Though this may seem incendiary it is not unfounded to believe that in the past two decades the moving image has been robbed of any and all significance or meaning. With the advent of personal computers, digital camcorders, smartphones and social media the collective relationship with the image has irreversibly changed. Gone are the days where we mainly encountered the image through the pretext of art and expression: through cinema, painting or photography. Even something as implicitly soulless like advertising at least appeared to have been crafted with meaning and intention. This was the world that Francis Ford Coppola entered though not the one he will exit. In her essay “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” writer Hito Steyrel explores how human visual perception has shifted according to advancements in technology. In the past human perception was limited by literally what we could see, with sailors, colonizers and architects being guided by linear perspective, following the horizon on their various expeditions, a viewpoint that connoted a stable, conceivable reality. What Steyrel argues is that as satellite technology developed human perception has shifted to a top down perspective, with machines allowing us to observe the world beyond our own capacity. From an overhead perspective the world appears to be boundless, placing the viewer in eternal free fall, preceding the creation of a stable reality of any kind. In this same matter modern viewers find themselves in constant free fall, being bombarded with images at every second at any point of the day to the point of overstimulation and desensitization.
It is perhaps from this theoretical starting point that we can begin to understand the visual aesthetic of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024). Watching Megalopolis my mind wandered off to various reference points: F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (1977), George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), The Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) and so on. But while mentally I could grasp onto cinematic antecedents spiritually I knew what the film reminded me most of: Instagram reels. For those not clued into the vast wasteland of content on Instagram reels imagine Tik Tok but somehow with less moderation and a weaker algorithm. Clicking on the little video tab will lead you down a rabbit hole, swiping from a scientific explainer on revolutionary new plant organelles that can convert nitrogen, to makeshift game shows in rural Indian villages, to influencers providing completely unsubstantiated life advice etc. Watching these 20 second clips will send you to the heart of the information free fall, where everything communicates something but is otherwise completely emptied of meaning, sound and fury signifying nothing. On a scene to scene basis Megalopolis conjures up a similar feeling of schizophrenia: as you move from Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) explaining the properties of his Nobel Prize winning substance Megalon, to Julie Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) sharing a heartfelt moment with her father Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) in full Latin to Shia Labeouf (who, it goes without saying, should not be allowed on any film set) mounting what is pretty brazenly the Trump campaign as the gender fluid Clodio Pulcher, all of which happening in the span of five minutes or so. In Megalopolis information moves at a rapid pace that appears foreign and overwhelming to the world of cinema but all too familiar to anyone with a social media account. Instagram reels typically and rightfully have no have no insinuation of formal clarity and intention, treating the image as illustrative and informative but never beautiful, with no explicit mind towards composition, however Coppola does, effectively aestheticizing our period of total excess through Megalopolis.
In some of the film’s most lyrical passages Coppola eschews the traditional boundaries of the frame itself, organizing the image as a disjointed triptych, with separate images ebbing and flowing, occasionally lining up to form a whole. It is no mistake that in these scenes the frame gets split into vertical videos drawing directly from the aesthetics of smartphones. In thinking about the literal the frame of cinema I constantly defer to Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), whose constant zoom, which decreases the amount of visual information privy to the audience, and use of off screen sound comes to suggest the frame as less so an indicator of what is on screen but an indicator of the world that exists entirely outside of it. Coppola’s triptych sequences are used to illustrate the full realization of Cesar’s utopian Megalopolis, and it is in their deployment that the film feels fully boundless visually. In some regards the usual context of where we encounter the vertical image colors in how we can interpret it in Megalopolis. While the widescreen film aspect ratio has always been presented in contexts in which it demands to be the center of attention in pitch black cinema halls the vertical image is one always encountered in broad daylight, with the surrounding world always existing in sight beyond the frame. The image becomes explicitly positioned to reflect a better world we can make the active choice to look around and see.
Though my attention towards the use of the vertical image was spurred more so by how flat Coppola’s compositions are otherwise in the film. In many regards the visual palette of Megalopolis, should not come as much as an immediate shot to those familiar with Coppola’s other big late career swings like One From the Heart (1981), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) or Twixt (2011). All of which lean towards a style reminiscent of German expressionism but one hopped up on Hollywood money and all its accompanying excess. The frame becomes a direct expression of his character’s emotional dilemmas in a way that very clearly guides one to ignore what is happening outside or of any conceivable sense of reality. In Megalopolis, when Cesar starts tweaking off drugs and alcohol in a colosseum bathroom naturally he is depicted with 6 arms extruding from his body or when Cesar goes to the flower shop he used to frequent for his deceased wife it appears glistening in gold, drowning out anything else in frame. In the same vein as expressionists like Murnau, a film like Megalopolis is best understood and experienced from a non-literal standpoint, ignoring normative parameters of quality like story or character progression for a pure cinema of ideas. If One From the Heart was Coppola’s stealth remake of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), then Megalopolis is Coppola’s Faust: a poetic moral fable sketched out with oversized emotions and groundbreaking images haunted by the old world. The incredibly elaborate, and consciously digital compositing of Megalopolis, is immediately reminiscent of the aforementioned Speed Racer, which memorably embraced a fully artificial mode of production, using green screens and extensive CG to render a live action anime, as well as the cut and paste visual style of Nobuhiko Obayashi. Though in practice I suspect Coppola’s intentions align closer to George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy, which sought to use cutting edge technology to advance the expressive visual language of epics like Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944).
To many viewers Megalopolis’ style of complete visual excess has triggered a full on allergic reaction not unlike the reaction to Speed Racer or Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, ones ranging from disgust to pure confusion: “Why would you want to make a film that looks like that?”. After seeing the film I facetiously texted that seeing it was like “Seeing a new color”, and though the excitement has obviously worn off I could only imagine that it felt akin to being one of the few people to rightfully recognize the brilliance of transgressive work like James Joyce’s Ulysses or the paintings of Kandinsky directly out of the gate without the need for years of re-evaluation, which this film will have. Of course this is a gross over-exaggeration but the form of Coppola’s film reminds me of a similar comment made by Lana Wachowski about Speed Racer.
“We want to do sequences that are like run-on sentences, stream-of- consciousness sentences that don’t just start and end with the conventional cut, that are just montaged collages and flow the way, you know, what Joyce was looking for was the way that his brain experiences the world. Joyce said, ‘I want to try to demonstrate the way my mind works as I’m getting all of this input and it doesn’t cut things and it doesn’t order things and it doesn’t always make sentences.”
The Wachowski’s Speed Racer came to similarly defy the boundaries of the frame, through transitions and dissolves that merged multiple scenes and images together, though Coppola’s Megalopolis may have an even more extreme approach to montage. At various points in the film scenes will play out purely in dissolves, between multiple images, characters and locations. There is a pure excess of visual ideas communicated in a manner that defies Eisensteinian logic. No longer does the meaning of the film emerge from the cut, from the hard contrast between images which creates a third image: an idea in the viewer’s head. Instead the viewer is made to swim within Coppola’s occasionally incomprehensible collage. Meaning is found not from transition but from the state of transition, which moves with no clear endpoint.
Coppola’s experimental approach to film form is not just one communicated visually but textually. In a very basic manner what Megalopolis is concerned with is the eternal battle between tradition and innovation, with Mayor Cicero wanting to rebuild New Rome in the same manner as it was before: a hulking mass of concrete and steel, while Cesar desires a city made from the shape shifting Megalon, which changes according to the needs of the residents and which is depicted as a glowing gold CGI goop. Within their relationship the various discourses discussed prior are echoed: Cicero represents linear perspective, approaching the world in practical terms purely from the visible while Cesar is the free fall, wanting a world that is constantly formless and constantly stimulating. While the viewer may have expected a sturdy concrete skyscraper, like The Godfather (1972), from Coppola, instead they are greeted with a structure made of Megalon: a film with no clear boundary between dreams and reality, between where an image starts and where an idea stops.
Though as much as Coppola seems to be recreating the rules of cinema he remains incredibly deferential to what came before. Cesar’s unexplained ability to stop time, which reads far less as something literal and more a metaphorical indication of his visionary instinct, and which is accompanied by the visual of everything in the frame freezing instantaneously, literalizes the promise of early cinema, in its ability to compress and distort time in a defiance of reality as practiced in the undercranked shorts of Melies. Meanwhile, the much hyped live portion of the film, which comes in the form of a real person asking Cesar a question at a press conference, follows in the footsteps of various live cinema gimmicks employed throughout the years, usually under the purview of B movies and innovative hucksters like William Castle who launched plastic skeletons over the audience during House on Haunted Hill (1959).
The indiscriminate manner in which Coppola picks influences is perhaps Megalopolis’ best trait, in the complete collapse of high and low, good and bad taste. It is incredibly noticeable that the film was written over the span of 40 years, especially in scenes where Cesar regales onlookers in Shakespearian prose before trap drums come rattling through. Though the hodgepodge of signifiers perhaps best expresses the dilemma the Western world finds itself at “The End of History” in the spread of neoliberal capitalism which has locked them in a place of permanent material stasis. Even as culture moves the world still stays the same, with the pressure built up from this lack of change launching us into full chaos. Another touchstone for a film like Megalopolis is fellow controversial Cannes competition entry Richard Kelly’sSouthland Tales (2006) whose vision of an empire in rapid decline: caught within a world dictated by movie stardom, war profiteering and reality TV more or less predicted the cultural and political climate of the decade to come. Similarly Megalopolis features the same lurid mix of high and low, juxtaposing boner jokes with personal betrayal, thinly veiled Taylor Swift parodies with Marcus Aurelius quotes. Coppola attempts to evoke the same feeling of hypermodernity as Kelly through direct references to contemporary events such as Trump’s presidency, but perhaps where the feeling of modernity best erupts from is the seeming inconsistencies between performances. As noted by many every actor in Megalopolis feels as if they belong in a different world, a different time period or different film entirely. Seeing everyone interact may cause one to jump to calling the film disjointed but it is in the friction between acting styles and personalities that the film’s most interesting ideas are produced. In a way the performances reflect our current cultural moment of hyper-individuality as enabled by algorithms and the internet, where everyone exists within their own bubble fully moved by their own convictions. Though the default mode of performance seems reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995), where the obviously campy, in on the joke script, is performed in a dead eyed affectless manner as if each character is withdrawn into their own reality in a matter that reads as Brechtian, plunging us into a world of stylization and pure artifice. Driver himself seems to be drawing from the performance style he honed in on in Leos Carax’s Annette (2021) of self conscious pomp, where at every point and through every action he appears concerned with how someone perceives him, creating the veneer of self-possessed arrogance which hides his vulnerable core.
In unpacking everything Megalopolis builds from one is again sorely reminded of the incredibly conservative place film is right now, where formal innovation is only recognized years after the fact and where anything transgressive is not met with any measured form of contemplation or curiosity and instead outright rejected. A film like Speed Racer only became celebrated for its aesthetic merit a decade after its release and I fear the same fate befalls Megalopolis, a work that does not require re-evaluation but direct evaluation from those willing to meet it at its terms. The concept of “hyperstition” concerns projections of the future willed into the present through the technology currently available, and sadly in the past decade when thinking about art that fulfills this I can only think about music. I think about the rubbery, spherical sound design of SOPHIE, the harsh blown out drums of Brazilian funk and the shitpost collapse of taste and genre of 100 Gecs. Music as an art form has seemed to progress at a rate far faster than film in the modern marketplace and I do think it is because the pipeline between ironic appreciation to sincerity moves way faster in that sphere. It did not take long for the sound of jersey club bed springs to end up on top 40s radio. But now when I think of hyperstitious modern art I can think of Megalopolis and only hope its vision of the future can have any bearing on the state of cinema moving forward. Though, as always, the most interesting work seems to be happening in the indie sphere with breakouts like Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2024) and Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers (2022) following the same path as Coppola in creating cut and paste green screen expressionism. Coppola’s film ultimately acts as a reminder of the visual pleasures that remain gate kept by the forces of modern American cinema: by budgets, by studios and by supposed good taste, exposing what a $120 million film can and should look like.
Though this may appear dismissive and cynical I do not think cinema needs another film like Bird (2024), another film like Kinds of Kindness (2024) and definitely not another film like Parthenope (2024). But with the current state of things we may very well need a film like Megalopolis.