Hungry for movies, starving for truth
Readers responding to my review of Megalopolis declared an unexpected hunger for cinema and truth — desires that contemporary Hollywood routinely fails to satisfy. Megalopolis itself demonstrates the disappointment over the trajectory of politics and Millennial society, especially in the way that Francis Ford Coppola compiles assorted influences from Shakespeare to H. G. Wells in a reckless smash-up of imaginative fiction and social prophecy that never answers the current appetite for vision and truth.
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Tempest are Coppola’s most obvious sources, but he also ransacks the 1936 classic Things to Come, by H. G. Wells, a futuristic adaptation of his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come (his answer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). Although the Wells adaptations War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau are better known to filmgoers, Things to Come parallels contemporary worries.
Wells, a Fabian socialist like George Bernard Shaw, wrote a speculative treatise that predicted the ecology movement, the arms race, socialist pacifism, and WWII. Megalopolis makes a mess of these issues because Coppola’s long-gestating “passion project” is convulsed by contemporary concerns — the same conflicted social awareness that ultimately ruined his Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Readers react to how Megalopolis cheats on Apocalypse Every Day.
Anyone perplexed by Megalopolis is troubled, deep down, by the way media relentlessly mislead us, the constant gaslighting by politicians, journalists, and artists who go from engaging partisanship to censorship.
The presence of Megalopolis in a conflicted culture only clarifies this era’s hunger and thirst — what a reviewer described as the “readiness for a visionary, climactic, summing-up movie” that protest-era filmgoers anticipated when Apocalypse Now premiered in 1979. Coppola cannot provide either the prophecy or moral contemplation found in Shakespeare and Wells, and he’s not alone. Everything Everywhere All at Once, Oppenheimer, and Barbie also epitomize the oddball fantasies of a degraded culture. (A desperate Things to Come character laments, “I learned a lot before education stopped and the schools closed down.”) The uncanny specificity with which Wells addressed Britain on the brink of war is a startling reminder of the insight that Millennial artists lack.
Things to Come was directed by legendary production designer William Cameron Menzies, who later designed the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind and clearly influenced Coppola’s skyscraper imagery and his bewildering mix of futurism and antiquity. To visualize the Wells prophecy, Menzies created enormous, canted London streets (Everytown) in a prophetic 1940 that evoked two silent-era classics, Murnau’s Sunrise and Lang’s Metropolis. The ancient and modern mix feels surreal, unlike Coppola’s anachronistic art-deco Chrysler-building motifs that contrast ancient Roman coliseum and digital-era grandiosity. In Things to Come, shots of airplane squadrons over the white cliffs of Dover and superimpositions of soldiers marching through the English countryside were eccentric visions of pre-War British fears, perfecting what Wells had made overly didactic.
It is Coppola’s extravagant indulgence of Millennial fears and decadence that makes the eventual family- and global-reunion optimism of Megalopolis so bogus. (Nothing equals Menzies’s “War Scare” newspaper page backed with a giant CINEMA marquee in the background.)
An extraordinary Things to Come sequence on “the ‘wandering sickness’ unchecked throughout the world” might have derived from WWI malaise, but it also seems a presentiment of how the psychological injury of Covid lockdowns reduced the populace to zombies. (A study for further study.)
Menzies’s titles announce: “No man has ever reckoned the ravages of the wandering less. Like the black death in the Middle Ages, it killed more than half the human race — no one who caught it survived. Only gradually did men realize that the epidemic was over and that social vitality was returning.” Then Menzies emblazons: “1970.”
This rationalization of a global crisis captures what Megalopolis does not. Election-cycle media keep us in a state of anticipation and anxiety — similar to Menzies and Wells warning against “endless warfare.”
Coppola retreats into himself, a symptom of Millennial solipsism. He emulates Menzies the same superficial way Scorsese quotes Michael Powell, as merely a source of phantasmagoria.
We need Coppola to explore the hidden conspiracies of political cabals as he did of the Mafia, politics, and religion in the Godfather trilogy. Readers who hoped for answers in Megalopolis feel they “will only be beginning,” as Menzies and Wells described the emptiness of being on the precipice of communism.
For Coppola, like Zack Snyder in his Star Wars makeover Rebel Moon, the futuristic sci-fi genre inhibits his grasp of psychology and politics, substituting action and spectacle, which Menzies nearly aced. And neither Coppola nor Snyder deals with how ideologues have plundered the West. Confused and incapable of foresight about the civilization and warfare to come, they tie mythology and the future into an allegorical knot.