Megalopolis is what you just watched

Megalopolis is a movie about a civilisation in decline made by a civilisation in decline watched by a civilisation so deep into its decline that it can no longer recognise its own decline

Damien Walter
5 min readOct 1, 2024

Megalopolis is a movie about a civilisation in decline made by a civilisation in decline watched by a civilisation so deep into its decline that it can no longer recognise

a TikTok video

of its own decline

Megalopolis is a movie with the narrative structure of your TikTok feed edited for the attention span of YouTube

That zeitgeist will repel people conditioned to the bland technical competence of an MCU movie

Watch the video essay on YouTube

But Aubrey Plaza, as the face of every duck lipped influencer, vlogs out of the fourth wall to tell you this is a movie for the age of Instagram

For a director in his later years Francis Ford Coppola must spend quite a lot of his time at his vinyards taking in the debauched human spectacle of

social

media

Megalopolis is labelled a Fable. And it is a heightened symbolic presentation of reality, with characters representing abstract principles of Progress (Adam Driver can control time because he is Progress…subtle Francis…real subtle)

But Megalopolis is also a 100% realist presentation of your social elites. Go and look at your entrepreneur industrialists, socialite supermodels and political representatives on their TikToks and Snapchats

Megalopolis is a supercut of your social elite’s Instagrams feeds. Getting high, getting arrested like a drunk bitch screaming at the cops, fucking the reporter, then covering it all up in the morning.

Of course the virginal pop princess is outed making home porn because that’s literally what happens

every

time

It’s no wonder the average cinema goer took one look at this slice of fantabulous cinema verite and declared it “boring” and “pretentious”

BORING = things you don’t like

PRETENTIOUS = things you don’t understand

Corporate media told us that Megalopolis was a shambles on set. Corporate media told us that the final movie was “unwatchable”. Corporate media even told us Coppola was sexually assaulting female actors.

All of which was complete and utter bullshit.

The corporate entertainment complex don’t want an indie movie self-funded by an auteur director to exist, and they can’t afford for it to succeed.

So now the corporate media is reassuring us that the work of art is bombing at the box office, and that order has been restored because the Beetlejuice reboot is doing just fine.

WOOOHOOO FOR CORPORATE REBOOTS!!

Megalopolis is the opposite of a corporate reboot. It’s amusing to watch comment threads with thousands of people screaming that nobody will ever notice this movie.

Old Man Coppola gets that outrage is the currency of our time, and he’s gone out of his way to trigger it from us with every avant garde narrative technique he ever wanted to try all packed into one movie.

The whole purpose of such avant garde shenanigans has always been a way for the revolutionary artist to trigger the bourgeois audience and actually make us think

Of course Megalopolis is bombing at cinemas that have been in the grip of corporate control for decades, churning out nothing but the latest “episode” of yet another corporate entertainment franchise.

But Megalopolis is already the memefied movie of the moment on TikTok. It will live on for year after year, decade after decade as a cult classic on streaming.

The studio execs who dictate corporate cultural production need instant profits they can burn on the kind of elite instant gratification Megalopolis parodies.

Francis Ford Coppola can afford to be patient. Apocalypse Now still earns big money for Coppola every year, and Megalopolis will do the same.

Megalopolis isn’t a new Apocalypse Now. But it does play in the same waters.

Until Apocalypse Now nobody knew that 1979 felt like a gunboat patrolling the Mekong to a soundtrack of The Doors. It’s easy to forget what a crazed splice of cultural relics Apocalypse Now seemed like when we first saw it, because Apocalypse Now created the aesthetic that now, much imitated, seems cliche.

And none of us knew that 2024 felt like 1950s Roman epic Quo Vadis spliced with 1990s television sensation Sex and the City filmed as an Instagram reel. We didn’t know how fucking trivial and ridiculous we looked until Francis Ford Coppola, artist that he is, created a whole new aesthetic to show us.

An aestehtic that will be imitated to death and cliche before you know it, the ultimate symbol of success in our postmodern hyperreality.

Apocalypse Now was a journey into the heart darkness made for dark times. Megalopolis is Coppola’s Heart of Banality, a movie made for trivial and frivolous times.

And as is typical of those times, we’ve confused the banality that Coppola’s movie reflects back to us, with Coppola’s movie being banal.

“Together we’ll discover new paths that lead to the unknown world ahead of us”

Adam Driver, inventor of Megalon, is cast as Mega Elon, the entrepreneur industrialist whose life is a cocktail of drugs, women and self aggrandising speeches vomited up from his crazed inner monologue.

“Utopias turn into dystopias”

“So we should just accept this endless conflict we’re living in now?”

It’s not about supporting Adam Driver as Progress, or Giancarlo Esposito as Tradition. It’s just about noting that civilization is a giant mob of humans, a Circus Maximus of life, and these characters and conflicts repeat again and again, especially in a civilization in decline.

Megalopolis is a myth drawn up from the deepest wellsprings of imagination by one of our great storytellers. It’s there as an artefact for us to experience, an imperfect beauty in a wasteland of perfectly banal franchise sequels and reboots.

“We have a duty to ask, is this the best society we could be living in? Could we do better? And when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.”

We should be able to watch Megalopolis as an invitation to discuss our future together. But our civilisation has declined so far that all we can do is ask “did I like it?”

Megalopolis reveals a deep divide between the people invested in corporate culture, conditioned to understand art as a consumer product that continually panders to their preconceived expectations of narrative.

And people becoming aware of our deep hunger for art, even art as imperfect as Megalopolis, that is more than just a byproduct attached to a corporate marketing campaign.

The “movie reviewers” have taken to YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes to shout the meme that has come to represent the perplexity of the average consumer faced with challenging art

“What did I just watch?”

In this case the answer is simple. You just spent 2h 18m watching the mirror that Francis Ford Coppola turned on your declining civilisation

and your civilisation is in such deep decline

you didn’t even recognise that what you just watched

was your own face

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Damien Walter

I tell stories about the future, technology and culture. Published by The Guardian, WIRED, BBC etc.