On “Megalopolis”

A year or so ago I was playing through Disco Elysium again, trying to see what I could break through hacks. I upped all of my version of Harrier DuBois’s skill points to well over maximum, gave him a nice little stipend with which to pay for his room at the Whirling-in-Rags, and set him loose in the dilapidated ruins of Revachol—the superest of Super Cops. What I found was ultimately still a reflection of my own unexciting choices.

I also found the reality-bending billionaire, hidden away in a storage container in the Greater Revachol Industrial Harbor. He’s difficult to find, even harder to talk to, but because of my artificially-enhanced stats I got into his enclosure and got a small fortune off him: 100 Réal. Startup investment money. Real generous, that Roustame Diodore. I wonder what he saw in us – if he could even see. A symptom of such immense gravity is that light bends away from you. Spoilers ahead.

Megalopolis, by Francis Ford Coppola, is probably not a good movie. I’m not a film critic, and I’ve watched maybe two of Coppola’s films of my own volition, but it runs counter to what I’ve seen from the few good movies I’ve watched. The acting is strange, the set design and special effects are often blurry and incomprehensible, and the message is indeed muddled. But if you look closely at its edges you can see the light bending in such a way that you can find the tell-tale sign of gravity’s pull.

Adam Driver all but opens the movie in his role as Cesar Catilina by reciting Hamlet. He sucks the oxygen out of the room, stealing it away from Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Franklyn Cicero and Jon Voight’s Hamilton Crassus III as the warring triumvirate of institutional power nearly comes to blows on a rickety scaffolding above a model of New Rome. Catilina is an architect; Crassus is the arch-banker of the city. Catilina won a Nobel Prize for discovering a groundbreaking new material in Megalon; Cicero once prosecuted Catilina for murder. On the sidelines are women: socialite-with-hidden-talent Julia Cicero, played by Nathalie Emmanuel; Aubrey Plaza’s hypersexual and scheming journalist, Wow Platinum; Grace VanderWaal as uncomfortably virginal pop star Vesta Sweetwater. Women play roles in this movie, but it becomes extremely clear right off the bat what kind of roles those are meant to be.

In fact it’s clear from minute one that this is a movie unstuck in time, ironic enough for its subject matter. It is a 20th century movie made and released by a distinctly and at times vulgarly 20th century man in an age that has implicitly rejected most of the rest of his kind. It’s extremely apparent why no studio wanted to touch this with a two-hundred foot pole. But when you have money, light bends around you; time stops for you when you have even the last remnants of auteur power. Nobody else could have made Megalopolis; I mean that literally. Name another director who has – had – a $150 million winery they could just sell on a whim.

The gravity is so powerful that it’s effecting how I’m writing this: who the fuck writes like this? I sound like a dollar-store Dagny Taggart right now.

Catilina is the head of a kind of unilateral public works association, the Design Authority. It’s a cross between the TVA and Jony Ive’s design lab at Apple circa 2009. It marks buildings for demolition on a whim, ripping poor people from their homes faster than you can say “eminent domain,” all in the service of some nebulous master plan. Catilina often supervises these demolitions and uses his powers to stop time – which we don’t have time to unpack even if I spent another two days on this post – to admire the rubble mid-collapse. This is how Julia Cicero first meets him—and she sees him stop time, a thing no one else seemingly can do.

From here Megalopolis is a view of the wealthy and powerful from the perspective of a wealthy and powerful person who perhaps hates certain aspects of his cohort. The drugs, drinking, sex and general debauchery all men of power get up to in this movie is not filmed glamorously, but instead portrayed as the pinnacle of waste and excess and rank stupidity. Even the Mayor shows up to watch the gladiatorial battles at Madison Square Garden. Even Catilina’s drug-and-drinking-fueled ramble through the tunnels of the coliseum is meant not to approve of this life but to pity it. We’re meant to find everything here pitiful, everyone’s lowest moment.

Catilina has a rival, his cousin Clodio (Shia LeBeouf). The two hate each other, though it would be accurate to say that Clodio hates Cesar more. Despite initially being a shoe-in for his grandfather’s seat as CEO of Crassus Bank, Clodio stews in his jealousy of Catilina’s talent and standing. He transforms throughout the movie from a sloppy philanderer to a fascist demagogue, his supporters at times standing on a swastika-carved tree trunk and tattooing Sonnenrads on their foreheads. He is shown to be weak-willed and barely in control of the mob he commands, led as much by his balls as his brains. He eventually is hanged upside down in a very particular fashion.

Wow Platinum also undergoes a transformation, from Catilina’s jilted lover to a gold-digging hypnotist, ensnaring Hamilton Crassus III in a toxic marriage and overthrowing his position in the bank he owns in a bid to destroy Catilina financially. Her death is as tragic as it is extremely stupid.

Meanwhile, Julia is being brought into Catilina’s inner circle. She becomes his confidant, his muse. He eventually loses – and then regains – his powers to control time through her. There are metaphors here, allusions to terrible shit in our reality, but eventually she is shown possessing Catilina’s abilities as well.

All of this seemingly-random shit is happening in service to Megalopolis—the movie, the new vision of the city Catalina puts forward, Francis Ford Coppola’s own ideas about the world.

At one point Clodio sneaks a doctored sex tape into the end of the gladiator match, featuring Catilina in bed with Vesta Sweetwater, a performer and representative of the Vestal Virgins. This causes immediate uproar as the holy pop star’s sanctity is destroyed instantaneously. Catilina is also promptly arrested on statutory rape charges, as Vesta is thought to be 17 years old. But conveniently, Julia and a socialite friend break into a records facility and find Sweetwater’s birth certificate, confirming her actual age as being 23! Catilina is absolved of all guilt! The Great Man Is Able To Keep On Creating! If I could have stopped time in that theater at that moment, pausing the movie so that I could process what exactly this signified, I would have done so. Instead all I could do was sit in slackjawed shock at the audacity.

There are other hints as to Coppola’s warped perspective: the way poorer sections of New Rome resemble NYC before the 1980s both in terms of architecture and decay; the disdain the movie has for populist mobs of any ideological stripe and the way they are ultimately 1) all the same and 2) easily controlled by the Men With Power. But in spite of everything this movie is not, as some would characterize it, a Randian wet dream. Cesar Catilina is not Taggart or Howard Roark or John Galt.

Cesar Catilina is Francis Ford Coppola. And his dream… his vision for the future… the utopian vision he wants the whole world to talk about… is neoliberal technocracy.

The empire must stand, but it can be led better. That’s it.

Light bends around gravity. Rather than bringing things into focus, gravity obfuscates, makes it harder to see. This diminishing perspective brought on by the excesses of excess wealth and power eventually results in “visions” like this: unclear, tepid and ultimately more of an indictment of your position in society than any kind of clarion call for a better world.

It’s no coincidence that this movie comes out before an election. I’m sure Coppola believes his film is a statement on the nation’s division and uproar, and I’m sure he believes his is an arrow striking true at the heart of the rot all around us. Still, what a damning thing: to correctly identify America as an empire, to portray populist frenzy and elite corruption, to even display what should happen to all fascists and fascist wannabes, and to conclude at the end of it all that the best way forward is to make sure the right stable genius is at the helm. Nobody should be allowed to own themselves quite so hard.