Spoilers ahead: Did David Graeber really influence Francis Ford Coppola’s vision of the film?
~ Simoun Magsalin ~
I first heard of Megalopolis (2024) last year when its director-writer-producer Francis Ford Coppola shared the four books that have “strongly influenced” his vision for the film. Three of the books were by the late David Graeber, namely Debt (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021). This was quite intriguing. Would Adam Driver’s character, Cesar, be some sort of Graeberian utopian radical fighting against the corrupt Romanesque elite?
Searching for Graeber in Megalopolis, however, is somewhat difficult, unless Coppola’s reading of Graeber was a shallow misreading. Don’t get me wrong; the film is monumental, Promethean even, and consuming and reflecting on the film leaves one at a loss for words—that’s certainly what I felt going out the cinema. But a reflection and accounting of the film’s politics is critical. Megalopolis, after all, takes itself seriously, sometimes too seriously—“It insists upon itself” was once the criticism lodged against Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). For Megalopolis, politics is absolutely central to the film’s theme and message. It is at once a story about an empire in decline and a society in renewal. But as we will see, this renewal is ambiguous.
Empire of Decadence
For starters, the film clearly is trying to say something about the fall of empires. Coppola re-imagines New York as New Rome, a capital city of an empire in decline. The opening shot of the film sees a relic of a past empire, an abandoned nuclear-powered Soviet satellite with C.C.C.P. (the official acronym of the Soviet Union in Cyrillic) embossed. The message is clear: an empire has fallen in recent memory and the empire centred on New Rome can fall too.
But what is Empire to Coppola? Nowhere in the film do we see the dastard inner workings of Empire or imperialism. Decadence is in open display, and corruption too. We are reminded several times Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) is so decadent that he and his siblings sleep with one another. Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is widely denounced and hated as corrupt, calling for a new state-of-the-art casino to be built where the Design Authority (that Cesar heads) had demolished some tenements. Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), once Cesar’s classy girlfriend has a whole arc where she marries Cesar’s uncle Crassus (Jon Voight), banker and the wealthiest man of the world, and tries to steal Crassus’s bank from under him. There are fascists too, represented by Clodio (Cesar’s cousin and grandson of Crassus) and his coterie.
Empire in Megalopolis, then, is not the Empire of Joyful Militancy (2017) or the “the organized destruction under which we live,” of domination, capital, hierarchy, patriarchy, imperialism, and all. In fact, while oppression to immigrants is hinted at the film—the Design Authority apparently demolishes some immigrant neighbourhoods off-screen (gentrification much?)—the “empire” in decline is merely characterised by decadence. To be sure, our own era of late capitalism really is marked by decadence, but the precise character of this decadence is rooted precisely marked by “organized destruction.” The empire of decadence in Megalopolis is one divorced from oppression, domination, and organised destruction.
The first we do see of the working class, we see them under the leadership of fascism. Fascism is curious in Megalopolis in that it is a working class movement made of immigrants and “human garbage”—as Clodio’s fascist associate puts it. One fascist associate even has a black sun tattoo on his forehead. This working class is being misled and provoked by Clodio and his coterie for personal ends to be used against Cesar. At one point, Clodio’s associate stands atop a tree stump in the shape of a swastika while Clodio organises a Trumpist-esque rally—“subtext is for cowards” indeed. That fascism in Megalopolis is a working class mob goaded by a decadent incestuous party-boy for the purposes of a personal vendetta, and not a petty bourgeois mass movement in the defence of their property against both big business and communism is certainly a writing choice, just as Megalopolis is a movie of all time. Sure, fascists in the film do get their comeuppance, and it’s quite satisfying to see Clodio get Mussolinied (get mobbed and strung upside down), but aren’t the working class justified in their anger against Cesar? Since his Design Authority demolished their homes after all? After all, we are not told if either the government or the Design Authority gives them new homes in the titular Megalopolis.
For Megalopolis, the renewal of society is not class struggle, anti-fascism, and generalised resistance to Empire, but the foregoing decadence and literally designing a utopian new world. This is precisely Julia Cicero’s (Nathalie Emmanuel) arc in the film. She desists in her party-girl lifestyle (decidedly not going back to the cluUuUb) and becomes Cesar’s secretary and love interest after witnessing him stop time and encountering his genius upfront. The fascism of the working class is defeated by a few utopian arguments from Cesar as the working class embraces Megalopolis and subsequently Mussolinies Clodio.
There’s this whole bit where Cesar loudly shouts in front of a loud crowd, “We are in need of a great debate about the future! We want every person in the world to take part in that debate.” But for Megalopolis, silence is quite louder than words: we never hear of the perspective of the working class in the film, only that they are angry at Cesar for levelling their neighbourhoods for Megalopolis and left out in the cold with no house (and very explicitly) “no food.”
The City of the Future
Cesar’s Design Authority levels whole neighbourhoods for the construction of Cesar’s dream: Megalopolis. Megalopolis is not built with mere concrete and steel, but Megalon, a fantastical interactive material invented by Cesar himself that won him a Nobel Prize. For Megalopolis, the city of the future is techno-futurism, a fallacy wherein contradictions in society can be solved in the future through technology. After the decaying Soviet nuclear satellite falls on New Rome, Cesar has the literal clearance he needs to build Megalopolis. Beside the fact that “never let a good disaster go to waste” is a neoliberal dictum, Megalopolis here misunderstands the utopian potential of a liberated city. We don’t even see if the working class thrives in the new Megalopolis.
For Megalopolis, Megalopolis is a city powered by Megalon that intuitively responds to the needs of its citizens. Megalon escalators, walkalators and spherical carriages allows citizens to speed around Megalopolis, and the Megalon houses expand when families grow bigger, and pieces of Megalon architecture can move to act as umbrellas or moving covered walkways.
But a city is not made merely by its architecture and technologies. Henri Lefebvre argued in Le Droit à la Ville/The Right to the City (1968/1996) that just as the products of the labour of workers is expropriated by the capitalist with only a pittance returned as wages, cities are likewise the product of the everyday life and living of its citizens as denizens. The city is produced and reproduced by its residents, but the whole of the city is appropriated by the ruling class, creating a city in which the people created and reproduced but are simultaneously excluded from. In the same way that the communist project seeks for workers to expropriate the expropriators and control the full value of labour, the right to the city sees that the city must be re-appropriated in turn and returned to those who truly make the city: the everyday working class people of the city. This is the city of the future that the right to the city promises for working people.
But for Megalopolis, the struggle for the right to the city goes in the opposite direction. It is Cesar and the Design Authority—the expropriators of urban housing—that creates the city of the future. The deliberate exclusion of working peoples from the planning of Megalopolis betrays Cesar’s desire to bring about the “great debate about the future.” Just for Megalopolis, the working class is left homeless and without food, falling to the clutches and machinations of fascism. How much less can imperialized peoples of the world participate in Cesar’s “great debate”?
Rather than techno-futurism, the city of the future can only be built through class struggle. Techno-futurism is a fallacy precisely because “there are no technological solutions to social problems,” as the saying goes. Megalon, for all the brilliant applications it could have in the real world, is ultimately a technology that can and will be appropriated by Empire. In the film, this is somewhat the case: Cesar is born into privilege as a member of the Crassus clan and Crassus himself seems to own the patent for Megalon. Crassus, however, releases the patent to the world; presumably, the entire system of intellectual property still remains in place, despite that it is (presumably) the workers who produce Megalon for Megalopolis. It is only through class struggle by which intellectual property can be smashed and the means by which to create Megalon can be released to the whole world, and Megalopolis to be created, directed, produced, and reproduced by the people who live in and make the city every day, rather than the ego of one man like Cesar.
O Graeber, Where art thou?
If Francis Ford Coppola drew inspiration from David Graeber, perhaps we must ask where Graeber’s influence is in all of Megalopolis. We can certainly see the utopian aspects of the film, and David Graeber is really all about what this world could be. He once wrote, “every day we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?” (Bullshit Jobs, 2018) Graeber’s vision of an alternative world is certainly a theme in the film. The film even ends with a pledge to humanity, after all.
But Graeber’s analytical method is one precisely not rooted in utopianism but materialism. Many are the Marxists who would lodge the complaint that Graeber was not dialectical materialist, but his anthropological method is one precisely and specifically rooted in materialism. His arguments in Debt, for example, are rooted in historical, archaeological, and anthropological records and research. His arguments are consistently evidence-based, rather than one rooted in utopian designs. If Graeber did write on utopias, it was in the context of nowtopias, that is, taking human beings as they are now and finding the ways by which people are already doing alternative and liberatory ways of doing things right now. Indeed, Graeber famously wrote about anarchism as a way most everyday people do anarchy right now in simple and mundane things like self-organising a waiting line at the jeepney or bus stop or organising non-hierarchically in voluntary organisations like clubs.
Yet the Graeberian stand-in with Cesar sees social change precisely in utopian terms, as a plan to be carried out by benevolence, whether of Cesar, Crassus, and a converted Cicero, or by the Design Authority. This is quite literally classical utopian socialism as envisaged by Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Fourier’s phalanstery finds new life in the titular Megalopolis. Megalopolis seems to have a grand plan for humanity, a utopia for all humanity, how it means to reach it is unclear.
At the end of the film, Megalopolis’ utopia is still someplace in the future, with the titular Megalopolis being only a fraction of Cesar’s full vision. Crucially, the utopian future of Megalopolis is one predicated by technology and coming together to sing kumbaya after the bad billionaire heir is Mussolinied. What practices Cesar and Julia use to build the city in the future was shown through a montage where Cesar’s team toss a ball around and do team-building exercises (it’s hard to make stuff up things about this film; it’s just so unreal at times). The “great debate about the future” that Cesar talked about in the climax of the film is also one that doesn’t take place. This great debate is the closest we can get to a Graeberian perspective, embodying the new global collective decision to decide how to socially reproduce the world against Empire, but it just doesn’t take place—the film just ends.
It’s clear that Megalopolis does try to impart something Graeberian in its viewers. The pledge to humanity at the end imparts a kind of common loyalty to humanity that implies a certain treachery to nation-states and Empire. But this grand vision of a common humanity seems undermined by Cesar’s Design Authority mowing down the homes of working people. It’s unclear what Megalopolis means by this since the theme of hypocrisy is not particularly present in the film (as much as say, decadence), nor is Cesar presented as particularly hypocritical.
Coda
I’m not telling you not to watch Megalopolis. Cinema simply isn’t made like this anymore with grand earnest visions. The role of literary criticism is not to say things are bad and wrong, but to unpack, dissect, and figure out how the text works. Students dissect frogs to learn about internal biology while physicists smash particles together to make sense of the universe. In the same way, literary criticism deconstructs and reconstructs the text to learn more not just about the film, but about the society that made it.
What can literary criticism of Megalopolis tell us about the society that made it then? I think Megalopolis speaks to the idea that social renewal relies on great men like Cesar, great technologies like Megalon, and great visions like Megalopolis. This reflects a largely liberal world-view that eschews revolution and revolutionary change. This is, perhaps, not surprising given the class conditions of its director-writer-producer. But crucially, this literary criticism and discussions of it are only made possible through the production of the film.
