October 10, 2024
By Fred Bauer
In a weird way, sitting in a near-empty movie theater drove home the sheer scale of what Francis Ford Coppola aimed to accomplish in his new film Megalopolis. The acclaimed director spent decades trying to produce this film, with disruptions ranging from the terrorist attacks of September 11 to Coppola’s firing of much of the visual effects department in 2022. He reportedly liquidated much of his net worth to finance this passion project, which is estimated to have made only $4 million in the American market on its opening weekend. These are high financial stakes. But this mad epic has even greater thematic ones, putting the visionary themes of American life on trial.
Megalopolis is in the tradition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy—sprawling epics that try to capture the wild weirdness of the American panorama. Coppola has long aspired to infuse his films with America itself as a theme. The Godfather trilogy surveys immigration, ambition, and moral compromises, while Apocalypse Now recasts the traumatic disruption of the Vietnam era. Megalopolis explores the powerful utopian urge within American life, from the novus ordo seclorum inscribed on the dollar bill to 1960s hippie communes.
Make no mistake. Megalopolis is a wild ride. The plot doesn’t really make sense, and the characters don’t seem like people. They suddenly spout Latin and Shakespeare and fortune-cookie apothegms. Devotees of cinematic verisimilitude should look elsewhere. Fusing German expressionist cinema with the mind-bending internal logic of David Lynch, Megalopolis aims at something different: conjuring a political system on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, the visionary technocratic architect at odds with Giancarlo Esposito’s Franklyn Cicero (the mayor and representative of the political establishment). Compounding the clash of these two figures, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf in a villainous turn) tries to discredit Catilina and leads a revolt against the existing political order. Coppola offers the neat triptych of prophet, establishment, and demagogue.
One of the inspirations for its plot is the Catilinarian conspiracy, an attempted coup against the late Roman republic led by Lucius Sergius Catilina (often called “Catiline” in English). Many of the character names (including Cicero and Pulcher) come from this pivotal event in the collapse of republican Rome. While Megalopolis has had a long gestation, it also draws from the unrest in contemporary American politics. Coppola transforms New York City into New Rome, a place of dazzling inequalities and political paralysis. The wealthy engage in marathons of conspicuous consumption and fornication, while the poor huddle behind chain-link fences. Like the United States, New Rome is ripe for a populist reckoning. When Pulcher mobilizes against the political establishment, his supportive crowd carries “Make Rome Great Again” signs. If lawfare enamors some American elites today as an emergency measure to save “our democracy,” Romans, too, often turned to legal prosecutions to settle political differences in the tumultuous twilight of the republic. The real-life Catiline was an ally of the dictator Sulla, who used proscription to exile and execute his political foes.
A sense of crisis is particularly acute in San Francisco, the city that has been the locus of Coppola’s cinematic career. The City by the Bay’s dramatic disparities reveal the lurid potential of American dreams and nightmares, as Teslas ferry tech billionaires past tableaus of public defecation and drug use. San Francisco’s fusion of Emersonian aspiration and Dickensian deprivation has fueled the growth of socialism, right-wing monarchism, accelerationism, and other forms of alternative politics in the Bay Area. The divergent reactions to this disruption have helped polarize the tech sector, and members of both presidential tickets have San Francisco roots. A protégé of Peter Thiel, JD Vance spent a few years working in the Bay Area, and San Francisco served as the launch pad for Kamala Harris’s whole political career.
If it responds to the disruptions of the present, Megalopolis also carries on the legacy of the decade that birthed Coppola’s career: the 1960s. The film valorizes Catilina as a visionary dreamer. While consumed by excessive appetites, he also has a great passion for the future and can even stop time itself. In a particularly grandiloquent bit of dialogue that reveals his ties to the American visionary tradition, Catilina invokes the “riches of my Emersonian mind.” Megalopolis fuses the figure of the genius architect akin to Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (reportedly another influence on the film) with the revolutionary aspirations for social change in the 1960s counterculture.
Yet Americans have long also recognized the peril of the visionary. Not all visionaries transform into Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” after all; some become Jim Jones or Charles Manson. Perhaps the name “Cesar Catilina” itself pays tribute to that tradition of visionary misgivings, as the real-life Catiline tried to overthrow the Roman republic. To some extent, it was technocratic schemes—the vision of a borderless world of commerce and digital communications—that sowed the seeds for the disruption convulsing much of the industrialized world today. This disruption has pushed hard at the American political order, and trying to render these whirling disparities caused Megalopolis to strain the limits of film.
Moby-Dick remains one of the most penetrating diagnoses of the mixed promise of the American visionary. If anyone has an “Emersonian mind,” it’s Ahab, the crazily charismatic captain who leads the Pequod on a doomed hunt for Moby Dick. “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed, and what I’ve willed, I’ll do,” Ahab says in one of the Shakespearean reflections that punctuate Melville’s masterpiece. Ahab’s transcendental urge to strike the universe and pierce the veil of the material world wreaks havoc on the ship, and the novel ends in a catastrophic collapse into the “great shroud of the sea.”
The towering figure of Moby Dick matches Ahab’s megalomania. That whale’s whiteness becomes a terrifying symbol of everything and nothing: “in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning.” The whale’s surfeit of meaning drives Ahab mad and gives a manic charge to the narrative structure of Moby-Dick itself. Transcendental aspiration, America’s tormented position at the crossroads of race and empire, maritime law, controversies in nineteenth-century Protestantism, same-sex attraction, political economy—they all swirl together in the maelstrom of Moby-Dick. The pressures of Melville’s attempt to render this kaleidoscopic range were registered in the literary form of the novel. Moby-Dick rockets from dramatic dialogue to long interior monologues to extended disquisitions on the procedure of whaling. The novel’s distinctive discourse merges Biblical quotations, Elizabethan English, and the lapidary prose of nineteenth-century America.
Megalopolis bears the marks of a similar thematic overwhelming. Coppola wants to show the clash between idealism and pragmatism, the promise and resentments of revolutionary transformation, the dangers of democratic deconsolidation, and the possibility of hope amid crisis. That’s a tall order for a two-hour film. Many of Coppola’s most successful films have a real-world basis to tie them down. The mafia might be only a narrative pretext for The Godfather, but it nevertheless provides some narrative guardrails, too. Like Ahab sailing for the deep waters, Coppola leaves those limits behind in Megalopolis. Instead, he invites the viewer into an AI phantasmagoria.
The mad American epic is a challenging genre. With the right internal tension, it achieves an electric charge. Few novels rival Moby-Dick, and Whitman’s greatest poems have transformed the modern poetic idiom. But realizing that promise demands a certain imaginative rigor. The later Whitman degenerates into a sprawling sing-song; the edge of “Song of Myself” and Drum-Taps had been blunted. Perhaps it is too early to say whether Coppola has succeeded at that game. (Moby-Dick was, after all, considered a failure when first published.) But that is the game he is playing: harnessing the mania of America to strike through the pasteboard mask.
Fred Bauer is a writer in New England.
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