Megalopolis

Megalopolis was the movie I was most looking forward to this year. After decades of films increasingly being polarized into either risk-averse blockbusters or grim, awards’ season fare, I was very keen to see a wildly self-indulgent artistic experiment by a master craftsman. Now, I want to be clear: Megalopolis is not a good film. It is a incoherent weed film that sees itself as deeply intellectual, with some truly clunky writing and bizarre artistic decisions. It’s a haphazard 1970s experimental film on drugs, released into the world fifty years too late. Long stretches of the film are bad or boring. It is not a movie I would give anyone as a Christmas or birthday present. I adore it.

It is easily the most fascinating film I’ve seen in a long time. The movie is bursting with ideas and with a strange mental energy that can only be attributed to obsessive fixations with history, science, drugs, architecture, power, wealth, and the rise and fall of civilizations. A lot of these topics interest me as well, although I’d put a massive asterisk and qualifying statement next to drugs. Legal drugs are okay only in very disciplined moderation and if you like drugs as much as the movie likes drugs, seek help.

Megalopolis takes place in ‘New Rome’ an alternative version of America. Basically, it is 2020s America but with a Roman fashion sense and an enduring Roman culture, complete with gladiator battles at Madison Square Garden and celebrated vestal virgins. The film makes it explicitly clear that the fall of the vestal virgins will cause the destruction of New Rome. And the vestal virgin of New Rome is, and I am not making a word of this up, Taylor Swift. Well, Taylor Swift in all but name. But it’s clearly her. And around the midpoint of the film, New Rome TayTay is embroiled in a deepfake sex scandal, goes off the deep end, and becomes the horny and angry Taylor Swift of her Reputation era. Look what you made her do. Cue the fall of New Rome. Sort of.

The film is full of weird parallels and ideas like that. It stars Adam Driver as Cesar, a polymath architect and scientist who won a Nobel Prize for discovering Megalon, a construction material possibly based on jellyfish skeletons, which allows for the construction of flexible and adaptable buildings that can reconstitute at a moment’s notice to suit the inhabitants’ needs. Again, I am not making this up. And the plot of the movie, if you want to sanewash it a bit, is that Cesar wants to use Megalon to rebuild New Rome into an eternal utopia to create a new form of civilization free from strife, conflict, or suffering.

It’s dopey. But it’s also so optimistic and earnest at times that I admire it. There’s this wonderful sense of creativity and change in moments of the film that is inspiring. There’s one delightful moment when Cesar reveals his inner workshop to show a room full of children playing with cardboard, tubes, and tape to design Megalopolis. Cesar reveals his design is based on the hopes, dreams, and possibilities of children, brought to life through his miracle building material. At another point in the film Cesar has a mental breakdown trying to grasp how the human mind, God, and time are interlinked and what the hierarchical order is of the three, and what control he actually has over anything in life. His rantings and ravings are fascinating as the film goes completely crazy in a hodge-podge of random images as Cesar breaks down completely. Moments like this show that clearly a lot of thought went into Megalopolis.

But, a lot of that thought is incoherent, poorly explained, poorly written, or poorly staged. Later in the film, Cesar is assassinated (no, that’s not a spoiler, check the name), but it turns out Megalon can be grafted to human issue and regenerate any destroyed living material, letting Cesar effectively sleep off a point-blank pistol shot to the face. Now, the film has this running subplot about the potential dangers of Megalon; but it struck me as odd that it can cure death, and that people would rather use it as a kind of LEGO jell-o to build affordable housing, and that most people are totally opposed to using it at all. The film’s whole perspective on Megalon is bizarre, and it nicely sums up the film’s incoherent thinking and logic.

Megalopolis ends with a shot of a cooing baby and a revised pledge of allegiance that reads, “I pledge allegiance to our human family, And to all the species that we protect. One Earth, Indivisible, With long life, education, and Justice for all.” I think this is a vast improvement over the current iteration, perhaps some of the finest words I’ve seen in print. A global pledge, forget nationalism entirely, to view the world as a single entity with universal fairness at its very core. If you want to be generous, Megalopolis is a film about a better world, a better civilization, fairness, and an enduring hope for progress and improvement. But such a reading requires giving the film the benefit of several doubts and ignoring a lot of strange, perverted, tiresome, and exhausted ideas. Still, there’s something sweet and noble at the film’s very core.

In a way, Megalopolis is exactly what I want my third and final book, The Electric Heist, to be. I want to write a novel in a parallel world to today’s civilization, poke fun at the rich and famous who govern our world, create a truly imaginative and spectacular world that could never exist, and tell a wild and new story for a breath of fresh air in a sterile age of entertainment. I also would like to inspire hope and a case for the future in grim and uncertain times. I see a lot what I hope the world can be in Megalopolis and to see such hope for justice and fairness was a soothing balm in dismal times.

I, however, want The Electric Heist to be really well-written, clear, and coherent. I would like it to make sense and to have a coherent plot and characters. But I do quite admire Megalopolis for being uncompromising and for having genuine artistic vision in the age of focus groups and second-screen content. Megalopolis is an inspiration and it is a cautionary tale for artists. It is a manifesto to make the kind of art you want to see and to realize your creative vision at your own expense, and it is a warning to run that vision by talented editors and critics before releasing it, to make sure that it tolerable and that it makes some sense. In essence, artistic vision needs checks and balances, as all things do, but even in a sloppy and incoherent form, it is a sight to behold.