‘Megalopolis’ is an aesthetically brilliant, morally bankrupt film that traffics in homophobic and antisemitic clichés
Adam Driver in ‘Megalopolis’ Photo by Lionsgate
By Jay Michaelson October 1, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the film Hollywood hated even before it was released: It was, everyone said, a bloated vanity project, an incomprehensible mess, a looming box office disaster.
In fact, Megalopolis is quite brilliant — inspiring, even — on many levels. It’s a layered, complicated art film, but with a $100 million budget. It’s a daring formal experiment, but by an 85-year-old legend rather than a new upstart. And once you learn the film’s rules, it’s not incomprehensible at all.
And yet, in the end, I still intensely disliked it, albeit for different reasons from most takes I’ve read. Because Megalopolis is a moral failure, not an aesthetic one.
In its title sequence, the film announces itself as a “fable.” And so it is: a kind of moral parable in which the fall of Rome and the fall of America are interspersed with one another. The film isn’t meant to be realistic, any more than Goldilocks or Red Riding Hood is. It operates on a symbolic level, its characters and conflicts standing in for those in our own world.
Essentially, the film pits three male protagonists against one another: Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an Elon Musk/Howard Roark genius inventor; Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the corrupt but also liberal mayor; and, in the shadows, Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), a billionaire.
Though Megalopolis is full of arresting visuals, brilliant special effects (and not just the usual CGI), and jump-cut sequences, fundamentally it is a morality tale of these three figures. (Threaded between these men are Cicero’s daughter/Cesar’s lover (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Crassus’s wife/Cicero’s femme fatale (Aubrey Plaza), among others.). Like Ayn Rand’s Roark, Cesar is a genius, but also incorrigibly stubborn, and insensitive to how many eggs need to be broken to make his utopian omelet. (He also has supernatural powers, which he seems to have developed like all of his inventions.) Cicero, meanwhile, claims to speak for “the people” but does little to help them. Crassus just wants to get even richer and more lecherous.
And here’s where things go off the rails.
First, if this sounds a little patriarchal, it is. Ultimately, the ‘good girl’ (Emmanuel) is able to bridge the worlds of Cicero and Cesar, and the ‘bad girl’ (Plaza) gets what she deserves. But these are reductive depictions, and overall, Coppola’s universe is a man’s world first and foremost.
Even worse, Megalopolis frequently indulges in the homophobic/ transphobic/ misogynistic trope of displaying decadent, androgynous, and queer urbanites as the ultimate villains: in this case, they include Crassus’s daughters, apparently in an incestuous love triangle with their brother, and many other “cosmopolitans” who resemble the most outré models from fashion magazines, partying till all hours.
This is, sadly, a very familiar cliché. It ran throughout the Hunger Games franchise, in which the strong, rural men were contrasted with the effete, queer-coded decadent ones in District 1. It’s in Game of Thrones, where the pansexual residents of King’s Landing are contrasted with the real, honest men and women of Winterfell and the North. It’s in Dune, Batman, Star Wars, Firefly, and countless other fantasy/superhero/SF tales. Always, the genderqueer urbanites are decadent and evil; the stereotypical men and women of the countryside are valiant and good.
As one might expect, thinly-veiled antisemitism is often present in this critique of decadent cosmopolitans. In Megalopolis, it appears in the form of a political fixer named Nush Berman (OK, I guess the veil is extremely thin), played by 87-year-old Dustin Hoffman, who came out of semi-retirement to play the role. Berman is a kind of Roy Cohn figure, though less malevolent — in fact he somewhat resembles Hoffman’s portrayal of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss in 1997’s Wag the Dog. But he’s the typical conspiratorial Jew, influencing politics from behind the scenes, full of tactics but devoid of principles.
To be clear, I’m not accusing Coppola of being antisemitic or homophobic. But his fable makes use of longstanding tropes that are.
At the heart of the fable, though, is a profound misreading of the crises of our times.
Over and over again, the film superimposes Ancient Rome and contemporary New York, blending the two into a fictional world that eventually becomes almost seamless. But the crisis between libertarian-technologists like Cesar and corrupt politicians like Cicero isn’t what’s tearing our country apart.
First, that very dichotomy is a right-wing framing: the nanny state versus tech genius, Pelosi versus Musk. At the end of Megalopolis — midrashic-parable spoiler alert ahead — Cesar assures Cicero that he will only wield his enormous power for the good, and his creation turns out to be wondrous and beautiful. But there are no structures of accountability that safeguard the public against Cicero’s next Cybertruck or Neuralink. Nowhere does Megalopolis show us what actual democracy might look like. There’s no code of law, no institutions to protect justice. It’s all Moses, no Jethro. The Great Man just realizes, thanks to his wife and child, that he has to take more care of the little people. Cicero tells Cesar he must use his powers for the good. “You can rest assured,” Cesar says.
I do not.
Second, Megalopolis totally omits the real forces tearing apart America: nationalism, nativism, religious extremism, racism. MAGA does make a brief appearance: Crassus’s son, played by Shia LaBoeuf, realizes he can gain power by rabble-rousing among the disaffected. (Weirdly, Crassus himself, played by the Trump-supporting Voight, is eerily evocative of Trump in his appearance, amorality and libido; I’m not sure if Voight was aware of this.) But extremist religion, Christian Nationalism, and right-wing populism play no real role in this parable, making it not only irrelevant to the decade in which we find ourselves, but actively misleading.
On the contrary, we’re led to believe that the fate of Rome/New York rests not on overcoming our animal natures to denigrate the out-group and finding a way to live together, but on making it easier for Ayn Randist tech geniuses to innovate.
This is weird. While Coppola has said his film is about hope for the future, the ‘hope’ comes from TESCREAL-style transhumanist optimism that only the Sam Altmans and Peter Thiels of the world can save us. Verily, as Rand put it, man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
In fact, if Megalopolis were truer to reality, Cesar would make common cause with Crassus and his son, and plunge the city into ruin so that he could be freer to pursue his dreams without governmental interference. Give the masses their MAGA rage, give the ultra-rich their gigantic tax breaks, and give Cesar/Roark/Musk and other ubermenschen free reign to do as they please. That is the devil’s bargain before us today.
Yes, good governance exists in a dynamic balance between protecting the public good and enabling individual flourishing, experimentation, and invention. But that is not the dynamic that animates the great crises of the 21st century. We are torn not between regulation and innovation, but between rationality and rage. Megalopolis calls itself a fable, but it’s actually a fairy tale.
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