The New Utopia

Or the yawn of everything.

I did not particularly enjoy the new movie Megalopolis, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. There were a few moments of genuine hilarity, but for most of its runtime I found it be boring or wooden or just kind of off-putting in an annoying way. Despite that, there is one part of its world and ambition that I found somewhat interesting, so I’ve decided to write about it here.

Coppola has cited a number of works as inspiration for his long-brewing fable, and among them was the 2021 book The Dawn of Everything by the anthrolopogist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow. The book is a pretty interesting mix of disciplines and ideas. It looks at a bunch of different human societies and social relations and examines how they were organised with respect to property, hierarchy, gender, culture, etc. Part of its main thesis (and the part that left the greatest impact on me) is the authors’ disdain for any grand narrative of mankind’s history. Are hierarchies inherent to human nature? Is inequality inescapable, no matter how we organise ourselves socially and economically? Or is the current level of hierarchy a fairly recent development in our history, brought on by the Agricultural Revolution and the emergence of private property?

Graeber and Wengrow basically reject these conceptions of history and instead argue that human societies are incredibly diverse and complicated and that trying to pin one single narrative about humanity is a pointless task. In support of this, they mostly focus on indigenous societies in North America, using anthropological and archeological evidence to show that there was not one “typical” way of living for these pre-European peoples. Some tribes had conceptions of private property but little to no inequality. Others held property communally, but then established hierarchies based on some other social signifier (e.g., religion). Women held positions of power; women were excluded from power. And so on. It basically amounts to this meme:

I think I can see where this argument had an influence on Coppola with respect to Megalopolis. When Cesar (Adam Driver) and Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) come into conflict over the future of New Rome, we don’t really get many details on the actual plans they want to put in place. Cesar wants to build Megalopolis, a flowery city with magic escalators and sparkly colours, while Mayor Cicero seems to want to keep things going as normal and focus on jobs and sanitation and whatnot. There is also a sub-plot about Shia LaBeouf starting a fascist movment to enrich and empower himself.

It’s easy to make fun of Cesar (and Coppola) for his ambitious vision for New Rome pretty much lacking any substance, and the movie often comically seems to just be about “good ideas” versus “bad ideas”, with the audience expected to simply side with the former without any real reason. But I do think that Coppola actually had something in mind here. Througout the movie, Cesar is relentlessly focused on widening the scope of humanity’s ambitions and self-conception and on one level, the Megalopolis design is just a way of achieving that. There’s a line I liked when Cesar gets asked about the future after the Soviet satellite crashes on the city.

“Is this society, is this where we're living, the only one that's available to us?…And when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.”

So we get presented, sort of, with three different visions for the declining empire. The first is the conservative Ciceronian status quo. The second is a regression into fascist violence for the benefit of a wealthy elite. And the third is the possibility, the mere idea, that we can imagine more for ourselves than this. That we can at least have a debate about it. The real utopia in Megalopolis isn’t the city itself, it’s the scene near the beginning where Cesar and Cicero are presenting their plans while walking through a stage of scaffolding, while glamorous crowds and reporters follow their words with bated breath. Even the Hamlet soliloquoy delivered by Cesar for seemingly no reason kind of ties into this: we are completely rejecting given narratives and understandings of how things are in favour of a radical embrace of what could be, regardless of what the results of that debate are.

I’m not sure that this theme is explored in a particularly deep or interesting way by Coppola for most of the film. I think too much of its runtime is devoted to an uninteresting love story that doesn’t really challenge our conception of anything, and visually it often looks cheap and ugly. But there’s a gem of an idea there. New Rome doesn’t have to be like Old Rome. You can have chariot racing and music videos, urban planning and time freezing powers. And isn’t that a utopia?