The mind behind The Godfather 1 and 2 and Apocalypse Now releases an arthouse epic about the Catiline conspiracy of the Roman Republic, which he says is the culmination of his career, and it's bombing in theaters. Some friends I've talked to, who are into movies but don't make movie news their business, aren't even aware it's out. Yet its cast includes some of the most well-known stars today: Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LeBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight. Dustin Hoffman. How did we get here? And how will Coppola get us out?
Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis follows an architect's ambitious plan to rebuild New York City as a utopian society. Beyond this, I wouldn't venture into plot summary. Its power comes in one's experience of the images, the texture of the sensibility, not in a description of what happens. What I can say is that Megalopolis was one of my all-time favorite moviegoing experiences, enhanced by a baffled audience whiplash between absurd comedy (like Adam Driver’s line delivery of “go back to the cluuub”) and intentionally artificial images created on mind-bending virtual reality soundstages.
But in an effort to relate this experience to others, I would seek out a genre label: "postmodern camp." Tonally, it has a "contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form," what Susan Sontag identified in her 1964 essay as "camp." Aesthetically it's like a cross between the beautiful tackiness of Baz Luhrmann and the operatic grandeur of George Lucas’ prequels, themselves an homage to the pulp of 1930s serials. As Luhrmann shifted from Shakespearean sonnet to wacky Looney Tunes physical comedy in Romeo + Juliet (1996), Coppola fluctuates between wisdom writing on the fall of empires to Jon Voight's crude boner slapstick: camp indeed.
Using images that look like 3D schematics of a futuristic Hudson Yards, Coppola creates self-consciously galaxy-brained montages of hyperreality. New organic cities that include life in their very architecture. Just when you think the movie might be taking itself too seriously, suffering from a case of Interstellar, it whips back to an image that strikes you as silly, even laughable. "The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration... [a sensibility] that converts the serious into the frivolous," writes Susan Sontag.
The "postmodern" part of the label comes first from its meta qualities. Adam Driver's architect is a clear stand-in for Coppola as a troubled artist pushing the form forward, surrounded by corrupt bean counters as he manipulates time itself (what Tarkovsky said was the unique domain of the filmmaker.) "Is this society, is this where we're living, the only one that's available to us?" asks Adam Driver's character. Coppola has said one of his only regrets was his generation not leaving the film industry in better shape for the next generation.
"The question that film-makers must ask themselves is, what distinguishes cinema from other arts? To me cinema is unique in its dimension of time... Film fixes reality in a sense of time—it’s a way of conserving time. No other art form can fix and stop time like this. Film is a mosaic made up of time. This involves gathering elements." — Andrei Tarkovsky
Another postmodern telltale is the wonky dialogue that revels in being "unrealistic" or "writerly" in the same way David Cronenberg adapted Don DeLillo’s postmodern dialogue in Cosmopolis (2012). In Cosmopolis, it's used to enhance the horror of the Information Age: even people speak like computers, their very humanity sublimated into a Baudrillardian artificial intelligence. It produced lines like "The logical extension of business is murder," "Destroy the past, make the future" and "My prostate is asymmetrical."
In Megalopolis, the postmodern dialogue allows Coppola to buck subtext entirely and show us a people of the future (who are nonetheless like ourselves) reaching towards utopia in all its stylized excesses. When LaBeouf's hateful demagogue wants to rile up the crowd, he gives a stump speech on a literal tree stump in the shape of a Nazi swastika. No, I'm not kidding.
When Laurence Fishburne's Fundi Romaine invites the audience to consider American decline, he says "When does an empire die? Does it collapse in one terrible moment? No, no... But there comes a time when its people no longer believe in it." By removing subtlety from the equation, Coppola gives the audience distance from the world of the film, taking us to a parallel universe New York (or New Rome) where one can safely live out their utopian idealism and on-the-nose political statements. Before we can really pontificate on the depth (or lack thereof) of these moments, Coppola shocks us with a return to camp: "Revenge is best in a dress!" says LaBeouf's now cross-dressing villain.
With these choices, Coppola makes us feel as though there’s some great joke that you’re in on and others aren’t; the fact that a few people walked out during my screening only heightened the fun. Is this really the work of the same director who made The Godfather? The film is a stylized parody in the mold of a new genre and you can hardly believe what you're watching as it unfolds.
Does everything work? Probably not. But it is fun to watch Coppola wrestle with these absurd images and ideas like some modern Murnau or Gance epic fueled with hard drugs and the declinist theories of Edward Gibbon? Absolutely.
It's a completely personal achievement in auteurism and a finger in the eye of the new guard with their franchised streaming slop loyalties and their evident disdain in watching an old master create his magnum opus by selling off shares of his own wine company to self-fund a $120 million dollar fable. Call me conspiratorial, but I still think the "superhero franchise industrial complex" had a hand in the Variety/Guardian libel scandal to try to sink Coppola's ship before it set sail. It's awfully convenient for an industry that would love nothing more to stay in the endlessly profitable capeshit mass culture business for another decade.
Interestingly, Sontag favors naive camp over deliberate camp in her essay. Naive "pure" camp achieves parody because they are "dead serious" while works of intentional camp often wander into self-parody because "they want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat." The camp in Coppola's film is intentional. It is a stylistic choice, not a creative faux pas. And yet, breaking with Sontag here, I think it is this choice to be campy that makes Megalopolis so clever.
One thing is certain: Coppola's view for a way forward requires that people have allegiance and support for those around them. In this way, it's actually a very heartfelt and optimistic film about sticking by your loved ones and your fellow citizens and having faith that the designs of our most talented and genius will be realized in a way that helps everyone: Ayn Rand for the social liberal. The film even feels patriotic in a time when that word has been manipulated to have negative connotations. When asked by an interviewer to describe all of his movies in one word, Coppola says "succession" for The Godfather, "morality" for Apocalypse Now, and "privacy" for The Conversation. For Megalopolis, he says "loyalty."
There are many valid reasons to not like Megalopolis. It will not be everyone's cup of tea, in narrative style or aesthetics. But there's two points of criticism from the "media literacy" crowd I'd like to address: that Megalopolis is "messy" and "it's so bad it's good." I think people are reaching for a way to describe the unfamiliar camp sensibility, what Sontag called "the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience." Audiences today are likely starved for this kind of sensibility, or choice in style, so they view it is a cacophonous "mess." They have a very rudimentary understanding of a how a movie "should" be and they view Megalopolis as mistake that fell short instead of a choice to exist outside the mold.
One can pick apart the ideas (or lack thereof) in the film, but I don' think there's anything messy about it. It's extremely precise in its scope and its style of presentation. Instead I think it has to do with what Sontag described: "to perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand being-as-playing-a-role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater." What better way to describe the tone of a man who began his career in the theater as Coppola had before encountering Eisenstein and committing himself to the magic of the moving image.
Disagree with my take? Think Megalopolis sucks and we should have Marvel supremacy forever? Let me know: milesvstephenson@gmail.com
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