Yo, Adrian

Rocky opened that November, written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, an actor who, despite being so unknown and so broke at the time, had reportedly turned down considerably larger offers for the script itself because studios wanted a bigger star in the lead role, and he refused to sell it unless he got to play Rocky Balboa himself. The film cost almost nothing to make by industry standards, and it became the highest-grossing movie of the year, eventually winning Best Picture at the Oscars, a genuinely stunning underdog triumph that mirrored, almost too perfectly, the exact story the film itself told on screen. What made Rocky work, though, wasn't just its scrappy, low-budget charm — it was the way it offered American audiences something they hadn't been given much of across the first half of this decade's most celebrated films. (spoiler alert) Rocky Balboa doesn't win the fight at the end. He loses the decision to Apollo Creed. What he wins instead is simply the knowledge that he went the distance, that he proved something to himself regardless of the official outcome, and audiences exhausted by six straight years of Chinatown's total corruption and The Conversation's inescapable paranoia and Taxi Driver's (also 1976, and we'll get to it) descent into urban alienation, responded to that modest, earned, unglamorous form of triumph with an intensity that surprised even the film's own studio.

Network, released that same November, gave America Peter Finch as Howard Beale, a television news anchor who has a public breakdown on air and announces he's going to kill himself during a future broadcast, only to discover that his network, rather than pulling him off the air out of basic human decency, decides his breakdown is fantastic for ratings and builds an entire show around his unraveling. Beale's famous rallying cry — "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" — becomes a genuine national phenomenon within the film's own story, viewers across the country literally opening their windows and screaming the line into the night, and the film's satire of television's willingness to commodify absolutely anything, including a man's actual mental collapse, in pursuit of ratings, landed at the time as pointed, savage comedy. It reads now, decades into a media landscape of reality television and algorithmic outrage, like a documentary that simply arrived several decades early. Paddy Chayefsky's script won the Oscar for original screenplay, and it deserved every bit of the recognition, because almost nothing else in American film has ever diagnosed the perverse economics of televised spectacle with that much precision that far in advance of the technology actually catching up to make the diagnosis fully, horribly true.

And Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Paul Schrader, gave the year its darkest and most enduring statement, following Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, an insomniac Vietnam veteran driving a cab through a New York City the film renders as something close to an actual vision of hell, his isolation curdling by degrees into a violence the film refuses to either fully condemn or fully celebrate, ending on a note so genuinely ambiguous about whether Travis has been redeemed or simply repackaged as a media hero that audiences have argued about its meaning for decades. Travis Bickle is, in his own broken way, one final iteration of the exact figure this whole series has kept returning to across every single year of this decade — an individual left alone by every institution that was supposed to catch him, veteran affairs, the city, basic human connection itself, forced to construct his own violent, deeply compromised answer to a world that had simply stopped functioning the way it was supposed to.

Three films, one November, and together they complete something like a full circle back to where this series' account of American cinema began, with MAS*H's black comedy about an unwinnable war back in January of 1970. Rocky's earned, modest triumph. Network's prophetic fury about a media machine already learning to commodify anything, including its own audience's rage. Taxi Driver's unbearable, unresolved portrait of a man the entire system had simply failed. That's the decade's cinema, in miniature, arriving at its own natural conclusion — still refusing easy comfort, still trusting its audience with genuine ambiguity, right up through its final years.

I'll close out the decade in the next couple segments, with 1977 through 1979 and the years that, in their own way, brought the whole extraordinary run to its close — disco's populist explosion, punk's full arrival, Star Wars changing the entire economics of the movie business overnight, and a hostage crisis in Iran that would hand the country its next great test of institutional endurance, right as the decade ran out of road.