The Art of Relevance: 2 Films of the 1970s Still Very Relevant Today

Do you ever find yourself wondering what cultural products being created today will stand the test of time? What movies will be relevant in ten, twenty or thirty years? What books being read today will still be read in 2030?

One way to answer this question is to look back.

What cultural products from our past remain relevant today? Specifically, what social issues from, say, the 1970's are with us today, decades later?

Two 1970's films come to mind.
Network and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest each tackle issues relevant to our lives today.

Network: Corporate & Media Power

Network, the impeccably written film about television's role in modernity, resonates with relevance in today's media driven world.

The film directly suggests that people ought to "look to themselves" for truth and that they collectively hold the power to change the status quo. The masses have a power to enact real change, beyond changing channels. The people have the power to alter policy in Washington.

Network's protagonist, news anchor Howard Beale, leads his audience to action again and again, at one point spearheading a flood of letters to the White House to halt a rumored corporate merger.

Before things can change, Beale says, you have to get mad and you have stand up and say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore".

This fictional conceit hits close to home today. People all over the world feel manipulated by media outlets that skew, misconstrue and lie about apparently everything, from profits to politics.

People are angry.

An obvious symptom of this anger, in America, is the Tea Party Movement. Regardless of your feelings about the political agenda this movement espouses, its anger

and its passion are undeniable.

The back-door, midnight dealings of global corporations are also fresh in our public consciousness. As the financial institutions of Wall Street are vetted and their ethics questioned, Network's exploration of the secretive collisions of the board room feels highly relevant.

The chief executive in the board room of Network openly describes his role as one akin to god. He is the corporate deity. He provides for the people all of their needs and the means to satisfy those needs. CEO spells god - this is his essential argument.

It is interesting to compare the corporate attitudes on display in the film with the attitudes today on display on Wall Street.

The thoroughness of Network's relevance to our contemporary lives, over 30 years after its release, is a surprise as well as a testament to the film's quality.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Drugs, Power, and Popular Attitudes

Ken Kesey's prohibitive tale of institutional drug policy and shock therapy may seem outdated, on the surface. After all, shock therapy has gone the way of phrenology, debunked and disrespected.

Yet, if we look just beneath the surface of the story and its asylum setting, we get a glimpse of a world, like ours, where (medicinal) drugs are ubiquitous.

The film's relevance is never more poignant than in its frightening display of medication as a replacement for behavior therapy.

Correctives are dosed out in little pills at the start of every day. There is no saying no.

In this way One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest presents a fictional world where the assumptions about the merits of drugs have been decided long before the patient puts the pill on his tongue. Our world may not be like this, yet the question is worth asking: What are our assumptions, today, as to the merits and nature of psycho-active drugs?

The film downplays McMurphy's (played by Jack Nicholson) attempts to convince his fellow patients on the ward that they are healthy and they shouldn't let the nurses convince them they are sick. However, we still see his attempts to "act normal" in the face of a small society that tells him he is crazy.

When McMurphy is ultimately rendered catatonic and insane, it is a result of the drugs and the shock treatment, not an admission that he had always been that crazy.

Perhaps metaphorically, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest presents us with a microcosm of our own society, a place where the curative nature of drugs is taken for granted, where the presumption reigns that drugs can help us more than they can hurt us - a world, in short, much like a madhouse.

What happens to a healthy person thrust into a world of illness? When the norm is defined by illness, how does our definition of health also change?

These are the questions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; the same question a parent asks when his or her child is prescribed Ritalin.

Neither Network nor One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest provide answers to the social questions they examine. The answers to the questions they raise are not available. It is precisely this bothersome continuation of these social issues that describe the relevance of the art.

Because the films' themes remain problematic, they stand as prescient commentaries on our culture and its conflicts, its uncomfortable silences and its continuing development.