Francis Ford Coppola’s American Panorama

In a strange way, sitting in a nearly empty cinema brought home the enormity of what Francis Ford Coppola wanted to achieve with his new film. Megapolis. The acclaimed director spent decades attempted to produce this film, with disruptions ranging from the September 11 terrorist attacks to Coppola’s firing of much of the visual effects department in 2022. He reportedly has liquidated a large portion of his net worth to finance this passion project, which is estimated to have only yielded $4 million in the US market during its opening weekend. These are high financial stakes. But this crazy epic has even bigger thematic themes, challenging the visionary themes of American life.

Megapolis is in the tradition of Walt Whitman Leaves of grassHerman Melvilles Moby Dickand that of John Dos Passos USA trilogy – sprawling epics that attempt to capture the wild strangeness of the American panorama. Coppola has long striven to incorporate America itself as a theme in his films. The Godfather trilogy explores immigration, ambition and moral compromise Apocalypse now recasts the traumatic disruption of the Vietnam era. Megapolis explores the powerful utopian urge within American life, from the novus ordo seclorum inscribed on the dollar bill for hippie communities of the 1960s.

Make no mistake. Megapolis is a wild ride. The plot doesn’t really make sense and the characters don’t seem like people. They’re suddenly spouting Latin and Shakespeare and fortune cookies. Fans of cinematic verisimilitude should look elsewhere. Combining German Expressionist cinema with the mind-boggling internal logic of David Lynch, Megapolis aims for something different: to conjure a political system on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, the visionary technocratic architect at odds with Giancarlo Esposito’s Franklyn Cicero (the mayor and representative of the political establishment). Seeking to deepen the clash between these two figures and discredit Catiline, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf in a villainous turn) leads a rebellion against the existing political order. Coppola offers the beautiful triptych of prophet, establishment and demagogue.

One of the inspirations for the plot is the Catilinary conspiracy, an attempted coup against the late Roman republic led by Lucius Sergius Catilina (often called ‘Catiline’ in English). Many of the character names (including Cicero and Pulcher) come from this pivotal event in the collapse of republican Rome. While Megapolis has a long history of development, but also draws on the unrest in contemporary American politics. Coppola transforms New York City into New Rome, a place of blinding inequality and political paralysis. The rich engage in marathons of conspicuous consumption and fornication, while the poor hide behind fences. Like the United States, New Rome is ripe for a populist reckoning. When Pulcher mobilizes against the political establishment, his supportive crowd carries “Make Rome Great Again” signs. While the rule of law appeals to some American elites today as a stopgap measure to save “our democracy,” the Romans also often turned to legal prosecution to resolve political differences in the tumultuous waning days of the republic. The real Catiline was an ally of the dictator Sulla, who used the ban to exile and execute his political enemies.

A sense of crisis is especially acute in San Francisco, the city that has been the location of Coppola’s film career. The dramatic disparities in the City by the Bay reveal the lurid potential of American dreams and nightmares, as Tesla’s tech billionaires sail through tableaus of open defecation and drug use. San Francisco’s fusion of Emersonian aspiration and Dickensian deprivation has fueled the growth of socialism, right-wing monarchism, accelerationism, and other forms of alternative politics in the Bay Area. The varying responses to this disruption have contributed to the polarization of the tech sector, and members of both presidential tickets have roots in San Francisco. JD Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, worked in the Bay Area for a few years, and San Francisco served as a launching pad for Kamala Harris’ entire political career.

As it responds to the disturbances of the present, Megapolis also continues the legacy of the decade that spawned Coppola’s career: the 1960s. The movie valorizes Catiline as a visionary dreamer. Although consumed by excessive appetite, he also has a great passion for the future and can even stop time itself. In a particularly stilted piece of dialogue that reveals his ties to the American visionary tradition, Catiline appeals to the “richness of my Emersonian spirit.” Megapolis combines the figure of the genius architect similar to Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fonteinkop (said to be another influence on the film) with the revolutionary aspirations for social change in the 1960s counterculture.

Yet Americans have also long recognized the danger of the visionary. Not all visionaries transform into Emerson’s’transparent eyeball,” finally; some become Jim Jones or Charles Manson. Perhaps the name ‘Cesar Catiline’ itself pays tribute to that tradition of visionary doubts, when the real Catiline attempted to overthrow the Roman republic. To some extent, it was technocratic plans – the vision of a borderless world of commerce and digital communications – that sowed the seeds of the disruption that is roiling much of the industrialized world today. This disruption has put severe strain on the American political order and fueled efforts to create these swirling differences Megapolis to push the boundaries of film.

Moby Dick remains one of the most penetrating diagnoses of the mixed promise of the American visionary. If anyone has an “Emersonian spirit,” it’s Ahab, the insanely charismatic captain who leads the Pequod on a doomed hunt for Moby Dick. “What I have dared I have willed, and what I have willed I will do,” says Ahab in one of the Shakespearean reflections that punctuate Melville’s masterpiece. Ahab’s transcendental urge to strike the universe and pierce the veil of the material world causes great damage to the ship, and the novel ends in a catastrophic collapse in the “great veil of the sea.”

Moby Dick’s towering figure matches Ahab’s delusions of grandeur. The whiteness of that whale becomes a terrifying symbol of everything and nothing: “in essence, whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; Is it for these reasons that there is such a stupid void, full of meaning.” The abundance of meaning of the whale drives Ahab crazy and gives a manic charge to the story structure of the whale Moby Dick yourself. Transcendental aspiration, America’s tortured position at the crossroads of race and empire, maritime justice, controversies in nineteenth-century Protestantism, same-sex attraction, political economy—all swirl together in the maelstrom of Moby Dick. The pressure of Melville’s attempt to represent this kaleidoscopic range was reflected in the literary form of the novel. Moby Dick rockets from dramatic dialogues to long domestic monologues to elaborate treatises on the procedure of whaling. The novel’s distinctive discourse combines Bible quotations, Elizabethan English, and the lapidary prose of nineteenth-century America.

Megapolis bears the hallmarks of a similar thematic overwhelmingness. Coppola aims to show the clash between idealism and pragmatism, the promise and resentment of revolutionary transformation, the dangers of democratic deconsolidation, and the possibility of hope in the midst of crisis. That’s quite a task for a two-hour film. Many of Coppola’s most successful films have a real basis to capture them. The mafia could only be a narrative pretext for that The godfatherbut it nevertheless also provides some narrative guardrails. Like Ahab sailing into the deep waters, Coppola leaves those boundaries behind him Megapolis. Instead, he invites the viewer into an AI phantasmagoria.

The mad American epic is a challenging genre. With the right internal voltage it achieves an electrical charge. Few novels compete with each other Moby Dickand Whitman’s greatest poems transformed the modern poetic idiom. But realizing that promise requires a certain imaginative rigor. The later Whitman degenerates into an extended song; the edge of “Song of Myself” and Drum taps was dulled. Perhaps it’s too early to say whether Coppola succeeded in that game. (Moby Dick was, after all, deemed a failure upon initial publication.) But that’s the game he’s playing: harnessing America’s mania to punch through the cardboard mask.

Fred Bauer is a writer in New England.