Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a meditation on utopia set to digital architecture designed by OXMAN, the new eponymous studio of Neri Oxman. The blockbuster film starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Chloe Fineman is a bouillabaisse of literary, philosophical, and cinematic references. Allusions to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Sophocles’s Oedipus (429 B.C.), Freud’s ruminations on Sophocles’s Oedipus (1910), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (1623), Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1973), Rousseau, Francesco Petrarca, and Marcus Aurelius all drive the plot forward.
Certainly, Coppola has never shied away from political commentaries, and Megalopolis can be understood as a metanarrative of sorts, a bit like what Adam McKay was trying to do with Don’t Look Up. If Apocalypse Now responded to atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, Megalopolis is the 85-year-old filmmaker’s attempt at grappling with MAGA. In a recent interview, Coppola compared the U.S. today with Rome circa 476 A.D. “Well, today, America is Rome, and they’re about to go through the same experience, for the same reasons that Rome lost its republic and ended up with an emperor,” Coppola said.
Coppola in fact self-funded Megalopolis to drive this point home, he said. All in all, the film revives the age-old question: Can utopia deliver a better world? Or is it a waste of time filled with good intentions that only brings heartache and misery?
Despite its aesthetic and narrative beauty, and its admirable attacks against late fascism before a mass audience, the utopia Coppola ideates—at least, if we take it at face value—is a plastic one that in fact maintains the status quo. One walks away from it asking: Is this really Coppola’s idea of a better world? Or is his vision a layered critique of utopia and the hubris of its proponents? Or…is it just one big hot mess with cool graphics and a few pithy one-liners here and there?
New York, New Rome
Megalopolis is set in New York today, except it’s not called New York: The city where the story takes place is called “New Rome.” Adam Driver’s character is named Cesar Catilina—a Promethean 21st-century version of Robert Moses in charge of New Rome’s “Design Authority.”
Catilina wants to build what he calls “Megalopolis” atop New Rome. Megalopolis is a utopian city he dreams of while hopped up on barbiturates (Berlin Alexanderplatz style) but can’t achieve from his lair, which is the Chrysler Building’s top floor. Studies for Megalopolis’s architecture were designed in the computer by Oxman (who appears twice in the film herself) and showcased at SFMOMA in 2022.
The parallels between New Rome and New York today are stark, aside from obvious allusions to 9/11. In the beginning, one scene captures Catilina ordering what looks like NYCHA towers be demolished vis-a-vis a controlled dynamite explosion so he can make way for Megalopolis. (As someone who constantly covers the very real privatization/demolition programs happening at NYCHA buildings today, I couldn’t help myself from drawing this parallel.) There are also grand plans by New Rome’s Mayor Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, to build casinos throughout New Rome; perhaps an indirect nod to the scramble for three gaming licenses in New York today.
Megalopolis’s architecture, or what’s defined later in the film as the architecture of megalomania (megalomania + metropolis = Megalopolis), is the dialectical opposite of New Rome. Its parametric curves defy Cartesian symmetry and contrast with the rectilinear masonry buildings of the old city it seeks to replace. Catilina finally gets his chance to build Megalopolis halfway through the movie when a Soviet-era satellite crashes into Manhattan where the Twin Towers actually stood in real life, creating a massive crater for Catilina to fill in with his swanky new buildings. The satellite awards Catilina the tabula rasa for him to build Megalopolis, like how many utopians fantasized about what they could build in European cities after World War II.
At another point, Cicero holds up a newspaper that says “FEDS TO NEW ROME: DROP DEAD”—a clear nod to New York’s 1976 bankruptcy crisis and the newspaper headline that came to define it. All of this is happening while proletarians and their children cling to chain link fences, asking for housing and food, covered in dirt. Clodio Pulcher (played by Shia LaBeouf) eventually fills in this political vacuum; he starts a populist uprising against Catilina and Cicero only to become a bourgeois Masaniello of sorts. Clodio’s political rallies are populated with signage that have messages like “Make New Rome Great Again.”
Hit or Miss?
Coppola appears as himself before the movie begins in a filmed presentation. In his preface, he asks: “Is this the only way we can live today? Or are there other ways?” This is a nice question, but I’m not sure Megalopolis delivered on its promise. Yes, the buildings of Megalopolis look like something from the Jetsons, but those same proletarians are still starving at the end of the movie, asking for help. The superstructure of Megalopolis looks very different from New Rome but its base, to quote Gramsci, is virtually the same.
Spoiler alert: Pulcher’s MAGA attack is eventually stymied by the good guys. Unlike Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, however, where Batman chooses not to kill the Joker based on his adopted system of Kantian ethics, Coppola had the Masaniello Clodio Pulcher killed by an angry mob. But at the end of the film, Megalopolis, like New Rome, is still controlled by an unelected class of drunken bankers and technocrats born into immense wealth, and the politicians are still corrupt.
The new city, despite its new look, is still a very unequal one, just like the old days. Thus, Coppola’s utopia is ultimately a reactionary one: Without abolishing the material conditions which nurture the seeds of fascism, another Clodio Pulcher will doubtlessly reappear. And then they will have to perform this saga all over again, likely at a time when the architecture of Megalopolis is unfashionable. Is it even still fashionable now?
