Warner Bros.The most common way history is taught and understood is through a linear view. Society constantly moves forward, problems are solved, and progress is made. Things should only ever be getting better, which raises a question: why does everything feel so bad? Sometimes you watch a 50-year-old film and see that we’re not always progressing forward, but rather that we’re caught in a vicious cycle.Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, with its biting critique of police militarization, the way media sensationalism dehumanizes us, and the Sisyphean task of keeping your head above water as a working-class American, still feels fresh and salient even a half-century after its release. A crime drama adapted from the Life article “The Boys in the Bank,” Dog Day Afternoon is based on a 1972 hostage situation and robbery of a Chase bank in Brooklyn. Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) is attempting this robbery as a last resort to pay for his partner’s gender-affirming surgery. He enlists the help of some friends, but the heist quickly falls apart. What ensues is an exhausting day-long standoff between Sonny and the police, and a revealing portrait of the rotten theatrics of bloodshed that American culture is built on.Lumet's take on the story approaches crime from the bottom up rather than the top down, and Pacino gives a fully embodied performance with so much sadness and history behind his eyes. Sonny is as messy and disenfranchised as any of us. The American dream has failed him, like it has failed so many vulnerable people. And with the LGBT community under attack, the film feels tragically present, as people in power turn their backs on gay and trans people in 1975 and today.With Sonny’s humanity at the forefront, everyone swarming the bank becomes a representation of America’s lust for law, order, and entertainment. In one of the film’s most absurd lines, Sergeant Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning) admonishes Sonny for firing a bullet into the air, yelling, “We got 250 cops here!” There are just two gunmen in this small bank, and yet the force sent to meet them is inept. They’re itching to pull their triggers. They arrest a released hostage on the assumption that he’s an accomplice because he’s Black. Lumet’s camera makes it clear that the police are not only incapable of solving the issue at hand, but that the threat of violent escalation overwhelmingly comes from the side of America’s institutions.Alongside this mob of cops comes a mass of ordinary citizens ogling at the situation from behind the police line. What’s initially a standoff quickly becomes a circus show. When Sonny makes the cops look foolish, the crowd cheers him on for sticking it to the man. Once a TV broadcast tells the world that Sonny is gay, half of the crowd cheers, and the other boos. In a phone interview, Sonny speaks plainly: “We’re entertainment.”And, admittedly, the saga does make for a good movie. | Warner Bros.The media’s sensationalist reporting treats Sonny like a ridiculous aberration, an outlier from an otherwise competent society that makes for good television. It’s a spectacle designed for entertainment, and the people surrounding the bank eat it up. While the screens we carry around in our pockets were far from being invented in 1975, watching these real people and their serious situation be flattened into content for the masses feels like ominous foreshadowing for the endless, discourse-filled social media cycle of our modern times.Dog Day Afternoon forces us to reckon with the rotten lie at the heart of America's logic: what is seemingly ridiculous is the idea that a man would go to such desperate measures to get out of his dire circumstances, while gawking at the situation and the hundreds of militarized cops who respond to it is somehow a normal and appropriate reaction. America is a stage, and as citizens, we suspend our disbelief and distract ourselves with whatever gets fed to us.If Dog Day Afternoon were made now, it would no doubt be at the center of an all-out cultural brawl thanks to its views on police and its complicated, humanist approach to what drives people to commit crime. This makes it all the more astounding that it came out 50 years ago today, and keeps the film’s searing clarity vital and pertinent. America is trapped in a time loop, like something out of Groundhog Day. But the day that we keep repeating is the one from Dog Day Afternoon, one that has dire consequences for the country’s most vulnerable people.