megalopolis (2024)
Megalopolis is a cinematic atom bomb. It vaporizes everything in its wake; all thought process, all feeling, all the architecture of an art form so carefully constructed and preserved over the decades and centuries, suddenly reduced to rubble. As the fireball expands, it burns the shadows of the moments and memories back into the concrete and the brick facades for an instant, and then destroys those too, and with them, the recollection of what they used to mean. Like burning the vines, or drawing a mustache on a portrait, Coppola’s détournement is as destructive as it is cleansing. As the soviet nuclear satellite crashes in pieces down to the planet Earth, its flashes of light cast shadows of the faceless population larger than life onto the buildings surrounding them, aged edifices that box them in, keeping them trapped in the yesterday when they should be in the here and now, building the forever (right?). The shadows appear and then vanish, too brief for us to see any defining characteristics beyond their cowering. Megalopolis hungers for the pursuit of what can’t be grasped or comprehended, only intuited, as a series of 1000 conflicting signals per second overload every faculty we’ve got left in a world of endless transformation. As the film progresses, we watch Coppola begin to construct a series of pre-fab scenarios, much like the familiar building blocks and patterns of the construction of a civilization, the kitsch remnants of meaning are all that remain in the city of New Rome. Designs, styles, gestures, thoughts, identities, personalities that have been reified and revived and recycled over and again until they also become shadows, brief reminders that quickly vanish.
Whether 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years from now, the patterns of civilization remain the same, and it’s Coppola’s Brechtian intent to snap us out of all of them. Each time a pre-fab scenario seems as though it were going to reach its pre-ordained conclusion, Coppola detonates it in grand fashion, exposing the framework, the falsity of the moment, and rendering all who would create the same inert in their sleepwalk. Sequences transpose from other films verbatim only to be upended in increasingly theatrical rocks of the boat, at times jarring us out of complacency by comedy or vulgarity or a visual fantasy. An early scene lifted from The Red Shoes is bafflingly devoid of any context, fourth wall breaks and ludicrous deliveries abound and the scene collapses in on itself like a dying star. The same thing happens to the subsequent scenes, the movie itself and the society it depicts. Driver’s Cesar steals the spotlight from the city’s mayor Cicero in a copy/paste of Hamlet. His words are of little importance when compared to his ability to hold the crowd’s attention. In a world of lightning fast information, only the familiar pattern can be recognized or acknowledged at that velocity, as McLuhan pointed out before Dementia 13 had even hit the screens. The person in the electronic age is surrounded by data points moving at the speed of light, the unfamiliar simply will not register. Hoffman, in one of his brief appearances, muses “I don’t mind the lightning but the thunder scares the shit out of me”, it’s the concrete we’re trapped in, it’s the concrete we’ve individually moved beyond, but can’t let go of when together. Coppola here gives cinema the push it needs to allow it to catch up to the other forms of lightning fast information flow. Nothing concrete and unmoving can withstand the electronic age, and so Driver now fashions structures that move right along with the ages, the fixed is no more, only the fluid can move forward into the next epoch. Fluidity is at the center of Megalopolis, a film where the rules of time itself can be bent and broken when our orator so chooses. No character stands still, from Labeouf’s gender-swapping to Plaza’s allegiances. The cliché, would-be sabotage of destroying a document by Esposito’s Cicero is rendered impotent by his daughter’s reminder that endless copies can be made of anything, there is no original in Megalopolis. The population’s most basic concerns for survival fall on deaf or opportunistic ears as the men their cries are directed toward either can’t hear anything but the sound of their own voice, or want to use them for their own ends. Necessities for the working class are the blank canvas for self-expression, or pawns in a game of dominance, for the ruling class. Civilization, touted as a failed rotting branch of a tree that needs pruning, in a film where only the elite have a voice and move within a small circle of familiar faces, the faces of the masses are barely glimpsed, as the crowd roars when coaxed by the actions of the exceptional.
Bread and circuses are engaged in with increasingly outlandish visuals and a pop performance with a ukulele. The pop star multiplies and is undone by her artifice. Coppola well understands the effigy of celebrity, of persona, and the person underneath; here he lights his own on fire and lets it burn to the ground in cinematic baptism. This is a film for the psilocybin generation, the psychonaut quest for a new form of fire, that renders the ego’s games of power relations trivial and bombastic as they overflow with the dripping soap of melodrama. As the film barrels toward its final act, the psychedelic visuals take over, the film splits into three screens which flicker and multiply and mirror in one eruption where Lang and Murnau meet Tik Tok in a collision 100 years in the making. Coppola in every way embodying the spirit of the silent filmmaker, filling the screen with visions that speak to the fantastic, the subliminal, the language of the mind’s subconscious as the next in a bloodline stretching back through Godard, to Resnais, to Vertov. With Megalopolis, he joins a different cinematic lineage, and a different conversation about the medium. With Megalopolis I’d felt the cinema of vérité and narrative dissolve into passé before my eyes, its images speaking to us by vision alone, and a resurgence of a language of camera-as-paintbrush on a blank canvas. To dramatize and give life to our dreams and our imaginings is as old as civilization itself, and Coppola here has honored the tradition by speaking to the now in the only language it understands, a maximalist nuclear reaction at the speed of light.
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