The most common way history is taught and understood is through a linear view. Society constantly moves forward, problems are solved, and progress is made. Things should only ever be getting better, which raises a question: why does everything feel so bad? Sometimes you watch a 50-year-old film and see that we’re not always progressing forward, but rather that we’re caught in a vicious cycle.
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, with its biting critique of police militarization, the way media sensationalism dehumanizes us, and the Sisyphean task of keeping your head above water as a working-class American, still feels fresh and salient even a half-century after its release. A crime drama adapted from the Life article “The Boys in the Bank,” Dog Day Afternoon is based on a 1972 hostage situation and robbery of a Chase bank in Brooklyn. Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) is attempting this robbery as a last resort to pay for his partner’s gender-affirming surgery. He enlists the help of some friends, but the heist quickly falls apart. What ensues is an exhausting day-long standoff between Sonny and the police, and a revealing portrait of the rotten theatrics of bloodshed that American culture is built on.
