Francis Ford Coppola’s Camp Masterpiece: Notes on Megalopolis

I was too young to see Showgirls when it was released to theaters in 1995, but I was old enough to notice the media narrative surrounding the newest “worst film of all time.” Paul Verhoeven’s NC-17 erotic melodrama was panned, mocked, reviled. Rita Kempley claimed in The Washington Post that the filmmakers were “little better than the club owners who prostitute their employees. They’re selling women’s bodies, and Showgirls is an overcoat movie for men who don’t want to be seen going into a porno theater.”

Though the most moralistic critics seemed completely blind to the film’s satire and camp, a few others at least paid lip service to those modes of subversion—though with little better understanding or appreciation for Verhoeven’s aims and achievements. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle noted in his negative review that Showgirls made “a few halfhearted lunges in the direction of camp.”

Years later, when I finally saw the film, loved it, and went back to read old reviews, I couldn’t believe LaSalle’s phrase “halfhearted lunges,” when the film is so clearly a swan dive—or maybe a cannonball?—into the chlorinated waters of camp. How did so many miss so much? Each critic performing their disapproval and outrage in unison like the synchronized swimmers in a Busby Berkeley number. Everyone somehow took the film too seriously and not seriously enough.

Similar things could be said of the reception of Verhoeven’s next film, Starship Troopers. When I play that film for students now, they can’t believe that anyone seriously thought that the film was just another earnest action movie—an Independence Day by any other name. Of course, it is an earnest action movie, but it’s also, crucially, a send-up of an earnest action movie, mixing together the aesthetics of fascism, the aesthetics of propaganda, the aesthetics of the Hollywood blockbuster, and the aesthetics of teenage melodrama into a baroque farce.

What the defenses and the critiques of Megalopolis most have in common is their focus on the “sincere” aspects of the film, which shows them taking Coppola, quite literally, at his “word.”

Enter Megalopolis: Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project—World War III’s Showgirls. Not only did Megalopolis bomb at the box office in its opening weekend, it’s also received, if not quite the universal disapproval of Verhoeven’s ’90 flops, an awful lot of head-scratching. Johnny Oleksinski declared in The New York Post: “From beginning to end, the craft—directing, acting, writing, editing, design—is just not there.” Odie Henderson admitted in The Boston Globe that the mere fact “that the director spent 40 years trying to make this worthless, 138-minute hot mess shocks me to no end.”

There are some critics in major papers that loved it—The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker all gave it positive reviews—but its admirers mostly commend it for the boldness of its vision and the earnestness of its final plea. In fact, what the defenses and the critiques of Megalopolis most have in common is their focus on the “sincere” aspects of the film, which shows them taking Coppola, quite literally, at his “word.”

According to Coppola, each of his films is centered around a single keyword. For The Godfather, it’s “succession”; for Apocalypse Now, it’s “morality”; for The Conversation, it’s “privacy.” What word did he have in mind for Megalopolis? He tells us: “sincerity.” So, once again, critics seem to synchronize their swimming: “There’s no doubting the sincerity of Francis Ford Coppola,” the movie’s “remarkably sincere,” “sincerely sublime,” “touchingly sincere,” a “transcendently sincere manifesto,” full of “intellectual earnestness” and “open-minded sincerity,” a “nakedly personal testament.”

But just because the movie is about the concept of “sincerity” does not mean it is inherently sincere. Satire, for example, is often interested in sincerity, but it engages in that concept through formal insincerity. I think many critics are refusing to view the end of Megalopolis through the same lenses that the rest of the film clearly demands: the lens of comedy, the lens of satire, and the lens of camp.

Even the elevator pitch of the movie—the Catilinarian conspiracy, played with grand Shakespearean theatricality, set in a fabulistic modern-day America that’s dressed up in Ancient Roman cosplay—begs to be seen as camp. And the film follows through on that promise: Shia LaBeouf in Roman drag with shaved eyebrows whispering “revenge tastes best while wearing a dress” is camp. A MAGA-red cap hitting a body that’s been strung up like Mussolini by an angry mob is camp. Adam Driver’s line delivery of “go back to the club” is camp. Jon Voight asking everyone to look at his “boner” only to unsheath a tiny cherubic bow and arrow is camp. Projecting panic-stricken shadows against skyscrapers as the Boomer boogeyman of a decayed Soviet satellite crashes to earth in tasteless 9/11 redux is camp. The sets seemingly borrowed from Joel Schumacher’s Gotham City are camp. Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum—her name, her performance, her calling herself “oral”—all camp. The fact that every single actor is acting in a completely different register—so, so camp.

Of course, the problem with calling something camp is that there’s always going to be someone wagging their finger, saying, “That’s not camp! You don’t know camp!” For evidence see last year’s endless debate about whether or not May December is camp. Here I could point to a definition of this aesthetic sensibility from Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’ (she offers many), or I could try, over the course of a number of paragraphs, to pin down my own definition, though it would likely be in vain. The quote I most think of when I try to define camp is one from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when he was trying to describe his threshold test for “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it.” Camp is amorphous, subjective, constantly moving, but I know it when I see it.

If you don’t see it in Megalopolis, that’s fine: don’t call it camp. Call it satire, call it farce, call it frivolity, call it insanity, but whatever you call it, the first two hours of Megalopolis are clearly not earnest. When critics point out the earnestness of Megalopolis, they are mostly focusing on the film’s finale, which admittedly does, at first blush, feel painfully sincere and naively hopeful. But it can’t be earnest—or at least can’t only be earnest—when viewed in the context of the rest of the film.

All of the named characters have at least three things in common: they’re rich, they’re “problematic,” and they’re more character-types than actual characters.

As the movie opens, Laurence Fishburne’s voice tells us, “Our American republic is not all that different from old Rome. Can we preserve our past and all its wondrous heritage? Or will we too fall victim, like old Rome, to the insatiable appetite for power of a few men?” Cut to an extreme close-up of Adam Driver’s face in his role as Cesar Catilina, a character whose name is as on-the-nose as the voiceover that proceeds our introduction to him: Cesar, like Julius, and Catilina, after the central figure in the Catliniarian conspiracy, historically regarded as the villain of the affair.

Much has been written about Driver’s character clearly being the director’s avatar—which is why most readings of the film see him as the hero and take his messianic arc seriously—but from the very beginning, the film itself (cutting to Catilina’s face just after wondering aloud about “the insatiable appetite for power of a few men”) undermines his valorization. Catilina is an architect who can stop time and has discovered a magical substance named—there’s no way to say this with a straight face—“megalon.” He’s got plans to remake the city with this mysterious material and save humanity from the decayed “civilization” it has made for itself. He’s Robert Moses by way of Ayn Rand with a self-described “Emersonian mind.”

What’s one of the first things we see our “hero” do? He blows up poor people’s housing to make way for his project: the titular Megalopolis. What exactly is Megalopolis? Well, in theory it’s a reinvention of the modern city, which would be able to grow along with its people, but really it just looks like a public park that moves and glows. How is this glorified High Line project going to save the American Empire from the brink of collapse? This, my friends, is never explained.

In fact, much of the details of Coppola’s world remain fuzzy—sketched rather than drawn. What is megalon? How can Catilina stop time? Why does the mayor’s daughter Julia not freeze like everyone else when time stops? Maybe the reason Coppola subtitled the film “A Fable” is because he didn’t want to answer such trivial questions? Sometimes things in folklore must just be accepted for what they are. Or maybe Coppola’s world-building is more like “world-blocking”?

As I’ve argued elsewhere, there needs to be a term for an alternative way of building worlds, the world-building-in-negative that is practiced by Anna Kavan and Kōbō Abe (and forebears and contemporaries like Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, John Hawkes, and J.G. Ballard). Some have called this process “inferred world-building” or “world-conjuring,” but “world-blocking” may be more apt. The term works in opposing directions to get at the paradox of these types of texts. A “block” is something that obstructs, but is also a unit, like a brick, for building (i.e., “building block”). The verb “to block” means to hinder or hamper, but it also means to plot out the movements of an actor on a stage or movie set. World-blockers build worlds through obstruction; they block out the moves of their world by blocking our full access to them.

We may not be given the answers to our questions about Catilina, but we see enough of this cliched visionary to fill in the gaps ourselves. And, anyway, he tells us that questions are better than answers. That’s his deep understanding of the essence of utopia: “When we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” Voila! ‘Nuff said.

Or is it? The scene in which Catilina says this hokey line about utopia—which comes immediately after an even hokier line about love—is worth interrogating. In fact, the scene quite literally invites our interrogation. We’re at a press conference, where Catilina, like a director at a film festival, answers questions. At the Megalopolis premiere in Cannes, a live person climbed the steps of the stage during this scene and addressed a question directly to the screen, to Catilina. Coppola wanted this live audience question to be a part of all screenings, but only a few theaters on its opening weekend were able to accommodate this request. The rest of us just hear the question in voiceover from someone off-camera.

This Brechtian formal intervention places us, the audience, in the questioners’ position, interrogating the director’s supposed avatar as though we are interrogating the director himself. But Catilina—and Coppola by extension, if we are to believe this character is his cypher—comes off as both navel-gazing dreamer and pompous windbag. He’s a caricature of an artist who speaks in little more than juvenile platitudes: love connects us, questions are good for society.

Catilina is not the only caricature in Coppola’s film; the movie is populated with corrupt politicians, callous capitalists, shady grifters, debaucherous elites, nepo babies, cutthroat media personalities, and manufactured pop starlets. All of the named characters have at least three things in common: they’re rich, they’re “problematic,” and they’re more character-types than actual characters. The poor too are character-types, amounting to little more than the victims of the whims of these titans of industry and culture. The only agency they have is when they come together to form a mob—and even then, they don’t amount to much, easily controlled by their “betters.”

Just as Starship Troopers works as both an action film and a satire of an action film, Megalopolis also is the thing it pokes fun at.

Catilina’s main antagonist for much of the film is Mayor Cicero, whose first name happens to be—you guessed it—Francis. (They make a big deal of telling the audience this, just so we won’t miss it!) If Catilina is the more obvious Coppola avatar, that doesn’t preclude Cicero from being one as well. Case in point: a conversation late in the movie has these two men debating the nature of man. Catilina argues that man became the dominant species on the planet because of his amiability: “Wasn’t it human friendliness that stimulated our brains by learning and enabled us to outcompete all other species on earth?” Cicero disagrees: “We were fierce, aggressive, warlike.” But fierceness or friendliness on their own aren’t enough. It’s the conversation between these two traits, their competition, that allows for human greatness. If you only see Coppola as backing Catilina’s worldview, then you’ll miss the importance of the “dialogue,” which, we know, “basically is a utopia.” Right?

The movie ends with a grand speech from Catilina at the unveiling of Megalopolis, while the unnamed poor look on with their Dickensian faces pressed up against chainlink fences. After the speech, at a big celebration, Catilina is seen on an outdoor stage with his one-time rival Cicero, Cicero’s daughter (whom Catilina has impregnated and married), and their newborn. Everything is hunky-dory, except…the poor—are they still behind the fence? Catilina says that “the gates of Megalopolis are open,” but we don’t get to see much evidence of what this means for the poor or how this access will bring about a utopia. But the rich cheer him on from below the stage. They’re all there to salute his success. What a visionary! This is the earnest ending others see? These elites have deluded themselves into believing they’ve saved humanity by building a fancy park atop the rubble of poor people’s homes. Seneca Village, anyone?

As time stops once more, and the only character not frozen is Catilina’s (future nepo) baby, I don’t see the sincere happy ending others see. I find this dark, funny yet terrifying. But Coppola has one more twist of the knife: a pledge of allegiance to “the human family” appears on screen and a collection of children’s voices recite it in unison. The movie ends as all fascist movements begin, with loyalty pledges foisted upon us. Catilina’s messianic figure might actually want to help people—a lot of fascists do too! not all of them start as grifters!—but this guy’s no savior of humanity, even if Coppola wishes he could be.

“One is drawn to camp,” according to Susan Sontag, “when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough.” The film’s hodgepodge of cliches dramatizes the hollow scenes of the Holocene. I doubt Coppola truly believes that some Randian architect can suddenly save us with a magic material—even if that magic material is “art”—but he is rightly horrified, as we all should be, that the decadence and degradation that currently surrounds us might be the best civilization has to offer.

Just as Starship Troopers works as both an action film and a satire of an action film, just as it uses propagandistic tools to its benefit even as it makes a mockery of propaganda, Megalopolis also is the thing it pokes fun at. It’s not that anyone is wrong to see some earnestness in the ending; it’s that there’s so much more to see. The ending is making fun of the idea that a bold dreamer and his muse could somehow save the world, but it also does believe that art and dialogue are the best way forward. Not as an answer, per se, but as a question.

Even if Megalopolis had been made by a camp connoisseur like Verhoeven instead of the more serious Coppola, I still doubt it would already be seen for the camp classic it is. This type of movie might just need to flop in order to be rediscovered later when audiences at midnight movies shout the non-sequitur lines back at the screen. It’s as if Coppola knows that the 12:00am timeslot is where this is headed by building in that moment where audience members can ask a question of Driver’s Catilina, as though at a real press conference. At Cannes one guy showed us how it’s done. Future cinephilic nightowls take note.

But why wait? If you can give yourself over to the idiosyncratic insanity of Megalopolis, it will leave you with much to ponder, and even more to LOL at. The question of whether artists (writers, filmmakers, architects, etc.) are meant to save the world has recently found its way back into the discourse, thanks in part to Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I suppose it’s a question that never really goes away.

If you take the finale of Megalopolis as a happy ending and a sincere appeal for a better world, Francis Ford Coppola agrees with Coates that this is indeed the charge of the artist. I don’t have such a lofty view of art, even though I’ve dedicated my life to it. Great art, like a great joke, merely highlights the great incongruities of life. The reason to watch Megalopolis, and the reason to consume any worthwhile satire or any camp classic—perhaps the reason to engage with any great work of art at all—is summed up simply by the film’s central character: “For laughs, of course. What else did you come here for?”