post #24.3: megalopolis mega mix: act 3. i forgot to keep a material record of what i was planning to name this section, but basically it's going to be about fiction
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 3. I forgot to keep a material record of what I was planning to name this section, but basically it's going to be about fiction
This movie is so distended from reality. Fiction incarnate. In every sense of the word: not indebted to history of our world despite its claims at referencing physics, science, and politics et cetera, and yet also inseparable from all of this. That is, the images are rarently manufactured. They come from tropes (et al) of our world's media ecologies, and yet the film seems as if not beholden to the weights of reality or history. --These are the notes I took while watching Megalopolis.
"Try to maintain the shape"
While I wouldn't say that the film's central theme is fiction (like Funny Games' is, for example), I nevertheless hold that the film is about fiction in a number of ways. The film is a fable, it announces with the title screen. This is the film's closest to telling us that it's dealing with fiction. There also seems to an encounter with fiction in whatever is going on with Adam Driver's character (I think hallucination counts as fiction, but I'm willing to be talked down from this point). Beyond this, however, my certainty falls off sharply (on account of my comprehension doing the same). There seems to be discourses of fiction happening somewhere within the film's addresses of media (fabrication), manufactured / doctored images, and the stories people tell about each other (narratives of identity), et cetera, but I've no clue to what ends these are taken up (or if they really are [i.e., discourses of fiction]).
I've started out speaking in a generalized sense, and I can feel that, even for me, my certainty about what I'm saying warbles and wavers. To build up my vocal resonance, I'll hop down to point out some of what I'm referring to. This close-er reading will be limited, however, in that I both did not watch the movie that attentively, as discussed in Act 1 and that even when I paid attention I couldn't always comprehend what I was looking at. In this way, I will speak about what I think I saw. Know, then, that some of this might be me plastering onto the film's images things invented in my delirious mind's eye. Surely something is lost in between the encounter with the screen and my reconstructive gesture of memory. One thing I remember, for example, is seeing a confederate flag at one point (in the banquet scene or whatever that was with the Christian rock song and the Cirque du Soleil performance and the bidding over Vesta's virginity or whatever was going on there). The context for this is (what preceded the flag cameo in the scene) this is after the screen gets highjacked and idk who broadcasts (a doctored?) video of Adam Driver's character having sex with Vesta, chaos breaks loose and people (angry rioters) spill into the center of the colisseum or whatever kind of architecture they're in. The rioters fight with police. During the scuffle, there's one or two shots where at least one of the people is carrying a confederate flag. Outside of this scene, I don't remember seeing the confederate flag show up again. The rioters come back a few more times later in the film, but I don't think they have the flag with them again. (That said, it's worth noting that they are vaguely MAGA/Jan 6 coded during the triptych/Saturnalia bit toward the end). The brief (and singular -- i.e., it only happened once) appearance of the flag, in combination with the many other things happening simultaneously in the banquet scene, meant that I wasn't been able to satisfyingly narrativize it. That I couldn't narrativize an image is relavent because, at least for me, narrativization is a mnemonic mechanism which makes remembering / assigning meaning to an event/image easier. (Images associated with narratives can be easier for me to remember). Since the confederated flag rarely features in the film, the way I narritivize it comes from the meanings I already have associated with it as an exstant symbol in the world I live in. When i see the confederate flag, I think about America's racial history and the type of people -- i'm blanking on the name of them right now -- who pretend mourn the South and do all kinds of political maneuvers to rewrite history and forward anti-black rhetoric and action, etc. I have this narrative about the confederate flag and I can imagine ways it integrates with the film's images, none of them feel satisfying or otherwise in cohesion with the film's surrounding contents. The film might be doing something related to this but I'm not sure what as it's ostensibly not interested in race (for example, from what I could tell, everyone was light skinned). Perhaps, then, the symbol of the flag carries meaning only when considered outside of the film's internal context. That is to say, I feel like the film's fictional world and that world's corresponding history -- which, vis-a-vis the demands of fiction, must necessarily diverge from our own -- neither explain the meaning of this image nor, seemingly, address its presence at all. The flag is a happenstance object. It only means something when the image exits fiction and is confronted on the level of the weight it carries (e.g., the history of violence it symbolizes) in the world that I live in.
Zooming out to a macro level, the film announces itself as a fable and goes through such lengths as using (vaguely) Roman pastiche and rescusitating some story from some period in the history of the Roman Empire. There are characters named Cicero, Caesar, Crassus, et cetera. Yet all the New Rome stuff is... I'm not sure what's happening with it. The film is anachronistic, sure, but the majority of the temporal distensions are just to contact / invoke exactly those symbols already enshrined as meaningful by the interests of power. Roman history is grand, one narrative goes. Historically, people referenced images of Rome as a claim to power or authenticity. Such a tradition reinstates the meanings associated with historical signs. The founding fathers (of America) appealed to Roman Architecture when designing the mechanics and aesthetics of the Capitol. Mussolini appealed to Roman antiquity to reify his claims to power and justify his mode of fascism (see: the Roman image of the fasces, I think?). [I cite these exampels as I believe them to be true, however, I am not well read in the motivations of either party, hence why I avoided specifics; this may be a shorcoming of my argument, but I believe a more researched approach will likely help round out -- i.e., not disprove -- these claims]. Although historically more recent than SPQR etc., the image of the confederate flag is constantly being reinstated by agents of power (to this day). These agitations mean that the reference point for these images cannot be a purely historical one (in the current year, the confederate flag can never signify (the singular idea of) Antebellum naivete etc.; it cannot escape or be disentangled from the way it has been continuously marched on). The agitations mean that the reference point is at once eternally recent and eternally putting on airs as if it has been here the whole time -- as if it knew better (because it was older), etc. I argue Megalopolis, intentionally or not, engages with this phenomenon and the corollary theme of that meaningful signs are made meaningful in correlation to their utility to power and their ease of translation. If a political symbol is too historically contingent, it will not persist (in the terms of the powerful). It is only when something is (imagined to be) generalizeable that power subsumes it and runs with it in whatever ways it does.
Anyways, this film is super fabricated. I can tell that everything is green screen. Nothing resembles the architectural shapes or properties of light I understand as existing in the world that I'm used to living in. The film hovers just at my periphery; I can almost discern what it is. I would say that the film is uncanny, but I don't know that I love this term at the moment. The film is a both-and, I'll say. The film feels epic, in a sense, and yet it feels so miraculously hollow. The performances feel real (e.g., I'm not constantly thinking, oh that's Adam Driver doing his Driver maneuvers), yet the characters do not feel like people. Again, I suppose I'm gesturing at a kind of uncanny. I wish I had a better tool set to say what I'm trying to say. My point in litigating this liminal property of the film is to say that it is undeniably fictive. I could never remove the film from the purview of fiction. If I'm watching The Room, for example, I can say, okay, this is a hokey movie made by non-professional actors et cetera. Even with science fiction films, like, for example, alien, I can pick up on enough things that resembles things in the world I live in -- e.g., people talk around a table, people experience anxiety and fear, there are cats, etc. This can be true for Megalopolis, but there were a surprising number of times where it wasn't true for me. Where I couldn't make sense of almost anything I was seeing in terms dispossessed of fiction. The film doesn't care about realism, or legibility, or any of that. It's in its own lane. For the purposes of what I'm trying to describe, this is what I mean by the film embodies fiction. And yet----
The countermand to this is what I litigated earlier -- that, simultaneously, the film spits out this constant laceration of signs canonized by perevious eras of power. In that these are signs, they are fiction, but in that they point to things I can make sense of in the terms of the world I live in, they are not as fictional. What I'm trying to say is that the film somehow doesn't care to observe history (historical patterns of urban planning are seemingly irrelevant; historical precedents for how media operates or how people have beef with each other are seemingly irrelevent, etc.) and yet there this constant insistence on pastiche with a vaguely historical veneer. Journalists use flash bulbs for their cameras, someone sings America, America, or whatever, in an Elvis impersonator get up....
The compresence of these impossible contradictions (that make perfect sense and which glom together like water and oil and paper and glue)... Megalopolis is all tell and no show, and all show and no tell. We see everything, but it is not telling us anything. We are told everytthing, but it is not showing us anything (how the fiction operates; what its legacy was). [The film does not show what the signs mean divorced from what they mean in our world; It does not tell what the city's legacy is is divorced from ... well it doint tell anything in that regard; the movie just starts -- at which point point the city already was for who knows how long -- and then it just stops...)
Is this the only way we can be living?, I wonder, seeing the film, feeling caught in a garrote
MEGALOPOLIS MEGAMIX NAV: ACT 1 | ACT 2 | ACT 3