despite its flaws, "Network"

By John Patterson

The Guardian

Does this sound familiar? “The American people are turning us off. They’ve been clobbered by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They’ve turned off, shot up … the American people want someone to articulate their rage.” And how about this? “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, and ATT and DuPont, Dow, Union-Carbide and Exxon. The world is a business … it has been ever since man crawled up out of the slime.”

Change the historical events, change the names of the conglomerates, and these speeches could have been written yesterday morning about, or by, President-elect Donald J Trump. He is Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s nightmare made real, his blistering satire come completely true just in time for the film’s 40th anniversary this week. If Trump hadn’t settled on Make America Great Again for a slogan, he could have easily run on “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more!”