There are moments in American cinema when art catches history in its teeth — when the camera becomes a prophecy. Two films from the late 1970s do this. Hal Ashby’s “Being There” (1979) and Sidney Lumet’s “Network” (1976) are radically different in tone — one icy, one volcanic — yet they converge around a chillingly similar insight: the performative nature of modern life and how media systems don’t just reflect reality; they replace it.

To revisit these films today is to be caught between recognition and regret. They didn’t just anticipate the conditions of our political and cultural moment — they warned us, repeatedly, what would happen if we kept mistaking visibility for wisdom, volume for truth, and image for meaning. We laughed when we first saw them. We’re not laughing now.

Let’s begin with the louder of the two, “Network,” that unspools like a manic sermon. Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, it begins with the public breakdown of aging news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who announces on air that he’ll kill himself live in a week. The network, predictably, smells ratings gold. Rather than usher him offstage, they give him a pulpit and rebrand him as a “mad prophet of the airwaves.”

What begins as satire ends closer to tragedy — not Beale’s, but ours. Because “Network,” for all its theatricality, reads today like documentary. The blending of news and entertainment, the elevation of anger as a product, the monetization of collapse — it’s all here, decades before cable news and viral algorithms. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” was once a slogan of defiance. Now, it could be the tagline for every clickbait headline and social media post competing for our outrage.

The brilliance of “Network” lies in its recognition that media doesn’t just reflect culture — it shapes it, weaponizes it, and feeds it back to us as identity. Chayefsky saw the rise of conglomerates and the retreat of public-service journalism as spiritual decay. When Ned Beatty’s Arthur Jensen, the network chairman, thunders, “The world is a business!” in a darkened boardroom, he might as well be describing the internet — a place where truth is irrelevant unless it trends.

The Blank Slate We Project Upon

If “Network” is a rant, “Being There” is a whisper — a slow, disarming film with a dagger underneath. Ashby’s masterpiece follows Chance, a........

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