post #24.2: megalopolis mega mix: act 2. cinema as ugly failure
Looking over my notes, I think I have three routes I want to approach Megalopolis from, but I'm not sure off the bat if they can all fit into a single essay. As such, I will split my thoughts into three acts.
ACT 2. Cinema as ugly failure
When I say that Megalopolis is a beautifully ugly movie, I mean many things. Most literally, I mean to refer to the movie's spotty aesthetics, a kind readily compared to the oft mocked Spy Kids franchise or Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Truth be told, I enjoy a silly image every now and again, and, in this respect, Megalopolis was a visual treat. I may not know what I'm looking at in the movie (because it's too blurry to see, there's too much going on, the image is too mind boggling, or it refuses to be legible, etc.), but I'd like to think that this is the point. The movie is called Megalopolis (kind of a generic, corny name already), and the titular Megalopolis shows up for only like 3 or 4 minutes at the end (maybe?), plus whatever amount in an animated segment earlier in the film. That is to say, Megalopolis is about a kind of spectacle not tied up in giving you the thing in all its grandeur. It is the spectacle of the tree struck by lightning that does property damage to a power line. The spectacle that is costly and sets people back in time, but that nonetheless draws your eye (if not at least because it is a rare sight). Perhaps it can be replicated, but few dare to try and thus it is commendable that something has fallen and broken its leg (even if unintentionally). The pastiche is so artificial it goes all the way around to being fantastical again (I will talk more about this in the next act).
But garrish visuals alone are not what is beautiful about the ugliness of this film. A second way I mean this description is to speak more sweepingly about what the film is and what it symbolizes. This film is an ugly movie -- perhaps THE ugly movie -- in the way that Hollywood and the film industry are ugly. The veil of visual pleasure is so nonexistent and otherwise threadbare that you can't but see how ugly the enterprise that runs it all truly is. I think this is beautiful. The movie is abashedly misogynistic, orientalizing, and otherwise regressive in it's politics. But what else could be expected; THIS is what hollywood is-- what Hollywood has always been. Whether it was Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad (1924) or James Stewart in Vertigo, Hollywood revelry has always been inseparable from a propaganda machine. I understand this to be one of the chief reasons as to why Hollywood has flourished for as long as it has in America-- why Hollywood is such a(n apparently) reflective image of America. Hollywood is an opiate of the masses. Hollywood peddles images of the marginalized and alienates the labor of the millions of those who have for worked within it. Hollywood coopts resistance and strips people of their faces in the same breath that it eternally teases at discourses of increased representation. Hollywood is capital, it always has been. Movies are the poster child of capitalism. They cost unimaginable amounts of money to make -- all of which goes,, no where?,, -- so that they might make an unimaginable amount more in return. But making money is not capitalism. Capitalism is the alienation prescribed by cinema. Hollywood manufactures culture wars and props up the proxy schema of stardom and auteurship. Marvel does not matter, in a material sense -- at least not more than wage theft. Yet Marvel is what so many people have willingly spent so much of their labor pulling apart and fighting over. There are positive qualities to this -- people resist capitalism and Hollywood and make it their own (it cannot all be poisonous; the folks need to be coming back somehow) and it has engendered many survival mechanisms too (providing work for little people and Indigenous people for a while, for example). But that doesn't estrange the fact that Hollywood propagandizes for the purposes of capital. And, as this film rarently (I thought this was a word; hopefully it’s clear what I’m trying to say) displays, in doing so, it is also that Hollywood is about reinforcing dominant / hegemonic narratives. This is not to say that artists and actors within Hollywood don't resist or make their own of these narratives, but that the interests of power in Hollywood come down overwhelmingly on the side of regressive perspectives. This is where the orientalism and misogyny and everything else comes from (in this film and elsewhere). Capitalism is a shaky enterprise and, historically, it is not THAT old. There is much more expediency and utility in framing the Orient as the problematic Other than in platforming narratives that interrogate the structure of power as it exists right now in a true and real sense. But maybe it's that the terms Hollywood invented cannot be used to critique its systems, not fully at least. I think this very well could be the case. I and many others have spoken at lengths about the violences and regressive nature of Hollywood's formal style or of the medium of film and narrative, in general. People have resisted and reclaimed some of these devices, but I think the devices themselves still possess problems.
Well, so my point is that all of this is the ugly ugly ugly side of Hollywood. And all of this is on display in a garish and undeniable way in this film. It's interesting, in my opinion, that Coppola, a director so connected with the history of Hollywood's sustenance, would spend so long making this film (investing not only decades of his time but hundreds of millions of dollars born from his fame). His films in the 70s (e.g., The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.) may not have been the only films keeping the studios afloat, but they were nonetheless (and are nonetheless) immense pillars of culture lending Hollywood newfound legitimacy and prestige (this is the context of New Hollywood cinema), of which has now aged into nostalgia as time has eked on. He has not remained a hit-maker, sure, but he once was. Maybe times have changed and he's just lost his ability to make stories that resonate with the masses. That could be true. But I don't think that changes my argument that he is a director who has proven certain artistic capabilities and who has had a certain relation with the industry for a certain amount of time, and who ended up making this film regardless (or because) of that. I think it is more interesting to speculate intent into an object than it is to assume that it was produced by mistake or ignorance (especially when it came about after decades of consternation). This position comes from that my communication has, throughout my whole life, been constantly mistaken for nonsense when in fact I have been trying to say something (whether it be with art or, more directly, with words). This has angered me to no end. And so, in respecting my autonomy, and the existence of my voice and my ability to make meaning even if I make a mistake, I choose to read into the film in these ways: as beautifully ugly.
Another reason I say Megalopolis is beautifully ugly is because its scope is unfathomable. How can this be decades of someone's life compressed on the screen? It doesn't even make sense. By this I refer again to a way in which Megalopolis crystallizes something present in the circumstances of all commercial cinema. I've said that movies cost so, SO much money to make. This is true. And I've said that many people work on movies (in saying that many are alienated from their labor in working on movies). This is true. But the machinery of these operations is so advanced at this point (e.g., with this movie) that it is difficult to parse (for me). In order to make Megalopolis, this 2 hour fifteen minute movie, so many people spent so long doing so much,,, to end up with this? What it means for something to be someone's job is that they spend time working on it. The majority of their time compared to time they intentionally spend doing other things. Work is essentially the word for the form of compensated labor someone most commonly does. For a smaller film, I can conceptualize what this labor looks like. I can see through the veil. I can work out how a scene was filmed, how it was set up, how the actors were prepared, how the footage was shot and edited and treated with effects, etc. If you work hard enough, this stuff becomes legible enough. I'm not saying Megalopolis is a feat of engineering -- because I don't think it is, necessarily -- but it still stumps me when I look at it and try to pull it apart-- the fact that this is a thing that people made, that this came from somewhere and that every seeming nonchalance we see was invented. This is because the in Megalopolis are always baffling. Why would someone invent that? Why would someone make that choice? It is easy to call the film uninformed. And yet, it is so deliberately obtuse, that I must feel like it's intentional. It approaches so many things from such unintuitive angles that it stumbles its way into being enigmatic. And, what's more, it all happens so fast and so often, all at once. So many characters are played by such big stars doing so little in scenes where nothing is anything and yet everything is somehow something. And throwaway lines and narratively essential dialogue are signalled in the same ways (as if they weren't words at all). As much as I will say that jumping to call the film a farce is a naive gesture, I also think that the film is miraculously fractured. It's an easier narrative to say that the film came out after decades of Coppola's toiling (and is therefore indicative of one man's grand design, etc.). This can be true (parts of this narrative), but surely Coppola did not make this movie by himself. We see other people. And there are so many other people. And yet, so few. The crowds are underpopulated and the city, as a whole, sags as a ghost town, devoid of both life and intrigue, drifting along only with the pulse of vampiric compulsion. There once was a passion to make a fable, and now there is this, stumbling over its own weight (and compelled by the stumbling to do it once more). The self-propulsion is fascinating to watch. It is, for me, the biggest sign that this film was the result of decades of effort; it's the film's most legible artistic trait. It seems pretty to say that Coppola got lost in the sauce-- that he had this idea for some time, but by being so hermeneutic, it was so long removed from contact with the outside world, that it is debating with itself. The movie has arguments and revelations and transcendent moments, perhaps, but it does not speak in any recognizable tongue. Yet I can tell that there is a rapid discourse and catechizing happening and I feel it must somehow be beautiful. But from what I have learned up to now in my life, I've also never been taught to call this illegibility anything but ugly and profane. The film is preparing to defend against things no one was ever talking about -- a real duck and cover situation, if you will. It didn't matter in the end, anyways. It made it to the finish line. It had its time in the sun (as a laughing stock, yes, but in the sun regardless), and now it can move on in peace.
But I'm still stuck on the labor involved in making this happen-- it is so unimaginable. So many people were paid so much money to show up to work for so many weeks and to show up again for so many reshoots and so many editors and script supervisors and boom technicians and so forth spent so long getting paid so much and they made this movie where you can't tell but in a way where it's both because they did such a good job filing off their fingerprints and because they seemingly just dumped out the puzzle pieces and gave up after they assembled vague images around a couple of the corner pieces. I say "gave up" but I don't mean this to come with any derision. Money can only go so far. Money wants to go forever (capital wants to imagine things this way, at least), but, in truth, it can only go so far. It (money) came from somewhere and it will go somewhere else. There will be a journey that is not infinite. Capital spends so much of people's time making products that will spend so much of so many more people's time so that it can somehow one day make a little bit of money and fuel its enterprises that little bit more into the future (pretending as if it's not spiraling into the abyss). But this film is not a Taylor Swift album or a James Cameron movie, this is Megalopolis. All of the money was there, but the visual pleasure never materialized (not in an intended way, at least). Instead of making something to satiate the masses and make everyone feel a little bad about themselves that they can't make this thing (they don't measure up to the triumph of money) -- and thus resign to suckle on its teat for the time being in quiet content -- instead of that, the movie came out, flaring, raring to go, and was dismissed and buried alive. Just like that. It came out last year and now it is streaming nowhere. Capital does not want this movie to be archived. It is a testament of the failure of its enterprises (of their potential for failure). It is a reminder that, actually, Avatar 2 and Avengers: Endgame are not the only ways things can be; things can be so much worse, actually; and this is all so fleeting and so razor thin, and actually, there are more important things than to go to the movies. There is beauty in the world, and it is not sitting in a dark theater by yourself for 2 hours (this statement is hyperbolic, maybe). Beauty can sometimes be in these places, but these are not its main progenitors. It all (everything) falls apart for a second. It's just a sham. A beautifully ugly one. All of this: trying to seem effortless: it's just a mess (and that's what's beautiful).
MEGALOPOLIS MEGAMIX NAV: ACT 1 | ACT 2 | ACT 3