This is my favorite movie, full stop.

I love this movie so much, am so close to it, I don't know what to say. It's like trying to write a summary of a beloved life-long friend.

This movie about the intersection of power, economics, and media, explored through a tale about the mental breakdown of a news anchor and the paradox of his resulting rise in ratings. It predicted, in 1976, so many things that we didn't see in reality until much later: the forces of economic globalization, the rise of "reality television", the commercial subversion of TV news (still, it may be hard to remember now, valued as a source of objective information at the time) from a reporting concern into a driver of profits and propaganda outlet—and takes them all to a ridiculous extreme, plus, casts a woman in the role of a cutthroat executive, something my mom reported she first began to see in the workplace in the 1980s.

It says something that, while few remember this movie nowadays, many still remember the tagline from the protagonist's first major act of on-the-job defiance: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" If this movie wasn't when the idealism of the '60s finally breathed its last and yielded the floor to a deep and distressed cynicism, it sure was a touchstone. This movie was to today's hyper-commercial, bottom-line-driven media what "A Clockwork Orange" was to violence: it laid them bare, even exaggerated them to a cartoonish degree—remarkable because in 1976, today's hyper-commercial, bottom-line-driven media corporations didn't really exist yet. But this movie read the tea leaves and saw what was coming.

Along the way it looks, courtesy some of the best-written dialogue in all of cinema by an uncredited Paddy Chayefsky, at the effects on the souls of the people ushering those changes along, represented by the May-December relationship between William Holden and Faye Dunaway's characters, presented respectively as members of the old guard and the ruthless new breed of television executives whose allegiance is to a heartless corporatism more concerned with ratings than with love, then with human life. Pretty strong stuff for 1976, and still strong today.

Also deserving of mention is the stunning cameo by Ned Beatty as the network head who may be manipulating the protagonist's deteriorating mental state, or may actually believe what he's saying, as he closes the curtains to rant in a darkened boardroom with the fervor of religious fundamentalist, calling nations and ideologies obsolete, describing globalized commerce as a fundamental force of nature governing man's existence "since he crawled out of the much", and outright comparing business to God, with—and remember, he's shouting this at a deranged news anchor—television as its prophet. Again: 1976. Incredible.

For a guy like me, with an appreciation for both social commentary and absurdism, a healthy dash of cynical humor, a strong love of a story that moves along on well-written dialogue, and a (in the aesthetic sense) Decadent's fascination with how things fall apart, it would be tough to imagine a movie more tailor-made for my enjoyment.

My brother-in-law, generally a right-on guy but perhaps at 3 or 4 years younger just on the other side of a generational divide I'm at the very tail end of coming before*, told me he just couldn't get into this movie, because the entire style of it seemed very dated to him. I've rarely been so disappointed.

(*My adolescence came at an unusual time culturally—to use that as the most obvious marker for the cultural shift of the early '80s, I think there's a big formative difference between having been in 9th grade when MTV came out, and having been in 5th or 6th grade at that time. But that's a topic for a whole other section of this website.)