“Megalopolis” Romanticizes the Tortured-Genius Architect Archetype in the Worst Way

Despite the many forest retreats and desert getaways featured in Dwell’s glossy pages, architecture is not about escapism. There’s much to be said about the profession’s purpose, but foremost it’s a job that requires one to labor intimately with the realities of the environment and human safety to resolve how buildings should respond accordingly. We can, of course, romanticize the tortured-genius architect, whose vision for a utopic future is stymied by bureaucracy or cash flow; their task might be to design a skyscraper, but their intention is to build a "new way of living," a departure from the doldrum of everyday reality. Sounds compelling, but most architects are just people who also pay too much for daycare and spend their days on Zoom calls. Still, the age-old cliché lives on—most recently in Francis Ford Coppola’s new two-and-a-half hour "fable," Megalopolis.

The film stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina, the protagonist architect who invents a new material called Megalon—a golden substance that can be molded into any shape—with which he hopes to rebuild his poverty-stricken city of New Rome (it’s recognizably New York, but with chariot races in Madison Square Garden) into the futuristic, more egalitarian Megalopolis. There are myriad conflicts and side plots throughout, but the film’s central tension is between Cesar and New Rome’s wealthy mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Though Cicero states he wants to address the city’s growing poverty and economic stratification through sanitation and services, he endeavors to change very little and fights Cesar, knowing that Megalopolis could upset the existing social order that keeps the affluent luxuriously fed and powerful. Beyond the film’s erotic depictions of indulgent wealth, musical number montages cut to feverish postmodern dance scenes (there is simply too much writhing in this movie), and its wretched misogyny (more on that later), Coppola’s tale speaks to a worn-out vision of world-building social change. It’s not a movie about the fantastical, but about a fantasy; one in which social ills can be resolved by ignoring the individuals actually doing the suffering in favor of visionary discourse.

At its most basic, the story centers around a core premise: genius, while misunderstood, will forever be at odds with moral failings like corruption and gluttonous wealth. Cesar, an ultra-wealthy loner haunted by his murdered wife, is beset in his task to build Megalopolis by his cousin, an over-sexed socialite Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBoeuf) who is trying to kill his career; while finance journalist Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) preys on his loneliness in an attempt to trap him as her lover. (Whew, that’s a lot already.) But Cesar is furiously devoted to his vision. As head of the Design Authority of New Rome, one of the film’s early scenes shows him demolishing an aging housing project (reminiscent of New York’s public housing), clearing the land for a speculative future neighborhood. It’s a scene that sets his character firmly as a questionable actor (and a 21st-century Robert Moses stand-in): By displacing already-impoverished residents without having official approval for Megalopolis, his future city begins by generating even more suffering.

But suffering isn’t part of Cesar’s equation—Megalon’s promise of utopia is. In the film, CGI renders the liquid metal-like material a glowing, undulating substance that can form buildings and create moving sidewalks, yet viewers are led to question if it’s more an Emperor’s News Clothes scenario. In one particular scene, the mayor’s daughter, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) visits Cesar in his home, and he leads her to his studio below where his interns have constructed a model city built from cardboard tubes and water jugs. He tells her to walk through the model, eyes closed, and share what she sees. She experiences Megalopolis with its Jetsons-like curved walkways and Megalon-based transportation bubbles. Everything shimmers. "People are learning together and growing together," she exclaims. There is no explanation for why she’s seeing what does not exist; she’s walking around a cardboard model. Is Megalon a material that responds to one’s imagination? Or, perhaps more concretely, the material is a great delusion that infects those "true believers" who follow Cesar religiously. The man, after all, has the power to halt time. "Stop, time!" he frequently shouts, like a petulant child. Only those cultish followers are able to see time freeze when he cries out. Julia, who sees this "ability" with awe, eventually becomes his lover.

Therein lies another problematic aspect of the movie: The women in it exist either as thrashing, wriggling sex objects, or as support systems for powerful men. Julia, who is taken under Cesar’s wing after demonstrating that she, indeed, is capable of thought, becomes his personal assistant—wherein her main task is to quash his drug-addled writhing (again! writhing!)—and ends up in the role of muse. Perhaps women fill multiple roles in the society beneath the caste of Cesar, Julia, or any of the movie’s various mainstays. But Coppola decides that we shouldn’t see them. When Clodio decides that the best way to defeat his rival cousin is to take up with the common folk who are righteously enraged that some renegade architect exploded their homes, they, too, are portrayed by Coppola as unthinking, undiscerning masses—Clodio only has to pick up a megaphone and chant "power to the people!" and "culture for the culture!" to be elevated into the role of political favorite by the poor.

Like the protagonist of his magnum opus, Coppola chose not get down with the tired, huddled masses to execute his grand vision. By only pointing the camera toward the petty conflicts of the wealthy elite, he’s crafted a narrative with strongman hero-worship undertones that The Nation described as an "Ayn Rand-inspired argument." Megalopolis—both the city and the film itself—is rooted in the fantasy that speaks to the worst elements of the romanticized architect-in-film: that we can break free of corruption, poverty, social division, by selling the public on complete architectural overhauls without considering the lived realities of those that would occupy them. In real life, the most exceptional architects work devotedly alongside community members, civic groups, and political actors to address the needs of those citizens, rather than overwrite them. Maybe some also have inflated egos and writhe at drunken bacchanales on occasion—but that part is their business.

All images courtesy of Lionsgate

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