The Network (1976)

I wanted to mention this great movie, and I figured I could use my Patreon to talk about philosophically or politically relevant movies I've seen.

The Network (1976) is a satire of television culture, but more widely a depiction of multinational capitalism (or late capitalism, or postmodern capitalism, or whatever your preferred label is). As a film about the postmodern era, it depicts the arrival of popular media which concerns itself with absolutely nothing other than whatever brings in the most views, whether that will be the ravings of a madman or a program about a Marxist urban guerrilla group (the Mao Tse-Tung hour), and as its corollary, a type of person who's personal life consists of nothing but their career.

One of the most memorable scenes in the film is an incredible monologue delivered by a corporate chairman, which perfectly describes the world of globalized capital:

"You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. ... There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale."