going on,
basically you could argue. So So anyway, that's my overall geopolitical setting for
this time period. The seventies were also a time, as as you noted,
when there was a lot of anti establishment feeling and sentiment in Hollywood.
So you could make a lot of movies that were questioning the system that we're
questioning. Things you could challenge and question, you know, innocracy, the
coming dystopia. There's so many you know, anti establishment dystopian films this time
period, and you know, the Fade Dunaway character is supposed to be anti
establishment. She talks about how she wants anti establishment, counter culture news,
she wants Marxist news, she wants the people. All this nonsense and the
iron of courses that we find out later on that the Ecumenical Liberation Army is
just this completely controlled, cutout thing. They're concerned with their profit share of
the TV show that they're going to get, which is a reality show,
so that they're they're basically getting this reality show years before reality shows. And
then Howard Bale is this sort of you know, angry rant man, which
reminded me of Lord Valdemart. So you know, I've actually I'm embarrassed to
realize that Howard Bill's kind of like, uh, Lord Voldemort. I didn't
I didn't even realize it until watching the movie. It's like, oh,
but now in this movie, as you said, it doesn't go in the
direction you think it doesn't go. You know, as you're watching it,
you think, oh, Howard Bill's going to start this kind of what's the
Jimmy Stewart in The Man who Goes to Washington, right, what's his?
It doesn't he start a revolution with all the Remember that we're basically the boy
scouts. Help him out with his revolution, you know, and you think
that Howard Bill is going to do that, but he doesn't. It goes
completely in a different direction. We'll get to that when we get to it.
But h yeah, that's the seventies Hollywood setting. Is that it's very
satirical, very critical of the establishment. It's it's uh set in this geopolitical
time period when the CFAR was really exercising an immense amount of control and power.
So CFAR basically selected Carter according to Anthony Sutton and Patrick would because I'm
reading the Patrick woodbook on the CFAR right now and the Trilateral Commissioner. What's
interesting is that they were really grasping and gaining a tremendous amount of power in
the nineteen seventies. That book was actually published in the seventies, so it's
an older book, but it's an insight into what was the CFAR, Brazinsky
Trilateral Commission. What were they up to in the seventies. Kissinger as well
and Wood and Sutton, you know, really backing up from the research of
Ingdall give us a completely controlled background to basically every news story that's mentioned in
this movie, and I think that that's on purpose, all of these news
stories that are mentioned. The CIA in Angola, Okay, I just covered
that in one of my recent videos, the Simboni's Liberation Army with Patty Hurst,
the daughter of William Randolph Hurst, being kidnapped and mind controlled. So
there's an mk ultra theme and they actually put it out. This is where
we know about Stockholm syndrome is because they first said, oh, well,
you see you can be kidnapped and fall in love with your kidnappers via this
mind controlled process of Stockholm syndrome, of which they supposedly did too to Patty
Hurst. I think that was some kind of psi op myself. And there's
a classic kind of maybe Brussel analyzes if if you're familiar with that classic old
school conspiracy stuff. And May Russell did some really fascinating breakdowns back in the
day on her radio show talking about how the Patty Hurst thing is basically one
big psi opum and of course a Semonise liberation Army. You know, most
of these kinds of groups are typically created and steered entities, and we find
out in this plot that that's more or less what the Ecumenical Liberation Army is.
It's basically the same thing. It's a satirical version. Yeah had six.
In fact, it's it's exactly what happens in the film because when the
uh you know to Tupac's mom comes and introduces herself to um Fade Dunaway in
the building, right, they sort of introduce themselves as characters and they introduce,
you know, sort of a tagline. She says, I'm you know,
they have their taglines. They introduce themselves and they negot these spend a
lot of their time negotiating what is going to happen and what the clauses are
going to be and what they're going to get from the show. And then
later when she has to go back and talk to the Great Khan Um in
his um you know, communists tied out or whatever they call it in the
film. Um they remember the scene where they're arguing and then all of a
sudden he pops around off and he says, show her the overhead clause.
Right. So so this guy's like totally tuned into the business negotiations. And
it's interesting, I mean, all of the things that you you mentioned that
are in the film in terms of the first thing that they meant. One
of the first news stories that they mentioned at the beginning of the film is,
um, the recent assassination attempt on Gerald Ford from Squeaky from yeah,
exactly right, and then yeah, and then they say they say that,
um, this was the second attempt in two weeks. Then they talked about
they mentioned Nelson Rockefeller, they mentioned Kissinger, they met, they mentioned,
Um, I think that it's it's it's so, I guess U. It's
relevant that you mentioned that the backdrop is this sort of black black rocks vand
guard, you know, conglomerate, because they spend a lot of their time
talking about how, for instance, the president of the news of the news
organization like is just a you know, he's nothing, he's a puppet.
He just barely said a word in the meetings. And they talk about the
stockholders meeting, but even the stockholders meeting is like a low level entry into
what they're actually doing. We don't get to see Jensen, who's this supposed
heads organization until later on in the film when he does his his corporate cosmology
soliloquy, and even he is just a liaison for whatever the group is.
And of course I know we're gonna get to this at the climax of the
film, and it's not a spoiler people, folks at home, But once
Beal starts mentioning money and banks and the Saudi Oil group is when the story,
you know, it veers off again into a different direction. And I
don't see how anyone could watch this now who was in tune with anything and
not think of the major um hedge fund, banking, the banking corporation and
Joe John Perkins um and all the stuff that's like a backdrop to this.
Um. So the other things that I think are interesting are that on the
on my most recent rewatch, I couldn't decide whether it Beal himself because Howard
Beal Um folks, is like, um, you know, the description that's
used most often for him is that like he experiences a psychotic break, right.
He's like a he's an old school news man, you know, he's
like madmen, but at the news and he was there in the fifties and
you know Murrow and all this stuff. Um. But the scenes where he
is asleep or where he's dreaming and he gets his messages or like I was
thinking, is this is this this is like this is almost like V two
k um some sort of you know, Delgado thing going on. I mean,
I don't know if that's that actually the case, but it looks like
it in the film, like he's because he's receiving messages. And we don't
know if it's literally he's receiving messages from the outside, or if it's a
psychotic break or he's in touch with his guru as he says in the movie.
But it is interesting that's he he becomes a sort of other person and
he's unpredictable. Yeah, he reminds me of Jerry in Conspiracy Theory, right,
I mean, he acts like a person who is has a not just
a psychotic break, but it is in some way programmed with some sort of
mission. And of course we're never told. It doesn't explicitly tell us that,
you know, he really was receiving revelations, but like you said,
in that in that nighttime sequence, he does appear to be thinking that he's
hearing or seeing something, and he says later on that and it's interesting because
his revelation, his experience is actually tied into the Again, the New Age
movement, because he says it wasn't anything to do with God or Christianity.
He says it was Pranya, Pana, Pranya. He said it was a
Hindu awakening, So he explicitly notes that, and the Hindu stuff is what
really underlies a lot of the still kind of popular, burgeoning New Age movement
of this time. So the New Age movement really kicks off. I was
seen in the sixties as part of the counterculture, but it was really being
ramped up and continued into the seventies. In fact, the Aquarium Conspiracy,
which John Coleman thinks was actually written by Willis Harmon, that's put out as
the book by Marilyn Ferguson, which is a you know, popular title during
this time period. That that's a seventies Texas's really again hyping up and promoting
the New Age. Shirley mc McLane had, I think, come out as
a new Ager at this time. So there's a lot of push for New
Age stuff, and it sort of is in the background of this movie in
many many places. So I think that his awakening, like you said,
whether it was voice to skull mind control technology, or whether he really thinks
he's having some kind of break. He's not a profit like you first think.
You think at first he's going to start being this kind of Billy g
m style health fire Brimstone preacher. And when they when they want to replace
them, they actually say, we need to find some kind of you know,
Billy Graham, health fire Brimstone kind of guy, which is funny because,
uh, you know, Billy Graham, I think was pretty much a
CIA said as well during the Cold War, so um, again we have
another kind of controlled Cold War era UM figure. They even mentioned, you
know, Walter Cronkite, and you had you said, you know, they
were talking about Edward R. Murreau in the Old School Broadcasters. Well they
mentioned Walter Cronkite specifically as well as well as many others because he was a
famous CFAR in Bohemian Grove attendee. And of course those those classic clips have
Walter Cronkite saying that, you know, I'm absolutely on the side of Lucifer
in the New World Order. So uh, at every point, you know,
the figures in this movie are um their establishment figures. And what's ironic
is that, you know, we we really see this in the in the
in the affair love story between the older guy who's called a middle aged man.
Now he's a boomer, he's a senior citizen. He's not he's not
middle aged. He's like a straight up seen. I mean, Faye Dunaway
is middle aged, right, she's calling him. Oh, he's probably like
nine in the movie because people, I'm just I'm joking because he looks like
he just looks like an old man. But anyway, but Jamie and now
we're laughing about that. But anyway, what the last thing I wanted to
make was mentioned was that let's, uh, we've kind of jumped around,
but I'd like to go back to kind of how it starts if we could,
because there's so many good, good points and good notes. I don't
want to like get too skipped around. Um so the film open, Can
we go back to the beginning? Is that cool? I don't want to
steal your thunder if you had something you want to talk about, But that's
good, let's do it. So um. Yeah, So the film starts
out with this, uh, we're told about these big networks, and of
course my first thought is, yeah, these these giant networks actually come out
of the OSS and the CIA, right, so that they were all they
were all steered by people from the OSS initially when they first created the original
networks. And so NBCCBS, ABC, I forget there's two that were first
and then a third. They're all creations essentially of the power structure, right,
our our elites, our shadow government, and that's why they were originally
run by OSS people who then took those techniques uh William Paley, Sarnoff and
others, and they applied those techniques to running these giant networks. So network
is about the networks that make up the original mining control network. And think
about CBS logo, right, I mean CBS's logo is an all seeing eye.
And there's even a there's even a rant at one point by Beal,
which I think is the best rant. Not the first round about you know,
sticking your head out and screaming to me it is kind of ridiculous,
but the next round is a lot better because he's like, you listen to
the boob tube and you think that we're telling you the truth, and we
just lie to you all the time. Right, that's that that narrative is
supermatt and he's like, you look at it like a god, and so
he's not a real religious figure, but he's satirizing himself as if he's a
prophet. He's like, because you listen to the news men like their prophets,
and he's like, but you're listening to false prophets. And so he's
sort of satirizing himself as a newsman when he starts to have his break.
And so anyway, that's my initial thought when it kicks off. But I
wanted to also mention that when they said the assassination attempt by on Ford by
Squeaky from well, if you, if you, if you're familiar with the
work from Tom O'Neill on Chaos and Manson, you know that there's an obvious
CIA connection to Manson and all that. So right away we have again these
references to these CIA stories that are really important in the news, like Manson,
and then I would say, yeah, of course, the assassination attempt
on Ford, all these things are typically in some way, you know,
psy ops and controlled operations. And then we're gonna get this reference to Beal
saying I'm gonna kill myself on air, which is also perhaps referencing the Bud
Dwyer incident. Right, because that was a huge news story when that I
think he was a senator or congressman when he did that to himself, unlived
himself on air. And so right away we're getting pretty intense media ideas and
imager shocking sort of media trauma is what's being discussed right away. And then
they have this idea why don't we say, why do we do the Death
Hour show? Right? So he's starting to make fun of the news and
say that why is everybody so obsessed with you know, death and destruction and
chaos. Why don't we just have the death show? Yeah, if it
bleeds, it leads, Uh, you know what they what they say,
and you know that. I think that there's some interesting tie INDs with first
of all, the bel character. I did a stream on a Face in
the Crowd, which was a short story, and then later a film with
by Elliot Kazan starring Andy Griffith where he plays basically the same type of characters
Bill. He's a he's a wandering drifter who gets co opted and he ends
up making speeches exactly like Beal does at the end where he says, remember
Bill does the speech about like send in your go to the Western Union Office
and send into the White House. And the reason that he becomes a threat
in facing the crowd is because he's doing that, and he becomes a he
becomes an advisor for a senator who's going to become a future president, and
he kind of gets off at the end of it. And and I think
that uh, Nightcrawler is is a kind of a good example of this in
the in the contemporary era, because it takes the national news and takes it
down to a local level. But one thing about about Network is a movie
that's interesting is to consider that, you know, at the at the time
up until we'll probably still now, for most people, especially most you know
norm he's watching the news or the or television or whatever. The things that
occur now are so fast, so fast moving, that by the time they're
covered on the news news there, they're not news anymore. So news is
kind of a it's a it's almost a misnomer in the sense that they later
on talk about time. They do this whole thing. Part of the monologues
that they do is talking about how they want to quantify time. They want
to they want to simplify meaning and existence down to a monetized unit that they
can quantify in terms of you know, advertising and consumerism and all that um.
But that even at the time that the film was released, and and
it harks back to the fifties, it's it's interesting to consider that the people
that are the audience for this in America assume that they're watching the truth,
like Beal says, but we're lying to you. Whereas in a controlled sys
like in a like let's say the Soviet Union, it's like you're watching the
news, but you know that you're that you know that it's state controlled,
and so there's no sort of illusion about that. Here. The problem is
that it's people are blinded by the illusion. It's almost a brave new world
thing where people are like willingly walking into their sort of slavery. And that
Bell even when he does the speech later and he and he says that you
know, we're lying to you, it's like, well, are you lying
to me now? Is everything you're doing a line now? And that's interesting
to consider because because people can people they watch this movie, I think a
lot of times they think that like Beal kind of goes based, but but
in fact, a lot of the stuff that he says, is just a
continuation of what the power structure wants, and they end up making, you
know, shows about it, so it becomes entertainment. And it's no it's
no accident that that the framing of the movie is we're constantly watching We're watching
a guy on the news on a television screen, through backstage television screens,
through the producers watching television screens. So it becomes like this triple layer of
fantasy. Um. The first thing that he mentioned, well, it's it
becomes surreal and we are divorced into associated by layers from this surreal thing because
it's it's all it's not real, right, And the irene, of course,
is that what's real is actually in this, embedded in this absurdity,
in this the satire and this surreal element, but it's cloaked and covered in
all this lies, just like the news and the so called news reporting itself
is Um. The other thing about Kronkite, it's it's wild. Is that
Patty You know, you were talking about Patty Hurst and the Simeonese Liberation Army
and the character who plays the Patty Hurst character, the Gifford character, is
Walter Cronkite's daughter in real life, she's the actress. Well that's crazy.
Um. The first thing that they mentioned in the voiceover is they talk about
Ford's energy program. They're hearing on Patty Hurst bail cruise violations in Beirut.
But then the screenplay is so well written. Um, the narrator says,
and it's Tom Howard Beale had been a Mandarin television so he's introduced as this
sort of authoritative, almost imperial figure. And then in the next part,
it says, the camera moves into isolated Howard Beale, who's who's fifty eight
years old, silver haired, magisterial, dignified to the point of divinity.
Narration continues over and so then you know that we get introduced into the news
segment. Um. And then we see Max, who's a fifty one year
old man, thoroughly plastered and on a drunken, laughing jag. The two
best scenes. I mean, this is a comedy, so and it's it's
kind of a classical comedy in Max. Max points that out. He's in
a way, he says, towards the end of the film, he'll say,
and there's a happy ending, right, So it's the movie shows at
the very end that like life goes on, but the fun the actual funny
parts in the movie are One is right at the beginning of the film when
Max and Howard max is um Is, William Holden and William Holden and Peter
Finch are talking and they they onto the street and they're like they're like in
New York. They're talking and they're telling this story about the George Washington Bridge
and how he first started to become a reporter. And that's an interesting story
because it's repeated in the in the film, he says that he got his
first lead and he went out to the He told the taxi driver to take
him out of the George Washington Bridge and he was going to run out to
the middle and the cab driver says, don't do it, buddy, you've
got it. You know, you've got a long way to go. But
it's interesting what the screenwriters doing here, because it's like we're on a bridge
between two worlds and we're standing over this abyss, this chasm. Now I'm
probably reading a little bit into it, but that is exactly what the characters
find that that's where the characters find themselves continuously throughout this thing. It's like
Max is on he's on Matt in Manhattan. He's a you know, a
producer, and then he gets fired and he goes back and forth, whereas
the Peter Finch character, Beal finds himself in the middle. But when they
when they're when they're drunk and and like they're laughing about it's it's really funny.
And Peter Finch is a I mean, he's he's a great actor in
this. And the one thing I'll say about acting in the movie, because
there's a side note, is that like when they have that drunken scene and
these guys play like obviously very authentic, you know, nineteen fifties through seventies
drunks, Finch does this thing where he um, he's not playing drunk,
but but William Holden is like overplaying his drunkenness. And then later we see
Finch after all the like Rigamorle, he's like dressed in black with this black
turtleneck, almost like he's an actor, um auditioning for a role, which
essentially he is. Um. So it's just that all of the all of
the scenes that are produced and that are fake, I mean, the other
great scene is where Fate Dunaway is watching the producers watch the the segments that
they're gonna come have a that they're gonna produce later on, and she says,
no, no, this won't do. And that's the Billy Billy grampart,
right. She says, if I want to Billy Graham character, I
would have gotten one instead. You have this product, and the prophet is
like standing on this hill with this like occult robe on and he's like he's
doing the can you digit speech right, um to the to the seventies you
know kids. Um. And it's it's so overproduced and overhype that she knows
that it won't sell, so she cancels that segment. Well, it's interesting
because uh in ways, he's kind of like this is like viral before viral,
reality show before reality show. Uh. And and I would add to
with the the con character, who is this this clownish cut out who is
really just you know, kind of a star who's negotiating his contract even though
he's a Marxist and his mother's his agent. It's it's like, um,
you know there you have with him, the uh, the rise of the
notion of some sort of vague Islamic terror because even though this is a Marxist
thing, if you look at the KLA, that was a combination of al
Qaeda philosophy and Marxism for NATO and the CIA to run in British intelligence to
run in Kosovo um. And this is the kind of the same kind of
thing that we have here. Although this guy might be some kind of vague
Nation of Islam style, we don't really know what is what. He's just
called the Khan. And so we have this black Islam kind of Nation of
Islam idea here. But they're also Marxist, like the Semoneese Liberation Army,
and they've gained news headlines because they're robbing banks or something like this. And
so Faye Dunaway's character realizes that she wants to experiment with new types of television,
right She's she's tired of this old you know, sort of archetypal old
white guy uh telling you the news and a very boring, dry format.
And this network, you know, UBS is they're the last of the networks,
right, so they're they're a dying network. They need some something to
experiment with. And so she comes in as this you know, edgy you
know, Girl Boss, basically who was leaning in, and she comes up
with this idea to start filming and utilizing the Ecumenical Liberation Army, which is
interesting because you know, when we think of a humanism, I mean,
that's typically something in the religious fear right. It's not something that we usually
think of in terms of geopolitics. But this is the ecumenical Liberation Army,
which is headed, as you said, by Tupac. He's basically Tupac before
Tupac. And then and then she's like, yeah, let's use this,
let's let's take these crazies and make them. And this is like again,
way ahead of the idea of I mean, there are predecessors, I guess
contemporary with this, like the Gong Show, right, Chuck Barris again,
you know, theorized to be supposed perhaps a CIA assassin or hitman or operative,
which is lampooned or I guess, I guess you could say lampoon in
the film of Sam Rockwell and George Clooney Professions of a Dangerous Mind. Right,
But then of course later on he and his wife supposedly say, oh,
this is not true. You know, Chuck Barriss wasn't actually Hitman but
makes for a great story. Who knows whether that's true or not. But
again, there's a lot of elite superstructure CIA elements just everywhere in this film,
but it's not apparent unless you kind of know the background. And I
wanted to get into some of the beyond just the SLA and Patty Hurst and
all that, and the seventies OPEC, but also the and not just Cronkite
in the CFAR, but Mockingbird, because Mockingbird is this, you know,
CI operation to really control the major media outlets in Henry Loose plays a key
role in this. Of course, he's the you know, Time magazine.
It's not just the print media, it's also obviously the televised media as well.
And I just covered last night the OPC, the Office of Policy Coordination,
which in nineteen forty eight was directed by Frank Wisner, right, so
he was a part of the Office of Special Product Special Projects, which became
the OPC, and this became the CIA's counterintelligence branch and Dirty Tricks operation.
Later in the same year, Wisner came up with the idea from Mockingbird,
which was a program to influence and run basically all domestic media now we are.
They already had their at not just their ADMIN, their madman, the
Don Draper types who's basically a kind of a war oss guy who goes into
the mad to advertising. They also had deep connections to people like Philip Graham
who Katherine Graham Washington Post right, which basically a completely CIA run publication,
as well as New York Times, and so they recruit They begin to recruit
a bunch of other media heads and media moguls, not just in print,
but also across the networks like CBS, and so basically Wissner owns and is
running and telling what what what can be printed at New York Times, what's
printed in Newsweek, and what's CBS prints. Back in the late forties ninety
fifty one, Alan Dullas persuades cord Meyer to join the CIA, and they
begin to recruit even more UM and spy even more, and this leads to
this idea of eventually three hundred outlets are completely controlled, including the New York
Herald Tribune, New York Times, Time magazine that's through Henry Loose and CD
Jackson, who is the father of the doctrinal warfare program, on and on
all the basically all the big media at this time. I don't I'm not
gonna list all these but you get the idea. And uh so, basically,
Frank Wisner, his mighty Wurlitzer, is that he can play, right,
is control, is controlling the entire media, and so it doesn't go
away, right, It's not like this goes away at some other time,
but in our day it just increases. And so it's no different by the
time in the nineteen seventies when this film is taking place, and a lot
of the people obviously running networks are also Wall Street individuals. They're banking individuals,
their hedge fund individuals, and so that clearly comes into the picture in
this film. The only thing we don't have is any specific reference to anything
like Mockingbird or the CI specifically, but we have reference to everything adjacent to
it, which I think is very relevant. But I thought that, you
know, if I had the inside secrets in the info, I could just
go to a journalist at the New York Times and I could expose the whole
system. Rch. Well, that's what we think initially. That so when
when Howard Beale starts to get his I'm gonna wake everybody up, you know,
ideology rocking. He kind of operates that way, and even what's this,
Yeah, even he's even he says he even he says, I'm gonna
tell everybody about what you're doing here. I'm gonna go to the press.
I'm gonna get the word out right, which of course it doesn't work,
and in the film it I'm gonna go to all the journalists and tell them
about it. Oh, by the way, are owned by the same companies.
And also, you know, I've got credit because I'm going to be
a college professor now that I'm having to retire. And then they're like,
can you be a college professor? And He's like, I gave a speech
once it you know, community College Missouri, So yeah, I can do
that. Um. The biggest Mockingbird element that I see just on the surface
of the film is when I when I think Mockingbird, one of the things
that I think is the it's almost a meme of the montage of all of
the local you know, the local news reporters. This is dangerous for our
democracy, right, um, echoing the same talking points, and it's one
and then it's it's four, and then it's twelve of them. And that
sort of occurs at the beginning of the movie because it's in three points in
the movie where we have one we have one reporter talking, and then we
have three of them talking, talking, and they're on a screen laid out
in the same fashion. They're not echoing the exact same talking points, but
it's sort of it shows. It shows that it's all the words are slightly
different, but the message that they got from you know, the guy writing
the talking point at the Pentagon or whatever, um is the same. And
uh, I think the movie exposes that pretty well. Like you said,
it doesn't name it though by name well, but and keep in mind too
that there is this naivety even at the level of Howard Beale and Max,
that that if you just get the word out right. I think initially Howard
Beale thinks, you know, I can wake everybody up, and there was
this naivety and kind of you know, just have faith in the process and
the American system. Think back again to movies like this, like mister Smith
goes to Washington, right, Jamie and I just watched this not too long
ago, and there you have Jimmy Stewart, who's uh, you know,
this happy go lucky sort of simpleton guy who falls in to being a replacement
senator because somebody dies and so he has to go. And he doesn't go
along with the Washington machine, and he starts going against it, and of
course all the dirt, the dirty tricks are pulled out against him and he
ends up falling back on I mean, it's so ridiculous. It's almost like
you almost feel like this is satire too, But I actually think it's supposed
to be that naive that oh, just let's let's get the boy Scouts churning
out their newspaper and then we can we can throw the rats out of Washington,
right, we can expose the corruption in Washington if we just get the
you know, the boy Scouts active. I mean, it's just silly,
but think how simplistic and sort of believing in the system things are at the
time of mister Smith goes to Washington versus the kind of nihilistic attitude, apathetic
attitude that we get from Network. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying
that Network is given a realistic portrayal of well, you understand, this is
how the system really works. Right, Think about another film at this time,
around this time, the one with u um I just went blank Um
Madonna's ex husband Warren Beatty, the one where he's programmed by this corporate to
be a patsy, that he's mind controlled by the corporation. Um, you
know talking about the It's not where he's the Senator, that's in the nineties
where he's the Senator. No no, no, not Shampoo, where he's
the man o the mkult It's a seventies m Kiltra movie with Warren Beatty where
he's a journalist, right, and it's the same idea where he's investigating this
corporation that's that has this mkultra technology that's basically creating assassins and he stumbles onto
this and he's gonna expose them, and then they grab him and mind control
him and they make him a patsy. Parallax View. Uh yeah, Parilexi.
If you're not seen, if you've never seen Paralexi, It's it's a
great it's a great one because it has the same sort of like, you
know, the guy who thinks he's gonna topple the system and he's gonna do
it through the press. Then he finds out that the press is controlled.
Right. It's the same kind of a thing, right, the m Cultra.
It's like the super megacorp that has you know, cim Cultra technology,
and he thinks he's gonna expose in the press, and when he exposed in
the press, then they just know to come get him. Right. So
it seems like by the seventies there's a radical shift from the forties fifties optimism.
By the seventies there's this sort of just helpless against the machine of the
system attitude, and that's definitely going on a network. And if you watch
Black Mirror, it reminded me of the one where the black guy's on the
bicycle and he's just getting the you know, Pokemon pop ups all day and
he finally beats the system and then they give him his own show and his
own apartment. Right, So when he when he beats the system, he's
basically now just part of the system. Right, And they give that same
offer to Howard Beale at the end. Right, Yeah, it's it's Pokemon,
Pokemon pop ups. It becomes um becomes meta satire because they again they
think that they can expose the system through uh the media arm They are the
media army. They know, I mean they have they the like the first
tenth of the movie is them in production meetings about what they're gonna cover and
how they you know, the deportation of Jonathan Lennon, right um, the
uh what do they say is it? Is it strong enough to bump?
And then they're gonna go to the detective talking. Then they're gonna talk about
squeaking from then then like you said, Patty Hurst a A. David Um
Gorillas and Chad Opec and Vienna Oh, but we gotta do the shampoo ad
right um, And then that has to be approved by the other guys,
like the pit boss who who By the way, one of the best scenes
in this is when he first says that he's gonna off himself on camera.
They're in the they're in the in the control room, and only one person
is watching what he's doing, like on the screen, and it's the girl
like with the ticker who like times the segments totally analog, and then she
says, did you guys hear what they just said? And then it takes
like seven people to even know what he's what he said until it comes down
from the top. And then the president of the network gets involved, then
Robert Duval gets involved, then the other guy. It goes up this sort
of chain of command. Um. One of the clever like just about the
filmmaking, the clever thing that they do is one of the things that they
do is that this movie is a great example just in terms of the artwork
of showing us the story and not telling us what's happening, even though the
characters are telling us. So for instance, like the way that the movie
starts off sort of dark, everything's tope. It's on small screens, and
it eventually gets more expansive, we get we get exterior shots, it gets
brighter, and then it's sort of exposed, and then we get the dark
nous of the rooms. We get them. The scene where he talks to
Jensen at the end is like Citizen Kane. He's at a weird angle like
looking up at him like he's this god at the table. And I think
that the like this, this screenplay is so well written because it's an example.
It's an example of like the economy of style in that it doesn't have
to be long with a lot of words telling us or telling the filmmakers making
it what's gonna happen he has. It's almost written like poetry. The theme
that I found when I reread it was that a lot of times, um
what's his name, Chievsky uses like it's like imperial language. He uses a
kind of a high a diction to talk about the higher characters. He's constantly
using terms like Mandarin and wise, and you know they're godlike. And it
becomes prosaic when we have the guy talking on television to the masses, and
like you were saying about the fifties through the like and the transition into the
seventies. I think it's interesting for people to keep in mind that, you
know, television like the internet, because that's what it's become now, is
this thing that it's like this great so called democratizing thing of information where you
can you know. He later says, we you sit in your homes for
us to entertain you, so you won't be bored. But in reality,
it's just as controls um as it was before, even with no channels,
even with no television. So even though it's not coming in print, it's
just on the television. So people think it's for everyone and it's there all
the time. But in fact, it's just as controlled even down to the
second and fay Dunaway's character is one thing that you've talked about a lot,
and shouts out to Rachel, who's you know, wrote a book on this,
is that Fay Dunaway is the busy businesswoman in the film. Really she's
a sexually liberated feminist. She explains us at the beginning that she has daddy
issue. That's why she's attracted to him as an older guy, right,
because she's a she's a feminist with daddy issues. She talked about how she
had any partners, she's had, Yes, she talks. She talks about
that she's she's he talks about how she's more feels more masculine than feminine.
Everything she talks about in the film is business. Even in the where she's
in the act of having the affair with the guy, it's business the whole
time. She says, she consummates like a man. Yeah, exactly,
and she's basically she's like a female Don Draper basically. Yeah. There's a
scene there's a scene where she's like she's in the midst of, you know,
an affair with some other rando and like this shot from behind can we
see her bear like it's her bare back and she's watching the television smoking and
the guy is like canoodling on her, like, but the roles are reversed.
Yeah, this is what. This is why they shot that one scene.
That's why Jamie and I were cracking up when we were when we watched
Geelie, one of the worst movies ever made, because they intentionally have been
Affleck cuddling up Jalo in the masculine pose and he's over there like, oh,
curled up like in a fetal position next to Jlo because she she is
the fade dunaway of that movie, of that ridiculous movie. Have you seen
Julie It's so bad? Yeah, yeah, with the beautiful slow boy.
Um. Yes, she's also. The other thing about her is that he
does a good um monologue talking to his what when he breaks up with his
wife and he talks about her and how she has no feelings. He doesn't
think she she's like she's the She talks about ending life in the same way
with the same sort of lack of emotion. She's dispassionate as she talks about
advertising or programming. And the other thing is that she's constantly eating in the
movie. I mean, did you notice that when you rewatched it? She's
well, she's predatory. She's predatory. That's the point there. And he
says that you have no feeling and you're you're you're incense a And basically the
point is that she's not going to be able to pair blind. But she
represents the incoming generation and that is only concerned with the numbers, right,
So she's sexually liberated, she's a feminist, she's um, you know,
super masculine. She's acting like Don Draper, and she represents the new generation
of people who are described by Beal. So when Beale gives his Brave New
World rant, which he basically does, it's if you if you well,
actually, the the the Jensen character gives a Brave New World rant with his
corporate cosmology, and then Bial kind of repeats it and they talk about being
entertained automatons basically being robots humanoids. They use the phrase humanoids, which is
this you know, uh invasion of the body snatcher's collectivist kind of ideology,
and they're basically saying that the corporations. There's this great scene again with the
Brave New World references where the Jensen character says, we will have everybody entertained
and they will be tranquilized and they'll be happy. You're thumping on, I'm
gonna be hoppy, all right, Oh you eat the bugs and your old
nothing I knew would be happy. So he's like this Claus kind of character
or at this corporate vanguard black rock kind of guy at the end. But
what he like lays out is actually what h Well says, which is that
the corporate world will bring the global socialism, so the global socialist order,
which will get rid of individuality. Because they actually make that clear in the
screenplay too. The individuality is what will actually be sacrificed because there's not going
to be a bunch of nation states anymore. It's corporations, and those corporations
will all be under one corporation, and that will give everybody the collective identity.
He says, it's a it's amazing speech. He even does away with
the notion of, like you said, nation states, and he uses Russia
as as an example. He says, do you think Russia sits around and
like at the board, you know, do you think that the committee sits
around arguing about like you know, Karl Marx. I mean, he says,
they like a corporation, right, So, um, I think that
we could, I mean, we could do the entire thing, just on
the on the monologues and the thing and the guy's last monologue. But do
you, um, do you want to talk about beals? First? Let's
see his first speech here. Oh, I noticed by the way that the
characters there's a character named Cheney and this there's a character named Snowdon, which
is which is interesting. Um. And he says when he first gets to
when we first get to Max's office, I mean sitting with Nelson Chaney again,
it's like this Roman imperial language. He says, he's a patrician,
right, He's a patrician sitting behind Max's desk on on the phone, looking
up to note Packet's arrival. These guys are from another order, you know.
They're they're above corporate, right, They're above the clish and the way
that they um. They vibe for power throughout the thing, you know,
and they expose that, like, if I do this, then Robert Duval
won't be able to kick me out. When I have total control, I'm
gonna I'm gonna need to count on your essentially your vote in the Senate and
yeah, so so oh they mentioned Kissinger and the un um I wrote that
the stockholders meeting insights into the power structures on a basic level, even though
it's a massive it's a massive organism, which they which they kind of allude
to in this um later on, Um, I'm kind of skipping it head
here, but Diana, let's see when Slesinger meets with Diana, Diana says
the air. Oh, this is where we get the foreshadow of what happens
at the end of the film. The Arabs have decided to jack up the
price of oil another twenty percent, and the CIA has been caught opening Senator
Humphrey's mail. There's a civil war in Angola. You mentioned that, another
one in Beirut. In New York City's facing default, we finally caught up
with Patty Hurst. The whole front page of the Daily News is Howard Beal.
So they decide to decide to run with him, because because people,
if you haven't seen the film, like what happens is Beal goes on his
rant and says he on you know what, tune in on Thursday. Our
ratings are so bad, I'm gonna off myself on camera. And this drives
the corporation crazy. They come in and they say, you can't you know,
this is debasement of media. We have this, we have standards and
practices, and we've never heard of such a thing. And then what ends
up happening is the ratings explode and Robert Duval decides to buy into it.
Because the corporation buys into it, they're making more money and they're just gonna
further what they were gonna do anyway, but they just do it in a
different way. And Robert Duval says, um, well, what I thought
was, it's interesting because UBS and the name UBS is seems to be I
mean, I couldn't help but think of the Swiss Bank, what's the annual
income? Just as stated? They have three point two trillion in assets under
management as stated of course, but um, but they become like what Fox
became. I mean Fox began in nineteen eighty six, and if you were
alive in nineteen eighty six, then anybody would remember like Cops right tops was
like the first big show that that drove Fox um into the limelight and like
into a new media thing. Because I remember, I mean I remember being
six years old and like we had Channel six, eight and twelve and it
was those those companies. And then Fox came around and they had tops America's
most wanted and married with children, right, And it wasn't until long time
when the news came around. Um. But they start as kind of a
reality TV show driven just like in this, which is predictive. Um,
let's see, yeah, exactly. It's also prior to uh, you know,
the war on T E R R O R as well. And uh
so when we come to that first rant where he really starts getting you know,
shaking things up, did you notice that there's not really any reason for
it. It's almost like, uh, I'm mad as hell. I'm not
gonna take it anymore. And then it's in You're you're sitting here thinking,
Okay, what are you mad about? He's like, I don't know what
to be mad about. He says, I don't know what to do about
the inflation and this and that and the oil crisis and this and that.
I'm just mad. And so it's like this irrational mob psychology and it's oftentimes
played and I understand why, right, It's played as if it's this movie
about waking people up. Maybe in an indirect way it is, but it's
more of a tragedy about the human condition and more of like a satirizing of
this idea of network television giving you anything truth truthful, because the bel character
is again, he's more of a fool character. He's not he's not actually
a prophet character. He's more of a fool because everybody sticks her head out
the window and screams, and they're all doing it because the TV told him
to do it. That's the irony here. It's not an actual awakening.
Now, bal seems that he's sort of huff he's huffing his own farts,
right, he actually believes that he's waking up and he's had this great spiritual
enlightenment. He's gonna wake everybody up, at least at this point we think
that. And then he tells everybody to stick her head of the winter scream
and they all do it. So it's like everybody's operating in a collective.
And this is reinforcing what's later said in the story that what's going to be
done away with is individuality, everybody's individuality, because you're all going to be
put into a break New World collective. So that's actually what's going on.
It's not a movie about waking up the masses. It's a movie satirizing the
idea that you can wake up the masses through the controlled means of control media.
Yeah, the scene, like you mentioned with he says, go outside
right now and open your windows and yell on. Mattis hell and I'm not
going to take it anymore. So it becomes this. So it starts off
as him seemingly being you know, it's like an organic statement, right Like
you said, he say, you know what really grinds my gears, you
know, and he's just mad, and everybody can kind of relate to that,
especially especially in the time right with the oil crisis and the the you
know, resident had two attempts that that week, and you know, everything
the fashion sucks, you know, and everything kind of gray in the savagies.
I mean, I'm being sort of you know, facetious, but but
it taps into that. And then he says, go outside and open your
windows and scream, and then like they open their windows and they hear people
screaming, and it becomes this mantra. And I think that the The insidious
part about this that I can just assume most people don't understand is that he
seems. It seems cool at first because he's angry and he's stating what people
think. But in the end what really gets me is when he goes on
and he talks about like truth. He says, there's no more truth,
there's no more objective truth. It's and like you said, he's like,
he's he is a nihilist. I mean, he states in his I think
in his first speech he says, don't he says, don't ask god um
for truth. Go and ask your guru, ask your you know your your
your look inside. Truth is in you. That's like the new that's new
age dictum one oh one right, that's his truth, right and uh.
And then that becomes so he becomes this sort of prophet of nihilism that people,
you know, they tap into it and they love watching it. And
this reminds me. I'm sorry, I don't mean to cut you off,
but think of future movie rants about nihilism that I think probably pull from this.
So fight Club, the rant from Edward Norton about consumerism and fight Club
is like the next phase of nihilism. Beyond Howard Beale's nihilism. Right.
Well, I think that one of the clever things in the screenplay is that
we are introduced, you know, we have we have the the system.
We're introduced. We're watching television. We're at home. You know, even
you sitting at home watching the movie. You're watching a screen where while they're
watching a screen inside a screen, inside a screen. So we're we're comforted,
you know, we're at home and we're watching a film. And then
this guy sort of loses and the the start jump cuts are supposed to be,
you know, they're supposed to be sort of surrealistic and um and satirical
because in one in one moment, the two guys are laughing and they're drinking
on the street, and then the next moment, like one of you know,
his head is down at the bar and he's talking about how he's gonna
he's gonna off himself. And then that we see how things maneuver. And
then at the end of the film, because of the the explicitly religious language
that he uses throughout the film, at the end when we get Jensen,
we got I think the climax of the film is when he says um Beal
is sitting there looking up at Jensen at the end of the at the end
of you know Halla, he calls it Valhalla in the boardroom and he says,
you know, I think I've seen the face of God, and Jensen
says to him, you just might be right. Yeah, yeah, it's
saying it's implying that he's the god of the system. Correct and and and
the language in that scene, I mean, we'll get to it, but
the language in that scene is like they're the lucif. It's weird the luminate
confirmed language that he uses in that scene. Um he says, he makes
references to like radiant light, He's seen the light, he's bathed in light.
Yeah, he said before that. Yeah, he is an emissary of
the light. Again new age Luciferian type of terminology. But it's because he's
he's now understood that, you know, he's not actually wakening the masses.
He's he's a controlled prophet. And in fact, the fade unaway character it's
said earlier on if the people want a prophet, give him a prophet.
In other words, the corporations will give you the profit that you want for
the ratings and for the you know, ads and all that. So it's
just a it's just a numbers game. And later on when they want to
replace him, they decide, you know, let's just find another Guru or
another Ten Commandments kind of Moses figure. They can't find one, and then
they decide, as you guys know, spoiler alert, well I guess we're
just gonna get rid of him because now he's a problem. So he becomes
this sort of nihilistic martyr. But um, yeah, I'm as well,
I'm not gonna take anymore. And then he then he's sort of again.
I if he's control, if he's a mind controlled dupe, which it'stially possible
that you know, these mainstream media reporter figures might be mind controlled dupes or
whatever. You know, he's realized that he's completely controlled by Jensen, if
that is the case, and even if it's not, he does realize that
he's really just a pawn in a bigger game and that he's not really the
one that's controlling any of this. And and so we get this the the
not just a reluctant prophet, but the idea, like in Plato's allegory the
Cave, which is that, you know, the people don't really want to
hear the truth. And so when Jensen tells him to tell everybody the anti
human, anti natalist, nihilistic message, right, that's people that people don't
want to hear that. But they don't want to hear that because it's not
the message that made everybody feel good. That was the earlier message, right.
So the more nihilistic, the more realistic it gets. And I'm not
a nihilist. I'm just saying that the point of the film is that you
can't use this. The system itself will not allow the system to be used
for good purposes. That's the point of this film. I think, Um,
the I kind of got hints of I kept thinking of because of the
language in this, of the way that Jensen has described as that sort of
I guess he would be more of a Beel's above in this. But he's
because he's an emissary, right. But one of the things that Robert Duval
says at the end is um he's describing him, and he says, yes,
he said that he wants Beal to stay on, you know, stay
does he doesn't, It doesn't matter. He wants him to stay on.
Television, and he said it in his uh filthy smooth voice. And um,
he says at the beginning here, like at the beginning of the screenplay,
he says that Max Schumacher, behind his desk is staring petrified at his
office console on which pandemonium is broken out. And pandemonium is I mean,
pandemonium is a Miltonian word, right, it's it's where it's where Satan at
the beginning of Paradise Lost finds himself in pandemonium. It's um, it's in
the tempest. It's in Shakespeare's Tempest right that um hell is empty and all
the devils are here, all they're all gathered in this building. They're sort
of the emissaries for this and that no matter what happens, um, Like
you said there, it's they're not going to let things get out of control.
Um if it's if it doesn't serve their purposes. He says. Um.
Also that he was in he was inflexible, and Adam Mantine in his
decision making Adam Mantine is a is a milk again in Miltonian word. Um,
he says, um. Uh, that's where Satan is thrown down in
Paradise Lost. And put in adam antine chains and penal fire. So his
decision making is inflexible and everything he does is going to be for his own
purposes. And that's interesting because because like we've been saying, Howard Beale is
a kind of supreme egotist. You know. Um, he doesn't destroy himself,
right, he he he talks about offering himself continuously, and he has
these kind of weird he'll go off on his prophetic rant and then he'll have
kind of a mock heart attack and fall on the floor and pass out.
You know. It's like like a like a like a TV preacher. He's
he's often portrayed, he takes on more and more of a TV preacher persona,
even though he's not really a TV preacher. He's kind of an anti
preacher, right because he's eventually preaching behind this giant stained glass window image,
right, which is enigmatic of a TV church. And so we're getting we
get the idea that he's like a Jimmy Swaggered or a Kenneth Copeland kind of
figure. And his message, as we said at first, is kind of
like one of rage and Protestant revivalism with a new Age revival preacher basically because
he talks about his Hindu conversion and all this stuff, and he gets people
rilled up. But then as soon as he starts preaching this sort of nihilistic
corporate message, he tanks, the ratings tank, everything tanks, and he's
he's again accepting basically of his complete pawn status. I think that's the most
shocking thing in the film is that when he gets the lecture from Jensen,
you think he's gonna like speak back, He's gonna you know, talks him
smack or I'll show you I'll never stop with my message, and he just
completely caves. Right, He's like, you can just see the terror on
his face. Right, Yeah, he's frozen in terror, and exactly the
same way that he's frozen in terror when he wakes, you know, when
he's when he's lying in bed, he first receives receives his vision. And
even the way that they stage his new TV show, you know, like
you were saying, I mean, he's like Jimmy Swaggert. They show him
from behind first, they show him in front, he's got the stained glass
window behind him. But then he's got his hands up, He's got his
arms up and he's got the the congregation in front of him, he's got
a televised congregation UM, and he talks continuously about how he's received messages.
He's it's almost like he's received he's talking, you know, the spirit is
talking through him. Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. And they've got it's
kind of it's it's almost like an inverted trinitarian thing. They've got two other
shows on there. They've got him, and then they've got the they've got
the Vox Populi, and then they've got this weird soothsacer works like yeah,
soothsayer like with a with a sibyl. They called her the Cibyl, Sibyl.
She's called Sibyl the soothsayer. And then they've got Matta Harry's secrets right
and um and the and the sibyl has like a year like a flag of
the European Union UM behind her um and so well, and Mada Harry's Secrets
is interesting because that well, she's the famous you know honey trop honeypot from
uh you know, a hundred years ago or so, who was married to
these various uh you know, royalty or nobility figures. And she she's a
burlesque dancer, or that's even prior to burlesque. She's like a, I
don't know, nightclub dancer or something, and and uh, now that's what's
taken over the news, right, So we get a big leap, a
big change when girl Boss Fade Dunaway steps up to you know, bring about
her pseudo woke programming st ucture, which is, you know, the angry
prophet Sybil, the soothsayer Mada Harri's Secrets and the voice of the people.
So there's this pseudo corporate Marxism element which is creeping in with the new um
scheduling lineup of her shows, which is again way ahead of its time,
and so it almost the best part is when they they're gonna have this the
Ecumenical Liberation Army and the name of the show is the Mau Hour. So
here you have the corporate that this giant corporate entity which is going to put
out the Mau Hour, which is all self consciously. I think it's even
it's even deeper than mere prophets or excuse me, the mere satire, because
this is really the case. You know, this is something that we've stressed,
which is that you know, Marxism has really always been a corporate creation.
It's always been something funded and promoted by the wealthiest people because it's a
tremendous tool for social engineering, social change, for collectivisation, for or transfer
of wealth. I mean, all of these things are very useful when it
comes to the Marxist socialist systems. So that's actually in this film in a
very subtle way, so that there's this nineteen eighty four ish element where the
counterculture counter revolution that you think you're going to be a part of. Like
the Faye Dunaway character says at the beginning, She's like, I want the
voice of the people. I want counterculture on primetime. And it's like there's
nothing counterculture at all about her because she's just the latest phase of the corporate
control structures system. She's the liberated feminist who wants to put Marxists on TV,
and it's all one percent of black Rock vanguard, top down system.
One of the things about the characters in this but I realized was that they
exist. So the news people exist on the screen, and that's the life
that people see in there. You know, they're in their homes every day,
and so the average person you know, especially in the seven he's watching
television like feels like this as a person who comes into their home, right,
they're there every day. And one of the things with Beal is that
we see him on the television, then we see his sort of we hear
him talk about his backstory, and then we hear him we see him off
stage, we see him in the office. But as time goes on in
the film, he only comes into frame when he's on camera. There's even
a scene where he like he's been in a rainstorm outside and he comes in
like with his like his rain jacket on, and and that's interesting because it's
like he's gone through some sort of you know, neo baptism into a New
age movement. And he starts ranning again about about you know what, grinding
his gears. But, um, what do you make of the Max character,
because, like you said, Max is like the it's a generational thing
where Max is like clearly a you know, he's a World War two guy,
he was there in the fifties. At first, he's like we're going
to get this trash off the television. We're gonna go back to its great
news, right, um, And then he gets fired then he comes back,
then he gets fired again, comes back. But Max's whole thing is
like that he wants He loses his marriage, but he wants a relationship with
with Faye Dunaway even though he realized And do you think that that's because that
shows that the older character wants to be involved in the new thing and sort
of realizes it or is it shown right? Like he doesn't know what he
wants. He's he's a generation and a character that feels left out. He
doesn't understand that that this craziness is a success. It goes against everything that
he's useful when it comes to what he's used to when it comes to somebody
uses this phrase about you know, like broadcasting standards and news reporting standards.
Right, that's this old generation and he can't even come to grips with the
degree to which the next generation has been brainwashed. In terms of counterculture,
which is again just a Tavistock creation. It's nothing to do with real counterculture
at all. It's totally control structure and bringing in the next phase of control
structure. So um, he think I just see him as a weak,
vacillating character who doesn't know what to do with the future shocks that have come
to the system. And this is actually when Tavistock and these entities were rolling
out future shocks. This is actually in the time period when Alvin Toffler was
writing about future shocks, and so these social stressers and future future shocks are
intended to create this catatonic state in the masses and in the viewer. That's
exactly what happens to Howard Bill. Howard Bale represents and exemplifies the breaking psyche
of the future shock of that generation hit geek being shocked with this with the
adult the mature adult generation in this mid seventies period, they don't they don't
know what to do with it. Faye Dunaway represents the new aquarian age that
has come into this, this new aquarium conspiracy that Ferguson writes about, which
is dominated by you know, women in the boardroom, women on top in
the bedroom, all of this stuff which is characterizing this this new era supposedly,
and what we find out is that it's all a lie. And he
kind of sees through this when he when he's been living with her after he's
left his wife and he's been living with her for six months, and they're
arguing and they're miserable. And his wife even told him, you're in for
a lot of drama. And that was true, right, it was all
budget it was. It was all a lie. So he falls for the
lie just as much as everybody else fell for the lie. Because Faye Dunaway's
character is completely programmed by the tube. She is because she sees everything as
a script and a screenplay that can be altered and changed at will for ratings
and for power. And that's the message that Beale has actually, So Faye
Dunaway is the is the perfect model of the humanoid. She's called a human
I think at one point, right, he's like when he when he describes
her as somebody beyond feeling, he's saying, you're the humanoid. She's the
humanoid of Jensen and Beale's lectures, and so she is the next phase,
the next she will bring in the brave new world is the point. And
doesn't even know what she says. She says when they're eating dinner, she
says, terrified out of my skull. Man, I'm the hip generation right
on, cool, groovy, the greening of America. Man, Remember all
that year that what humbugs. We were in the first year of college.
I lived in a commune, dropped acid daily, joined four radical groups,
and you know something else with Sufi Sutras. I lost six weeks of my
sophomore year because they put me away for trying to jump off the top of
the administration building. I've been on the top floor ever since. Don't mind
any windows around me because I just might jump out. Am I scaring you
off? And and then later yeah, and then and then she talks about
being a corporation man. And then later on it says Max and Diane are
lying in a maelstrom of sheets, both still puffing from what must have been
an a brilliant bout in the sect. So it's like that language is used
because because we're trying to see that Max is like a romantic and he's from
this other ara that's supposed to be juxtaposed against her character that's like this,
you know, it's like crocodile tears. She's just this total psycho. Yeah,
she's a psycho, and she she's obviously to some degree mentally unstable,
but now she's found stability and basically becoming a corporate psychopath, right, Yeah,
which is ironic because the whole ethos of counter culture is supposed to be
against being the man man. You're you're the corporate man man. Well,
the corporate man is what she becomes as a woman. And that's the great
irony and contradiction of her character. And now in our day twenty twenty three,
it's it's like we're just like two business faces past her, you see.
Now it's you can identify is anything you see. So it's the same
business plan that rolls out in crazier and crazier phases. And so somebody said,
is the Fade Dunaway character actually a mind control Yeah? Basically, I
mean she doesn't she doesn't have to literally have been in the CIA, but
she basically is some kind of you know, um, she's a product of
the m cultric culture. Basically, she's totally psycho. I mean she when
you're watching the movie, you get this sense of like especially when they go
they go to like some sort of cabin or something, the two of them
to have their affair. And it's interesting because now they're away from the corporate
building and they're like supposed to be outside on this vacation or whatever they're doing,
and Max is like even his facial expressions, it's like he wants some
sort of closeness with a human being. But she's you can't imagine her ever
saying anything personalized or anything sentimental. Her whole life, her whole thing is
this is this business and the structure that she's in. And I think that
I don't know, I think that she's lean an in. She then again
very she's prophetic of what what exists today in the corporate world. Yeah,
that's the total opposite of the wife who UM. By the way, there's
a thing in this movie where every time women who are not when when it's
not when Fate donaways talked about, or when the you know, when POC's
mom is brought in, it's um. Whenever they talk about women, they
say, I've been, you know, living my whole life with this shrill,
sibilant um, you know, horrid woman who's been lying to me.
And it's like, well, if that's the case, like this is what
you want, you want, like you want this lady instead. So it
is a kind of um. Like you said, it's a future shock.
Um. It's the woman that plays his wife is great because she sits there
and listens to him, you know, say that he's been having this affair
and it's over and you don't know what a reaction is going to be,
and it's it's pretty powerful. I mean, she takes it for the situation
like she takes it fairly, just passionately. I mean, she is passionate
about it, and she tells but she does tell him exactly what he's in
for, like you said. And that's an interesting part because that those two
characters fade un away and the wife would both you know, not that the
awards mean anything but be wreck. You know, they would both win the
Academy Award for playing two different, completely different archetypes. Right, And that
the end that the wife is on screen for like five minutes and then she's
totally gone. Um. Also, the way that Howard is continuously talking,
I mean we mentioned surrealism earlier, but the way that he's constantly talking about
dreams. One of the first ones is where he says, I wrote my
note said that this is ecumenical imperial language of controlled chaos. So what so
what they do is they have order at the beginning of the movie, and
then a chaotic situation ensues and then we have sort of generalized chaos, and
then we have this weird juxtaposition between Max, like you were saying, which
is this older guy, but the other older guys are the same age as
him, and there's but we see that they're a different you know, social
strata because they represent the corporation. So at first, it's like you said,
you know, standards and practices aren't gonna like this. You know,
you can drink. You can drink your shot of bourbon like before you go
on, but you can't be drunk on the camera. But now things change
and they want drunkenness and you know, supposed like truth and reality on camera,
and we see that. We see him say, last night, I
was awakened from a fitful sleep at shortly after two o'clock in the morning by
a show. Oh here is a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice that was
sitting in my rocking chair. I couldn't make it out at first in the
dark bedroom, and I said, I'm sorry, you'll have to talk a
little louder. That's a weird speech because it is like he's talking to somebody.
You know, he's either dissociating or he's literally talking to someone and the
capital V voice, so he capitalizes the voice in the screenplay like it's this
some sort of godlike character. The voice said to me, I want you
to tell the people the truth. Not an easy thing to do because the
people don't want to know the truth. I said, you're kidding. How
the hell would I know what the truth is? I mean, you have
to picture me sitting there on the foot of the bed, talking to an
empty rocking chair. I said to myself, Howard, you're some kind of
banjo brain sitting here talking to an empty chair. But the voice said to
me, don't worry about the truth. I'll put the words in your mouth.
And this is why it's kind of remlatory. And I said, what
is this the burning bush? For God's sake, I'm not Moses, And
the voice said to me, and I'm not God. What's that got to
do with it? Yeah? Later on it's interesting because he later on,
like just after that, he'll say why are you telling me this? And
the voice will tell him because you're on television, dummy, And that's exactly
that's exactly what Jensen says, right, So it's almost like Jensen and perhaps
Faye Dunaway, are you know, mind controlling Howard Beale, right right,
right, because because because Faye Dunaways all four of this crazy plan, right,
She's she's the one that's like, I will create the number one show
if you let me have this, let me run this, let me be
the you know, programmer, producer. I will make this a number one
show. And she's completely committed and at no point does she at any time
show any conscience, right, she has no conscience at all in the um.
She's only committed to winning this game when it comes to the ratings and
uh, you know, making this crazy show a hit. Um. And
so she's sort of like the perfect underling for Jensen. Right, we don't
I don't know if we've ever, if we ever are told at any point
that there's a connection between her and Jensen. But the Robert Daval character is
the under He's below Jensen. Jensen is this, like you said, disembodied
godlike figure. Throughout the film, and when Howard Bill does his speech about
the merger, trying to undermine the merger, you know, Robert of all
sitting in there feeling like he's lost everything, and he's dreading this phone call
from the disembodied voice of Jensen. Right, Yeah, he's he's the consigliari
dreading the voice of Marlon Brando, know exactly, I'll need you to Lit'll
talk to you. Come to me in the day of my daughter's wedding.
Um. And he's in he's in black high like almost the entire movie.
He's constantly in a tuxedo. He's always at dinners, he's at the stockholders
meeting. He dreads, he dreads the disembodied voice of Jensen talking to him.
Everybody's on the phone, so they're they're constantly talking to people who aren't
there, of course, including Howard and UM, like you said, he
we we we as the audience fear what Jensen is going to be like when
he shows up. And when he finally shows up, of course it's a
baty from from Deliverance. But um, but that's that's like his um,
that's his facade. Because even when we meet Jensen for the first time,
you know, when how when we meeting Howard, like because we're supposed to
I guess his audience, we're supposed to be Howard and that's where and so
he meets Jensen and Jensen were terrified what Jensen's gonna be like, but Jensen
says, hey, you know, look, I was a salesman. I
can sell anything. I can sell this, I can sell that. And
now he's risen to not the top, but he's because he's still, you
know, an emissary for somebody, but he's going to explain to him what
it's like and be It's also interesting that his soliloquy in Valhalla in the boardroom,
that he calls it Valhalla, is also a performance. It's and it's
becomes a meta performance because it's a two page monologue where it's written in this
like it's a it's it's a Miltonian soliloquy to the other demons. But it's
like he's rehearsing it, and when he's done, he says, does that
you know, he's like, does that make sense? He just breaks He
breaks yeah, yeah, yeah, did I get into that breakthrough to you?
Yeah. So so it's like the movie's interesting because it breaks the fourth
wall obviously because we see the characters. You know, they're doing a sides.
They don't really do true at sides. They're not talking directly to us,
but they are because they're talking to a screen, which is us but
there's a layer there. There are layers of you know, veils, and
then finally we get this this piercing the veil at the end where we see
like them the method revealed completely from the guys. I mean it's from the
horse's mouth at the end of the film. Um, right after that speech
with Diana, we're in there where they're in the they're eating dinner together.
Howard says, you have forty million Americans listening to you after it's a nice
show. You can have fifty million. For Pete's sake. I don't expect
you to walk the land in sackcloth. And Ash is preaching the armageddon you're
on TV man. So again it's been it's pseudo biblical language, as if
he's supposed to be a prophet. But like he says, um, this
is the reason why Bal is not. It's like, okay, well,
how how based is Bal going to be right? Because he says at the
very beginning, he says, like it's completely nihilistic. He doesn't you know,
he doesn't want to talk to God, he doesn't believe in God.
It's all about you know, the egotistical, like you said, new age,
you know, looking inward, looking inward, and it becomes this,
you know, my truth. Um, I'm here, I'm gonna shout and
everybody's gonna follow me. But to what So there's no there's no real resolution.
No. This is another thing that predicts the future of media, basically
where we are in media now. So if you remember, you know,
back at the time of forties, fifties, sixties, news rapport was supposed
to be about the facts. I mean, it wasn't, but it was
supposed to be that, right, I mean it was you know that Walter
Cronkite era was one hundred percent still psychological warfare, public opinion making Walter Lippmann
right, I mean the stuff that we've been talking about, because Lippmann wrote
wrote this in nineteen twenty so they're making a public opinion out of tavistock Is
nineteen twenties. And then we get Burne's wrote propaganda also Tabstock connected in nineteen
fifty twenty eight, so he wrote he wrote this eight years after Lippmann's public
opinion, and by the forties and fifties you get these you know, totally
cronkite seven sixties as well, so type characters that are totally controlled. But
the next phase of where they want to take things is again just even crazier.
And that's what's so hard for that generation to accept. And I wanted
to make a point that probably wasn't maybe immediately apparent, which is that there's
a lot of books in the seventies that came out from the elite power structure
that also I think gives context to this movie. And I mentioned before the
Marylyn Ferguson book about the Aquarian Age or the Aquarian Conspiracy, which is a
seventies book, but it's you know, like we're decade, two decades almost
after the counter culture of the nineteen sixties era, and the New Age movement
is still going strong in the seventies. And one of the things that she
talks about in that book that you wouldn't expect is networks. A big part
of that book is networking and creating networks. And so even though this is
about a TV network, when we watch the film, it's actually about power
structures and their networks. Networking is a big part of the power structure,
and so certain people are at certain levels of this pyramid. Right, we
can think of the same kind of thing is lampooned in um remember the oh
Jesse even you know what's the one with jesseven turin Arnold, the dystopian movie
where they're running Man, where they have one TV network that runs the society.
Right, very similar to what we see in network Um and Damien is
this you know figure that basically controls the wholes He's sort of the dictator who's
also the TV game show host, which is which is funny, but um,
every strata of the society kind of has its its network, right.
So there's the masses who watch Howard Beal, and then there's Howard Beal and
the you know, directing production team. That's another network. But there's a
network above them, which is the network of the corporate uh you know,
elite and the shareholders, the shareholders meeting, but they actually answer to a
higher network, which is this amorphous Jensen group which represents like the hedge funds
and these big you know, international conglomerates, and they answer even to high
powers as well. So networking again is very key to how media controls everybody
and the replacement for this. There's a movie about that called The Social Network,
right, with Jesse Eisenberg playing who Zuckerberg or whatever. And that's about
the establishment of Facebook and what is Facebook but social networking? Yes, Peter
Peel is in the movie. Who Peter Peel, Peter Teele is in the
film is Social Network? He's in He's in the Social Network. He's actually
in the film. Yeah, I remember, he's the he's the he's the
angel investor for for Facebook. And when they go when they go to New
York and he's wearing his pajamas or whatever, and he goes to me,
the angel investor. That's Peter Teele. He's actually in the film. And
and actually that's interesting because because that that movie is an Aaron Sorkin film,
and this movie is the Aaron Sorkin like this, this is the movie that
is the precursor for all Aaron Sorkin works. People talk about Aaron Sorkin because
Aaron Sorkin is the you know, he's like sort of seen as the screenwriter
par excellence. And we can see where the you know, even the way
that things are are scripted and seen on television, like with The West Wing.
I was recently watching like a season two of the of The West Swing
and the way that we have the tracking you know, you have the tracking
shots, the walking tops, and we see that in this film. I
know Aaron Sorkin like worships this movie. And because the screen the screenwriting is
so tight, you know. And again it's it's like you said, it's
it's it's sort of a pre a proto social network. Yeah. And you
know she talks about how uh in in this book the personal and social transformation
in the nineteen eighties. Right, So she's writing this right when the eighties
are about to start. I'm pretty sure it's it may have been early eighties.
I thought it was a seventies book. But of course John Coleman's theory
is that it's actually written by uh. Yeah. This so she this in
nineteen seventy six to prepare everybody for the nineteen eighties and what they wanted to
see in the nineteen eighties as the strategy of moving us into the new world
order. And so the end of it is actually about how we will all
be globally networked together in a global transferformation. And now keep in mind,
this is not a conspiracy book. People are confused by the title of they
think, oh, that's a conspiracy. No, No, this is a
book from the establishment about what the whole counter culture of the nineteen sixties was
about, which was to transform and change everybody in the society to enter into
what she writes about at the end is the whole Earth conspiracy. And that's
what Jensen says, is that everybody will be under the network. Everybody will
be under this one. There will be one network, because the network will
be the network of the one corporation that will give everybody the brave new world
social scenario. The Um, the Sibyl, even the fact that they I
mean every time I hear Sybil, I think, I think Um. Beginning
of the Waste Land C. S eliott Um references the Sibyl non Sibyl m
that you know, the man goes to talk to the Sibyl in the aid
and the Sibyl says, I'm in hell or I think of Sibyl League,
remember cyl Sibyl League. That the witch who was brought into MK Ultra and
or was it mka often right, and she was brought in for the for
the the occult programming the darker things in MK Ultra. In John Marks he
talks about Sibyl Leaku and Um. But it's interesting to consider that there's a
sibyl in this, and that the sibyl, even in the even the classic
Sybyl, is a prophetess who speaks for another power structure. Shoot, so
she is relaying the message for the guy. Remember that scene in three hundred
right where he climbs, he climbs up on to the top of the mountain
and he talks at the article. Yeah, and they're up there huffing gas
and being perverts and um. But there and they give him a fake message,
right, which is that like, no, the war is not you
know, give us your gold and the war, by the way, is
not going to be advantageous for us at this time, which is totally fake,
right, because the sibyl is just up there being there being there pervert
slave or whatever. But it's the same in this that they have. They
she's one of the people that like is on the programmed, you know,
produced a television show, just like Howard Beale is right where he is supposed
to be an intermediary between the people and the power structure. And then like
you said, there's levels of the pyramid where each one is completely you know,
they network amongst each other, um, and they sort of they I
don't know they can. Again, they can sort of like Bob and weave
through. You know, things don't up exactly when, you know, when
we think they're gonna happen, but they're gonna happen later on. But it
just depends on the how the the organism works. Um. I mean they
even bring up later on, they bring up Sybil to sus Air. And
thought it was interesting that they bring up the It says possibly uh by twenties,
possibly thirty with a comparable Q level? What that was weird? The
other segments on the bele shows, Sibyl to sus Air, the webbing,
Vox popula I have all developed their own audiences. It was again, what
did you think was weird about that? Just like well, just just about
that certain letter. That letter. I know that a Q level in terms
of of marketing and advertising, yes, and TV, but you know,
with with the thing, I just thought it was Q and on and on
they were predicting Q and ony. Uh. By the way, did you
have you watched Madman? Oh? Yeah? Uh huh so I never did
watch it, and Jamie and I are watching it. Um, I don't.
Actually, I'm still in season one and we're almost done with season one.
I don't find it to be that engaging or that interesting so far.
I know that where it goes because for some reason I ended up seeing like
the last episode at some point. Um, so I know, I know
where Don Draper ends up. But uh, you know I see parallels between
that and this as well, because you know this, this ends up being
very much about um image iconography, you know, and a lot of the
ADMIN end up being the TV men as well. So these worlds actually collide
and then the ADMIN are also coming out of the OSS as well. Now,
I remember in season one there's some point where they mentioned I don't know
where this this the screen The story goes with Don Draper, but he's some
kind of amorphous war person that we don't know. He was doing something in
the war and he wants to hide his background. Um so is it because
he's OSS or something? I mean, do you recall? Well? I
don't. But I think that one of the things that this film does well
and that they do in Mad Men, is that they kind of should they
illustrate the the Old Boy Network in a way that like we don't get we
don't get now, um, because it's become sort of something else. But
like I mean the documentary you were showing last night with Chuck, you know,
Chuck Uston and he's interviewing Helms and like all the people that we see
in the interviews are all part of this network, right, and you know,
Sidney Lumette is sort of outside that. Sidney Limott himself is sort of
outside that network. But he did go to Colombia and he was you know,
I mean, it's Glory of Vanderbilt and the first Wife and you know,
all this stuff, and I think that, um, that's one thing
that they do in I mean, those people are lower, you know,
in the scale, like in mad Men. But I do just on a
personal note, like I do. I do have a friend who um is
at a pretty much draper level advertising in New York and UM and it's totally
different. I mean, the same sort of it's the same sort of maneuvering
in things that happened then, but it's it's totally different now. Like you
know, everything is fifties in the show, and it's image and style and
um, you know, like I mean, he he had the uh,
he had the NFL account, he had the uh, he had like the
Windy's account. He had the the iHeart Radio I mean, he had the
big accounts. And it was interesting that like he flew me. He called
me one time it was like, um, hey man, you want to
come out to Vegas? And I was like, I mean, you know,
is this is this on the you know, is this on the Don
Draper card? And he's like, everything's paid for it, you know,
I've just tell me when you want to come, I'll fly you out there.
The hotels paid for, expenses are paid for. We're gonna go to
the iHeart Radio festival. And I kind of didn't believe it because he's my
friends, so I didn't believe. Like I was like, dude, how
can you know this guy? And we went and uh, we went to
We went to the festival that the performers like, we went back. You
know, we were backstage and because he's advertising, the performers will get off
stage and come up to him and be like, sir, you know,
was that a good performance? And he's like, listen, I'm talking to
my friends. Get the hell out of here, you know, and it's
like they're funny, you you're the guy. So but he would, you
know, he went to every event, and he would go to all these
things. And I think that it's interesting because you know, he he got
that through his you know, college networking. Um, you know, he
went to a college where he knew people and and those people sort of it's
expanded from that, but the core thing is still the same, you know.
It's it's it's who you know, what you look like, what you're
gonna you know, what what your background is, and what you can accomplish
for the bigger thing though, I think, and it's just funny to me
because you know, Draper is this psycho psychopath in the so called patriarchy right
in the in the fifties era, and then now Faye Dunaway is the sociopath
psychopath you know, almost dissociating uh Don Draper type of character in the nineteen
seventies because she's the product that you know, Draper ends up at esseland Institute
meditating. He's this total nihilist, self serving pleasure man, and then he
ends up looking for you know, meaning at esseland Institute meditating. And then
so the sixth Esselan is the brains behind the sixties counterculture New age movement in
America. You know, Huxley goes there and promotes it, and all the
new ages like Debat Chopper promote it and then uh, Faye Dunaway is this
this product of that ironically and so but now it's a woman, I think,
which is interesting. So now what is news now? Well, news,
I forgot what I meant to say it earlier when I was talking about
the old guys h Howard Beale. The reason he's popular is that he attracts
a culture personality, and news wasn't this way at this time. And so
some people were saying, oh, you know, he's predicting, like Donna
Hue and stuff like that. Okay, maybe maybe it's predicting like the daytime
talk show, but those people weren't really known for personalities. You know,
people weren't following Donna Hue because he had a personnel. Donna Hue is actually
really boring, right, Yeah, I mean, but it does, in
a way, inadvertently maybe presage the way media is now. People follow media
figures like Lord Baltimore because he's a character. You want to get your media
from somebody who's interesting and funny, and it's and it really is infotainment and
Howard Howard Beale's entertainment before there's infotainments. He's charismatic, he's magnetic. Um,
he's you know, his his foibles and his faults are things that people
relate to, and they trust him more for that U versus the the the
cronct characters who are like straight laced, Yeah, straight laced establishment, you
know, and they're they they've got their stories. One thing that bother me
about this movie is I mean, I I was watching Um, Sam Hide
and Nick talk recently about something, and Nick was saying that Um, whenever
he like sees certain things, he's always like obsessed with the logistics of it.
And I don't understand how they can do a news story in the seventies
and they can have footage of things because there's there's no there's no zip file
to send, right, there's no video. There's a pre videotape. So
there's like person have to view the actual event and film it on a Super
eight camera and then and then courier it all the way to New York.
How long does that take? Yeah, it's great. So you did have
I think you had stringers and people like the Jake Gellenhaal character at this time
time. But yeah, but again, like you said, though, like
I think they probably relied on stock footage a lot more than we would think.
Like when I was watching that old news seventies news broadcast about the CIA
an Angola, I think they were just running a bunch of b roll from
you know, old who. It might not have even been Angola, might
have just been some random ass b roll from some African looking country or something,
I guess. So, I guess they still do that now, but
it's just sourced from the internet. So remember a few years ago they this
is what's happening in Syria and it turned out to be like a Kentucky firearms
exhibit because they're lazy and yeah, exactly. Also with Night with Nightcrawler,
like there's a you know, I don't know, I think that Renee Russo's
character and that is almost like she's not as psychic, you know, she's
not on the same level as Fay Dunaways and obviously she's local news, but
her character like uh takes a cue from Faye Dunaway's character. It seems like
that's what it's kind of evolved too, and like as it's made its way
down to the local news right Russo, she throws out her she has,
you know, she throws out her morals. I mean she never had any,
but she threw out her facade of morals. Um. She takes what
she can't. You know you you went inside the house. It looks like
you stage this. Okay, I'll take this, you know, and then
their barter for for the money. Um. So, I guess the the
Jake Jillenhall character is just the one that we don't see in this right well,
in a way, I mean he would be I guess actually the Jake
Jillenhall character might be related to the guy who looks like Um Tim Um the
actor, to the tall guy, to the what's her named Tim? He
was in Arlington Road, Um, the guy in Shawshank Redemption. There's a
character in this one of the two is Tim Robbins. One of the two
assassins looks exactly like Tim Robbins. There's the great Amiccon and then there's the
Tim Robbins character. So I guess maybe that would be Jake Jillenall, like
in another age. By the way, it's interesting that one of the resolutions
a small point of the movie is that what happened to the great amic Coon.
He got away, right, he yeah, because he's he's a controlled
system creation, right, even though he's on they killed the guy on camera,
and then I guess the audience is just sitting there and then they're like,
all right, cut you know, um, okay, you can go,
sir, and then he just leaves. I'm glad you brought up the
parallel to Nightcrawler. And by the way, I do have an old Nightcrawler
analysis with Sean Helton from twenty one Wire, which I just looked as nine
years ago. So we were doing film film analysis nine years ago. If
you want to go see our Nightcrawler analysis where we got into the background.
I mean, the Jake jellen Hall character is great in that because he is
precisely one of these sort of totally psychopathic news social climbing news people who realize
is that the way to get to the top is to actually make the news
and fake the news fake news. All right. So long before Don Trump
was doing that, Jake Jillenhall showed us that in Nightcrawler back in twenty fourteen.
I would say, I would two, There's another Uh to Die For
is also really good. That makes the same point with um Nicole Kidman and
Gus van zandt right you've seen that. Yeah, Yeah, that's that's a
classic because she's also like the psychology pathology the peche mode. I thought that
was a good introductor the character in Um to Die For. She she's a
local news uh weather girl basically who decides that she has aspirations to be,
you know, the most famous news anchor whatever, and so she gets she
just basically does everything in moral that you could think of, including being involved
in murder. But it's making this same point about the power of media as
is Natural Born Killers. I mean that's kind of the point of that movie
too, which is to show that, you know, it's the media has
a role in making the serial killer into this you know, popular, amazing,
cool character. When they're compared they're complete degenerates. But that's actually part
of the role of the media is actually to do this on purpose. With
Robert Downey Jr. I'm Wayne Gail here on Highway sixty six. Yeah,
that's the sort of Haraldo looking at the Yeah, he's totally a Haraldo character
exactly. That one was interesting because I remember when it came out and h
the they had the Barbara Walters interview with Woody Harrelson. Um talking about how
you know your character in this is similar to someone that you might you might
know personally, like your father, right, And Um, that's when do
you remember that interview? They asked what? She asked what he Harlson about
his dad? What's his name? Is it Charles Harris Harrelson and ms And
he says in the interview, he says, um, Well, she says,
and you've claimed that the CIA trained your dad. Um, why do
you think that? And he said, well, I think it because it's
true. And she says, do you think that makes any difference? And
he says, Um, I think it makes any difference in the CIA trained
my dad. Yeah, I think most people's dad, right, yeah.
And she says, um, what do you want to talk about it some
more? And he said, nah, these are the kind of questions I
can't really talk about. Actually, recently learned did you see that movie?
Um, see that movie Cocaine Bear that just came out. I'm not seeing
it yet, but I do plan to watch it. Well, it does
the the storyline for the movie is about the Dixie Mafia that you've talked about
and and in the in the just to make it short, in the real
story, the guy who threw the Pilcaine out of the airplane and fell to
his death and like was wearing the Gucci loafers and all that was working.
He was a he was an establishment guy in Kentucky. He was like in
a horse racing family. He went to you know, private schools and colleges
and all this. But then he started being a kind of a Barry Seal
character. But when it went to trial later, the guys connected to it,
the federal judge, Um, one of the witnesses, Um was off
before the trial. And then the federal drug judge was assassinated. And who
was the assassin, Woody Harrelson's dad. That's the one that he went to
prison for. So interesting. Wow, But um, yeah, I think
that I remember. I mean I watched that Nightcrawler analysis when it happened.
Shouts out to the old school people out there, and I think that One
other thing about that movie that's interesting is that Jake Jillenhaal Um, there's a
scene where he's in his you know, tiny little um you know, he's
in his odd cubicle apartment and he's like watering his little plastic plant and he's
sitting there eating and he we see his kind of schizophrenia, right because he
starts hearing voices and laughing, and it's it's similar to this movie how you
know, how how Howard Bill acts in the film UM and receives his messages.
Do you do you buy the connection between the Edward Norton in Fight Club
and Howard Bill here, because it's like Edward Norton's nihilism and fight Club is
like the next level beyond this this level. It's because you know, we're
in the nineties to that point, right or is it? Is it right
after the Big Nine event? I forget when fight clubs right before? Yeah,
it's right before. It was pre pre Big Nine? And yeah,
I do buy the connection because, um, you know Edward of course,
Edward Norton is working. I mean that that movie and that book UM are
about the you know, the ultra consumerist UM sort of that that well,
and he's he's dissociating too, right, I mean, and and he's and
he's yeah, and he's dissociating. And then the UM, the co opted
paramilitary group that they become in the movie exists as part of the arm of
the of the stay too, or of of the structure to break down the
you know, the the buildings of the banking structure. And then again just
like in this it's order out of chaos. So what are the it's is
it? What's it called Operation Chaos or they have a name for the operation
that Tyler Dirden gets Edward Norton to do, but I can't remember the name
of it. Well, I don't remember the name of it. I met
Chuck palinik Um, the guy who read Yeah, I met him at the
Goal I was. I was. I lived in Ireland, I went to
school there, and um, and I met him at the Galway Literary Festival.
And that was weird because um, he like he's this like Western dude
with like a poncho on. But at the beginning when he gave a reading
and um he said, uh, he said like, I'm just gonna warn
you that every time I read this short story, people walk out. And
this was like at a literary festival, and I'm like, who's gonna walk
out of this? Like who, you know, we're not prudes. But
like there was a point in the short story when I went this this is
like the most infense, insane thing I've ever read UM. And I think
that people got up and walked out, and I think that Polinick it's weird,
like what's happened with people like Palinick? Or are these sort of you
know, UM nineties like Irvan Irvan Welsh who wrote Trainspotting in these sort of
nineties postmodern figures who exist in the kind of UM pop culture domain and who
make you know, literature popular um and that that seems to also move on
from what we get in the seventies UM as a we get a reaction to
the seventies altar of film, and we get the eighties and the big,
the big you know, government movies, and we get Top Gun and it's
you know, they used like you wrote in your book, like you know,
they use the aircraft carriers and the Department of Defense, you know,
as contracts and advises on the movie. And then in the nineties we get
this sort of scaled down version in a number of ways, we get the
big movies also, but we get scaled down versions which are getting geared at
a more personal or individualized level and trying to make people um. In one
sense, rebel against the obvious consumerism, but in the end it just was
furthering it again, just like in this film. Well, there's this I
remember, by the way, thank you to the gun in the chat their
operation mayhem in there you go in the in the in the movie, not
read the book. But there's this subtext in the rant of Edward Norton that
we need to return to primitivism. So there's this archaic revival primitivism thing which
is part of the counterculture. Actually it doesn't end up winning out because when
the counterculture culture kicks off, a lot of the writers are searching for different
possibilities of what types of culture might be better. Right, So like Terrence
McKenna talks about returning to more indigenous ways of living and you can see them
searching for living off grid and all that, but they're immediately confronted with the
fact that living off the grid and all that typically requires men and masculine energy.
Men build houses, they engage in constructing subpumps and sewers. It's not
typically women they're doing this. So there's this, Okay, but how are
we going to have archaic revival and primitivism without toxic masculinity. Oh, we're
gonna have like a feminist Guya kind of spirituality. Right, That's why,
that's why all of those seventies and eighties taxs, like Turning Point by Freedolf
Copra and Marilyn Ferguson's a New Age book, it's they constantly stressed the guy
a feminine aspect, as does Terrence McKenna. He's like, no, it's
got to be guy a worship. We can't go back to any patriarchal stuff.
So in Fight Club you get a reaction against that, all of the
Faye Dunaways that have been stepping up and leaning in and girl bossing already in
the seventies and eighties. And if you remember, there's this point too in
the movie where Fay Dunaways talking about like stock options and who's like shorting the
market. It's like, that's not what women are typically interested in there,
and they're not usually talking about shorting the market, right, but she does.
And so in Fight Club you have Edward Norton talking about how feminine it
is for a society to seek safety, security, perfect, you know,
ease, simply all the stuff that uh modernity is offering. And so his
postmodernity. Nihilism is grasping for masculinity, which is why they have fight club
right where guys meet up and and and you know, let out their pent
uprage at this feminized um ease and security based society. So, now do
you do you think that the primitivism in it's like, I mean, people
often draw comparisons to the um the let's say, like the youth groups and
the outdoor groups of the of Germany in the middle of the twentieth century,
right, Um, And so it's a it's a it's it becomes a masculine
primitivism, that's a paramilitary arm right. Um, do you think that what
do you think that that means? In terms of I mean, there's there's
one on the one end, we have the you know, the dawning of
the Age of Aquarius, and we've got all you know, we've got all
that, which is a whole other, whole other thing, but it's still
part of what you were saying. And then we have the more masculine groups.
Do you think that, I mean, that's a brave new world.
Right do you think that now there's this because like you were saying, it
didn't work in terms of like a let's say it's just a true return to
primitivism and men are going to go do this stuff, but they didn't have
the men to do it. And do you think that that's mixed in with
you know, technocracy transhumanism and we have like you know, we have on
the one end is returned to primitive living and on the other hand we have
a technological age like we see that in West World. This is yeah,
this is archaea futurism, right, that's the notion of mixing primitivism with transhumanism.
And so this is people like Terence McKenna and Gillam Fay. So he
was one of these, I think arctis public his book from On Our Archo
Futurism, which influenced some of the alt R I g HT characters, right
right, So um, yeah, so in in the European New Right,
you have people that have promoted this idea. But uh so that's like the
right wing version of Terrence mckenney's left wing version. But in my view them,
my view is just totally controlled, made up stuff. It's not it's
not a real organic movement anymore than Terence mckenne's thing is a real organic.
They're they're just the right wing neo neo pagan spirituality of um, you know,
the new right versus the left wing feminist you know, goddess worship of
Terrence McKenna. They're both two arms of the same new age thing, and
they both promote, like you said, like trans humanist stuff, although probably
Terrence McKenna would be a little more critical of the trans humanist stuff than the
New Right would be. Yeah, the how just came across the humanoid part.
Um. This is what Howard says after the gentsen, Yes, after
the gents and speech, Howard says, the time has come to say,
um, is the humanization such a bad word? So he totally changes right,
um, because good or bad, that's what's so. The whole world
is becoming humanoid creatures that look human but aren't pretty regulatory, the whole world,
not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting
there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass produced, programmed, wired,
insensate things, useful only to produce and consume other mass produced things,
all of them as unnecessary and useless as we are. That's fade done away,
right consuming She's constantly. He brought up she's constantly eating it. That's
that's when they start to hear him and they go this, God gotta go
because he says that, and then he gets the the Bank speech um.
The the Jensen speech um is essentially again what he does in a face in
the crowd um. But he leads him into should we go over that?
That's talk. Yeah. That that's actually the most revelatory overall in the film
is the Jensen speech the corporate cosmology. So so that speech is interesting because
I can't help but think that. I mean, you brought up a good
point earlier. You said that Beale is essentially a fool. I mean he's
he's kind of like the fool in king Lear, but without king Lear.
Right, he's speaking the truth in a sort of tempest. I mean,
the timpet like when king Lear and the Fool are out on the heath and
he's raging against the wind never never never never never um, and the fool
is the voice of reason. But in this I guess the two characters are
kind of unified in one because he is a sort of a he's an old
figure. He's like a king Lear figure. He's part of this, you
know this power structure. Um, he's magnetic, he's cares madic. But
the fool in him is saying, is saying the things that are true to
some extent. But I couldn't help but think of um and as you Like
It, just to bring in a purely literary element that I'm sure um the
screen, right, I'm sure Sayevsky meant. I mean, he couldn't have
not meant this when he wrote this. Um, there's all the world's a
stage speech in As you Like It, Um, which occurs right after the
Fool's speech, and in that he says he goes through the seven ages of
man. But this is like, this is like, um, this is
Beale's life basically in the In the movie, he says, all the world's
in stage, and all the men and women merely players. That's what they
are in the film. They have their axents in their entrances, and one
man in his time plays many parts, his axe being seven. Um,
he says, the lover sighing like Furnace with a woeful ballad made to his
mistress eyebrow. So that's like Max in the movie. Then a soldier full
of strange oh's and beard like the pard jealous and honors, sudden and quick
and quarrel, seeking the bubble, reputation even in the cannon's mouth. That's
that's Beal in the movie, raging, raging against the not the dying of
the light. But it's I guess it's being illuminated. He constantly talks about
being illuminated in the movie. Um uh. And then the justice it's fair
round belly with good cape, unlined, with eyes, severe and beard,
a formal thought full of wise saws and modern instances. And so he plays
his part um Latin. Then he's I'll skip to the end, last scene
of all that ends this strange, eventful history. It's second child, scottishness
and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sands everything,
And that's the on screen assassination. So it's interesting that that that the
characters play out these roles, that they're literally playing parts in the news in
the movie, and then the actors are playing those roles and we're watching them
as arcatapes playing roles, and it just it's it's all sort of synthesized in
this in this movie, which is this sort of the same as a sort
of cut and pace from Shakespeare and from Milton right. Um Jensen says.
He leads him into the room and he says, he says, Um,
you know, it's his Valhalla, and we get like, I mean,
the staging of it really is like in in Citizen King. We get it.
It's kind of off. So we see his character is sitting down,
yeah, and he's way far away at you know, untouchable at the end
of this giant table. He's in a he's in a three piece suit.
He's like v suit. He's like the suit of all suits. And Beale
is sitting down and he's low in his chair and he's looking up and of
course we're looking when we're looking up in film, you know, we're looking
at somebody who's larger than life. And he's he all of a sudden goes
on this monologue which seems rehrst. I mean, it's crazy. He says,
you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, mister Beale, and
I won't have it. Is that clear? You think you've merely opt to
business deal. That's not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars
out of this country and now they must put it back. So he's giving
us a kind of an introduction or an exposition, and he says, it's
the ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You're 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's only one
holistic system of systems, one vast and immine interwoven, interacting, multi variant,
multinational dominion of dollars, petro dollars electro. Interesting that it's electrodollars,
multidollars. It's the international system currency that determines the totality of life on the
planet. That is the natural order of things, that is the atomic,
subatomic and galactic structure of things today. So it gives us the microcosmic and
then the macro cosmic level of it. That's his sort of pyramidal view of
things that he's in control of. And you have meddled with the primal verses
of nature. So he ties it back in and you will atone. So
the idea of atonement is interesting because it's like he's saying to his servant,
here, you're going to atone for the sins that you've committed because you were
running my system, you were doing the things that I told you, probably
indirectly. They talk about sort of plausible deniability and how they can't tie in
the murder directly to the news agency. And so there's already a disconnect,
and then here there's another disconnect, like you were the guy. We gave
you the job, and then you were doing this stuff and we were letting
it happen and it was serving our purposes. But now you have to atone
in this quasi religious way for what you've committed. Well, the assassination of
the blood atonement, that's the thing, right, right, he says,
Um, he says, you get up on your little twenty one inch screen
and howl about American democracy. There's no America. There's no democracy. There's
and then he names the corporations those which is what we've been saying over here
on this channel for a long time. Right, So the speech that he
gives could be the summation speech of everything that this channel has been talking about
for maybe the last ten years. It really is, it's all I mean,
it really is all here. It's all in this movie. Um,
we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. The world is
a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by laws of business.
The world is a business, mister, mister beale, it's a business.
And then he brings in, He even brings in ponscomb evolution. Right,
he says, has been since man called out of the slide. You will
live to see that perfect world, brave new world in which there's no war
and famine, opression 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 sheriff's stock. You know, y'all, get your your your UBI,
all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized. You take your soma, your
you know your fentinal meth um. All borders, all sorry, all boring,
He should have said, borders, all bored He kind of implied that
all boredom. Amused. Right, you'll you'll go to your entertainment, your
pervert, your pervert entertainment. And I have and I have chosen you.
So he's chosen to preach this evangel Yeah, he's the prophet Christ figure preaching
this gospel of brave New World exactly, which is by the way, new
Age in in the hucks And novel, it's it's a new Age, uh
you know religion that they have, which we discovered that when we broke down
a Brave New World recently. Um, and Huxley is a key figure in
the New Age movement. He went and uh you know, was a mover
and shaker at Esselin. So that's why we've seen the new Age thread throughout
this movie. This movie which I didn't actually uh, like I said,
like I had not. I had watched about twenty minutes of this movie ten
years ago, and um, I never finished it. Not because it was
bad, It's just a I got distracted at the time and just never finished
it. And I always heard the clips, you know, because Lord Valdemar's
played the clips for twenty years, and I just never thought much about it.
And I'm glad that I did finally go and watch it, because there's
so much in this movie that you don't expect to be there. I did
not expect this new Age thread running throughout it. But but yeah, he
is essentially a prophet, a christ preaching figure for this new um, this
brave new world. We um what I think that what I think is probably
the best part of this whole of this of the screenplay, the screenplay here,
I mean look like I mean, I do a literature channel, so
it's all it's all books, right, and we'll cover you know, we
occasionally cover movies or movies based in books. But I think that this screenplay
exist, it will will make it. I mean, it's already in the
sort of cannon of scram It's I would consider this one of the best screenplays
I've ever seen. It's it's so well written, and I think that this
thing is so revelatory, so tight, and he says, um. My
favorite part at the end is he says, Howard slowly. This is not
in the film. This is the direction, you know in the screenplay.
It's this Poward slowly rises from the blackness of his seat, so that he
is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light shooting out from the rear of
the room. He stares at Jensen, spotted on the podium, transfixed.
It's a it's religious language, right, this is lumina confirm. I mean,
he says, I mean, it's like we're about to go through the
portal right to the top. And he says, Howard, all of a
sudden says, what an odd line to say. He says, I've seen
the face of God, which is a culmination of where he's been headed throughout
this thing. But of course he's a nihilistic prophet. It's also, by
the way, it reference to the beatific vision. Right, So this is
the Beati vision of the Latin Roman Calic Church, which is that to see
God is to see you know, the essence, to see everything, to
see you know, reality and toto in terms of its full meaning and full
significance. I mean, Orthodoxy we don't have that. We have a doction
of seeing the divine energies. But um, it's beatific vision language on purpose,
but it's not beatific vision of God. It's the God of the world
system, who is the you know, the essentially the controlling oligarch. It's
a it's a to me, it's a it's a glimpse. It's a glimpse
of the anti Christ in terms of this guy is an emissary, right,
And he says, because he says I think I've seen the face of God.
And Jensen says, you just might be right, just right. Yeah.
So that's, by the way, that's the same way that um Mosophomon
talks in Brave New World. He uses this h christ like language as well.
Right when we have that weird creeper chapter about the peedo stuff you can
see end of chapter three, and he says, let the children come unto
me, right, so most off himand is also this Antichrist type of figure,
which is a really I mean, people have I'm sure people have read
the book. Are they read it in school? But it's interesting to go
back and reread the book and look at exactly what you're looking at in that
scene, especially in that scene. It's so unbelievable what happens in that scene,
in the creeper scene. I think that, you know, the sort
of Luciferian satanic pandemonium language is kind of tied up in a bow at the
end, when of course we get the Sibyl the sous air, and then
we get he is, Hackett says about Jensen. So Vincent has made his
appearance and then he's disappeared, right, He's gone back to you know,
the under the capstone or wherever he is, and he says he is intractable
in adam Antine. And again that comes from Paradise Lost, where it says
he says him the almighty power curled headlong from the ethereal sky with hideous ruin
and combustion down to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adam Antine chains and
penal fire. Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms And he says adam Antine
because it's it's adomic. It's adam right, because in Paradise Lost, Satan's
whole m is to go back to Earth to destroy God's creation so that he
can It's just like in the movie Prisoners. They want to undo God's creation
by destroying people and their faith in God. And it does that in Paradise
Lost by entering the garden to meeting in the guise of the serpent and that
and then the fall of man ocurse. So right, so yeah, uh
so I want to remind everybody to the show sponsors. Of course, the
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up a little quicker on rock Fin, but on my website, of course.
If you subscribe to Jason Asis dot com, you get access to all
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go to concluding thoughts on on Network as we come here to the end with
our buddy baselet Analyzer. Also, you can subscribe to bla at the link
in the show description his channel. As we said, it's great for deep
dives on a lot of literature and a lot of movies. Head on over
to that. His link is right there, um, base Analyzer and you
can see the rest of his really deep deep dive content. Um. Last
thing I noticed is that, you know, we find out that the Beal
characters really as in my view, a kind of a fool uh. He
really ends up caving to this pseudo rebellion, the pseudo counterculture, and he
basically just preaches the gospel of nihilism, which is what the corporation wants him
to preach anyway, to demoralize the public. What a great image of mass
media, and then we find the absurdity of mass PSI op T E R
R O R events presaged in this televised assassination of Howard Beale himself, so
he becomes the blood atonement that Jensen said he would be, and we get
again, I think presaging predicting of the types of mass trauma, future shocked,
social dissociation, mass dissociation that Tavistock and the deep State wanted to create
through mass media all along. We get that image in the final almost laughable.
And I'm not saying that to be crude, but this is a satirical
film, and his assassination is supposed to be comical because they show us a
bunch of screens running the Mikey likes it eating Life Cereal as they run the
assassinations. In other words, we're supposed to think the product placement is off
the charts, the rates are off the charts because the mind control created fake
Ecumenical Liberation Army, which is the pseudo Marxist guy uh you know, outfit
run by a mind control sort of uh tupac character, as bees Litten Andlzer
said, he's it's a stage thing. They control. I mean it's they
really do kill him, but they're essentially mkultre puppet assassins um and they serve
their purpose to have a televised mass assassination UM on purpose and it was all
planned by the you know, high level super super elite. So mass trauma
through mass media m chulture on full display at the end. Yeah, the
way that um that it's staged with the ass the assassination is so quick.
It's such a start. You know, he comes out like he's gonna come
out every week, and um, he sort of raises his hands and then
the great you know, uh mustaph amand's Tod and Tim Robins stand up and
they off him. And then it goes straight to you know, buy the
Funko pop version of Howard Beale in stores now and then and then that's it.
And then we have a brief voiceover. And what's interesting is that the
last line of the film is the voiceover says, this was the story of
Howard Beale, who was the network news anchorman on UBSTV, the first known
instance of a man being killed because he had lousy ratings, which is supposed
to tie this up in a comedic sense. That it was satire, but
again, like we said, it becomes met It not only becomes a meta
meta satire, but it also does this weird thing where it unites comedy and
tragedy in a way where it's ambiguous, because because in the tragedy the character
falls from a high to a low position right into death or exile. He's
about to be exiled at the beginning of the film, but instead he makes
his way through the thing and then he dies. Um. It also mimics
the way that with the two guys are talking on the street and then it
cuts to him with his head down saying that he's going off himself. It's
a quick cut and we see the same thing he's he comes out, he's
standing up, he's talking in almost this grunken fool um fashion, and then
he falls down and we see his head and his head is like a disappearing
cube on the you know, a square on the screen that sort of fades
out into the commercials Um. But it also is it also becomes a comedy
in the sense that the whole thing that they're doing is comedic because it's so
ridiculous and it's but it's so ridiculous because it's actually happening, because the movie
is, the movie is prescient, it's revelatory, and it's now. I
mean, this is media now, and anybody like absolutely, people people have
you know, people have tried to make you know, heads or tails of
what's happened in the media recently with the two big figures, um, who
recently departed their their big places, you know, the news the news figures,
UM, and you know they've been trying to you know, they have
various opinions on it. But I think that this movie it is it's not
direct obviously it doesn't. It's not a commentary on that per se. No,
that was that was me. That was me getting Tucker fired, right,
So I made Klaus mad. Klaus is the Jensen character who called Fox
News and said, get rid of get rid of Tucker. Yeah, you're
so, you're saying. Your segment was when the guy came on with the
microphone. He was going, can't right and she said shut it down?
Right? So no, so UM, So I think that people should should
watch the film, um, because it's so multilayered, there's so much to
make from it and UM, like you said, I mean, it's a
kind of a culmination of of all the work that you've done and UM,
and I think that people will sort of if they have any sort of insight
or discernment, they'll be able to understand what the film is saying. And
and I think that one last thing about it is that, um, the
guy who wrote the screenplay, he won the he won the best Screenwriting the
year before this, then he won for this year. He didn't go to
the ceremony, UM, and then he won. He was nominated again the
next year, and he sort of vaulted into this position of great screenwriters.
You can tell because it's just the word by Batchevsky is not you know,
a screenplay by or a screenplay. And I think that um, that it's
again it is it's a masterful work. And uh I read an interview with
him where it said, UM, someone asked him like, well, what
what's your what's your take on your own movie? And this is one thing
that I talk about on the channel that it's often a mistake to ask the
author, um what they you know, for an opinion on their own work,
because oftentimes it's misleading or they don't know. It's like asking Robert Frost
what he thought of his poems and he would say, look, I don't
know, I'm just a farmer. Or you asked T. S. Eliott
and he would just read he wrote in other words, meaning like what I
wrote is exactly what I meant. And the guy the screenwriter here, how
did Chievsky? He said, his one takeaway from his own film after it
was produced and he saw the final performance in the cinema was that he felt
like there was no resolution because there's nobody to root for. We don't know,
like we don't know what happens to the characters, and who is the
viewpoint? Who is this supposed to be directed at? And again I think
this was a mistake to ask him, because we clearly see who the audience
is. The audience is is us through the eyes of the television audience.
And there's no resolution because it's a purposeful non resolution. The resolution is exactly
what the power structure wanted to be, the resolution, which is a sort
of seeming chaos, but his order in their sense, So right, that's
about yeah, well said, all right, let's go to super chats.
Hirsh ten dollars, says, big dog, and then he says the dollar
and says, I mean to put a question mark. No problem, dude,
s l I d A three D ninety nine d F fifteen eight nine
three nine three one three dollars. This is off topic, but can you
comment on Baudelaires to the reader? I think Father Saraf from Rose called him
a prophet of the prince of darkness at the beginning of the book on Nihilism.
Um. I read somewhere that he was into Satanism. I don't know
how serious he was about that, but I don't remember why. Father Sera
from Rose said that. Do you have any comments on Baudelaire BLA, Yeah.
The symbolist, the French symbolist movement is um has a lot of satanic
overtones, and um, the Flowers of Evil is especially one. You know,
one of those. Um, I would you know, go back and
read for yourself, Go back and um. You know, people, go
go back and read The Flowers of Evil. Go back and read Boulaire,
you know, not because you want to believe what he's saying, UM,
but just read the language and read what he says. I think that Rambo
is a better example of French symbolism that's often under stated, under under La
bod Lair gets all the name because Bode Lair is responsible for translating po and
sort of disseminating Poe to the masses, making Poe popular. But people should
go back and read Rambo. He only wrote two books, one of which
is called Illuminations and the other is called A Season in Hell, and A
Season in Hell is a sort of a Gnostic gospel of the nineteenth century that's
also very relevant today. That's how I answer that. Kristen for ten dollars
says best movie you breakdown ever. Wow. Well that's a high praise.
Kevin Farrell five dollars. Thank you so much, Kevin and Kristen. Rachel
five dollars. I really enjoy this combined analysis. This is the best of
entertainment that you can get. Thank you well, thank you much, Rachel
muche. I really appreciate that the fool forty dollars Christ has risen. This
is a great tag team recommend living wait. I recommend having on lookout for
Charlie for discussion on technocracy. Well, thank you for that recommendation. I'll
look into who that is. I'm planning to have in ad talked to Patrick
Wood for him to come on, because he's written three books on technocras four
books on technocracy. So after we get Patrick wood On, when he starts
feeling better from his surgery, we'll go for that. When I remind you,
guys too, to like and share. The algorithm, of course is
no friend of ours, So become our friend and overpower the algorithm by liking
and sharing and giving your comments below. What movies and books in literature do
you want to see me in BLA do down the road? As we said,
we do plan to do. I think when I finally finish up Confidence
Man by Melville will do that because that's a great insight into the devil con
men, and the devil as kind of the ultimate archetype of the con man.
It's an overlooked Melville novel. Everybody, of course thinks about Moby Dick,
but Confidence Man is really good too. So we'll be looking at that.
And I'm sure there's all kinds of other pieces of lit that we could
do. I've read, you know, Cormac McCarthy is one that can always
be analyzed. I mean, there's tons of it, though, I've we
could do Faulkner. Uh, you know, there's a lot of symbolism that
you can analyze. And Faulkner, Um, I like Flannery O'Connor. We
haven't really done any Flannery O'Connor breakdowns. I've read all of her short stories,
but I've not yet read Wise Blood, although I do intend to,
so um, maybe we could looked to. I mean, her short stories
are full of symbolism. A lot of them are a little too red pilling
based for you two. We might have to to save those for something else,
but uh, that would be fun to do. I mean there's tons
of lit I mean, you know, we we did recently do you know
CSLU Space trilogy and tied that into Tolkien and all that. But um,
yeah, I don't know. Uh, we'll think about it. You guys
tell me below recommendations for stuff to do anything you want to leave us with
BLA. Yeah, thank you so much for having me really appreciate it.
Please everybody go over to my channel, and by the way, during this
past two k s ups, so please uh subscribe to channel. Yeah we
got we also just passed this morning one hundred thousand views, so it's big
time. It's big time, so please go on over there and and and
like and Sharon subscribe my videos. We just covered Um, I just covered
Cormac McCarthy's The Cross and we've done five Cormac McCarthy novels. We've done Donde
Leo, Brett, Easton Ellis. Um, we could cover Ken Keizy one
flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. People don't really talk about it, but it's
revelatory for MK ultra. Um. We're gonna keep continuing Shakespearean cannon. Um
shouts out to Jethro out there, who recommended this movie. And it's been
uh, you know, trying to trying to get us to do it for
a while. So UM, that's that's awesome. Glad we finally got to
it. Thanks again for having me really appreciate you. Have to be back
and see you soon. Thanks everybody. Yeah, and then we got another
super chat here at the end. Um cost you ten dollars. There could
be intelligence connections to uh Shayevsky. So the screenplay writer the father served twenty
five years and pre Soviet Russian army and study Chefsky study language for US army
and wav ford them. Yeah, that sounds like intelligence. Maybe this person
didn't like what they saw could be. Yeah, thank you for that.
And also to the people in the chat saying do Rollerball in Death Race,
yeah, that would actually be fun to do. We might have to throw
in a couple more dystopian movies on top of that that are kind of similar,
like Running Men. All of those would kind of be they would fit
well together. But for those that are curious, Jamie and I are gonna
next up, we got some good movie podcast coming. We're gonna be doing
Tom Coomb's Mission Coomb Possible, the entire series. So I did old videos
when Mission Possibles would come out, like They'll Fallout or Ghost Protocol. I
think I did videos on those back in the day. Rogue Nation wrote analysis
of that. But Jamie and I thought I'd better to just do all of
the Mission Impossibles in one podcast because the new Mission Possibles coming out. We'll
also have I'm gonna do a cathulu Fire Movies stream, so that'll be about
six or seven or eight Cathulonic movies that will fit well together based on Lovecraft
themes and m let's see what else are we We just did our Mel Gibson
stream, and I think we're gonna do a John Depp stream, so we're
gonna do some Johnny Depp movies that we've never covered. Um So anyway,
Yeah, I look for a lot of good film podcasts to come in the
near future. Thank you, bla great, great chat today. Thank you all appreciate