1080p-ness

The P-ness Pays Tribute To The Greatest Film Ever: Network

Sidney Lumet died April 9, 2011! Sidney Lumet was one of the greatest film directors of all time, churning out classics like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Verdict. His greatest film was Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and starring Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall. Network was released in 1976 and was a satire about the destructive nature of television and corporations. 35 years later it has come true and woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!

Rather than include our usual captions, The P-ness has decided to let the movie speak for itself. RIP Mr. Lumet, you will be greatly missed.

“I’ve decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today.”

“I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can’t think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don’t know why we’re going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decays, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That’s the God bullshit. So I don’t have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.”

“He’s saying that life is bullshit, and it is, so what are you screaming about?“

“Hi. I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.“

“Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Full-fledged messiahs don’t come in bunches.”

“This is not a psychotic breakdown; it’s a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued with some special spirit. It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things… It is a shattering and beautiful sensation. It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness. I feel on the verge of some great, ultimate truth.”

“And you will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression.”

“I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.”

“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!’”

“I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell…”

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

“This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people.”

“Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth… Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth.”

“We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night… We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal.”

“You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!”

“So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now!”

“TURN THEM OFF…”

“I don’t know how I feel. I’m grateful I can feel anything.”

“I’m your wife, damn it. And, if you can’t work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance.”

“Man, give her the fucking overhead clause. Let’s get back to page twenty-two, number 5, small ‘a’. Subsidiary rights.”

“I want a show developed based on the activities of a terrorist group.”

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you… will… atone!”

“Because you’re on television, dummy.”

“Now I’m a man without a corporation.”

“You need me. You need me badly. Because I’m your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me.”

Rest in peace, Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)