January 4-5, 2025: 2025 Anniversaries: Five 1975 Films

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to this special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

Quick thoughts on what five 1975 classics can tell us in 2025:

1)      Jaws: I wrote about what Spielberg’s game-changing summer blockbuster can tell us about American communities in that hyperlinked post. But here, in a moment when orcas are rightfully rising up to take back the seas from selfish greedy humans, I’ll add that it’s getting increasingly difficult not to root for the shark—and for all of nature to resist and overthrow the human regime that has been so unnecessarily destructive to it. Sorry for that bleak start to an ostensibly fun post, but, well, January 2025 be like.

2)      One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Surprisingly, that brief mention in a post on Dorothea Dix is the only time I’ve really engaged at all in this space with Milos Forman’s complex and wonderful film (or even with Ken Kesey’s even better 1962 novel, it seems). I can’t do any kind of justice to it in this brief space, but I will say that a fraught but definite lesson of the 2024 election is that we need to do better to engage with young men’s mental health—and the history of how we’ve done so (or how we haven’t) is, to say the least, relevant.

3)      Dog Day Afternoon: This 1975 film I have blogged about at length, in that hyperlinked post. But that post was from 2014, and I’d point out something deeply cringe-worthy that reflects a vital continued conversation in 2024: my use of “transsexual” in the final paragraph (in service of, I hope and believe, entirely inclusive ideas, but nonetheless). On the one hand, we’ve come a long way in the last ten years in how we talk about our transgender fellow Americans—but on the other hand, if you watched any Trump campaign ads, you know just how far we still have to go, and how much we need sympathetic portrayals like this film’s.

4)      The Rocky Horror Picture Show: The portrayal of LGBTQ+ Americans is significantly more central still in this cult classic film, of course. In recent years there’s been a lot of debate over whether the film is transphobic; I won’t pretend to be qualified to weigh in, but this article represents one side of the coin, and this one the other. Cultural works are complicated and contradictory, and ones from 50 years ago even more so of course. I vote we watch them all, take away what we can, critique what we need to, do the work.

5)      Nashville: In that recent post I made the case for how a few of the many main characters in Robert Altman’s film can help us think about not just that place and time, but our own as well. My older son now living in Nashville has pushed me to think more about that community, as both of my sons’ interests in country music have made me give that genre a far deeper listen. And that’s the thing—as much as I don’t feel that I recognize far too many fellow Americans in 2025, we’d all better find ways to do so more fully if we’re gonna survive together.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?