megaflopolis
or: architecture as insemination
Megalopolis isn’t really a movie about architecture, but it is a movie about erections.
If you haven’t seen it, let me do my best to describe its convoluted plot with concision. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, a handsome and infallibly talented architect, is embroiled in dual conflicts: The first is a Moses-esque power struggle with Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) the conservative mayor of New Rome over the fate of a large parcel of land on which Cicero wants to build a casino as opposed to Catalina’s experimental utopian microcity Megalopolis. The conservative mayor takes special issue with the use of Catalina’s Nobel-winning “Megalon” - a miracle substance that can both heal gunshot wounds and construct buildings without labor. (How convenient!)
The other struggle is between Catalina and his jealous, scheming cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who, along with Catalina’s ex, the tv-journalist Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) wants to seize control of the family megabank chaired by the aging Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight) and thereby foil Catalina from ever building Megalopolis. (Platinum herself is an archetypal, greedy seductress: Catalina dumps her; old Crassus, in search of a little spice, marries her, and Clodio sleeps with her.) But, Catalina, being simply built different than his nemeses, surviving everything from slander to assassination attempts, is, thankfully able to bring Megalopolis to fruition. Thus, he stands upon his computer-rendered creation and gives a big speech about the need to do big things and make art no matter the cost. All is right in the world.
If you’re looking for a The Power Broker type movie about architecture or spatial politics, search elsewhere. At the root of both Cicero and Clodio’s animosity towards our architect hero is petty envy and an inability to understand the great vision of Catalina, as opposed to any clear ideological or political motive. The fact, for example, that Megalopolis is built on an imploded public housing estate is used only as a cudgel by Clodio to stir up the public’s anti-Catalina sentiment — not for what would be an interesting political reason but because Clodio hates Catalina. Cicero’s land use spat transpires only in a dueling press conference with Catalina, never to return after the film’s exposition.
The decadence of New Rome, a hyper-capitalist Shakespeare-referencing iteration of New York, is more aesthetic than interrogative via its mix of 1920s Art Deco, Versace, and a kind of gritty opera-set Postmodernism. (I will be tackling the aesthetic and architectural elements of the film in a separate review for Curbed.) Finally, The subplot of Catalina’s uncle’s bank and the unquestionable control of the rich in both building and undermining Megalopolis is portrayed as a mere family struggle rather than as a material question or even a question of artistic or ethical integrity. In general, all the frictions of city-making simply disappear. The Megalon foil, after all, makes every feat of intent, engineering and execution feasible. Something the film does belie about architecture, however, is the still-dominant, highly-gendered portrayal of the architect as a sole, white male genius, inseminating the world with his brilliant ideas.
The gender politics of Megalopolis are fraught. The conflicts of the movie are not, at their core, architectural, but sexual, wrapped in an architectural facade. Perhaps this is also why these conflicts are so undercooked, both in plot and in depth: nothing can be allowed to truly threaten the virility of Catalina as either thinker or man. The film is saturated with erotic fantasy, anxiety, and objectifying ideation.
That the banker Crassus, old (yet fertile!) boomer that he is, still knows better than his stupid, dissolute son reveals not only sexual insecurity, but a trenchant generational fantasy of control and a resentful inability to cede it – anxieties not uncommon throughout our American gerontocracy. The battle with the mayor over the future of both site and city is not a battle of ideas but a battle of two masculine egos vying for control over the same woman: Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter. Julia, initially portrayed as a tabloid-cover hedonistic sexpot, first tries to ameliorate things between Catalina and Cicero by visiting the former at his office where he immediately treats her sexistly (“go back to the club”) – at least until realizing that Julia is uniquely aware that Catalina has the power to stop time. (Which the Megalon can also do for some reason.) The two then inevitably fall in love, even though Julia finds out Catalina drove his ex-wife to suicide by way of being too much of a complex, difficult genius. Thus the problem between mayor and architect is resolved in a rather medieval fashion: Catalina impregnates Julia, forcing everyone to reconcile. Architecture!
In a particularly emblematic, misogynistic scene, this time architecturally set in a Madison Square Garden that’s been transformed into a kind of Little Ceasar’s Colosseum, Platinum and Crassus host a joint wedding party and fundraiser for Megalopolis. For their entertainment and as a money-raising scheme, the teen pop star Vesta Sweetwater, solicits wealthy donors to take the “virgin’s pledge” in which their funds are backed by the girl’s guarantee to remain pure. Clodio, as part of his revenge, fabricates photos of Vesta and Catalina in bed together and blasts them over the jumbotron, causing a testosterone-fueled riot in which Catalina is badly beaten and arrested for having relations with a minor.
This is all very Freudian already, wrapped up in masculine fantasies of age and desire, as well as creepy obsessions with young women’s sexual intactness, but there’s yet another sexist twist. Here, Julia (now Catalina’s publicist), the good woman by way of being an ally to the great man, saves the day – not by revealing that the photos were doctored and thus proving the girl innocent, but by instead demonstrating that Vesta, not so sweet after all, is lying about her age and is, in fact, 23. What’s most interesting to me about this scene, however, is that by being the evil foil to the noble, manly Catalina, Clodio is emasculated. Later in the film, Platinum bosses him around and sexually dominates him, Crassus tells him if he wants to be a real man, he should cut off his long hair. But here, in the Vesta scene, Clodio is dressed in drag. He is portrayed not as himself but as a woman – because greed, petty jealousy, falsity, and cowardice are women’s traits, women’s tactics.
Something about all this felt strangely familiar. Even before asking the woman question, one immediately notices Megalopolis shares a lot of DNA with the two major novels of Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. That’s not surprising, considering Coppola originally wanted to adapt The Fountainhead itself as a film. Hence, the surface-level comparisons are fairly obvious: both novels and the film feature long, concluding speeches as trophies of triumph. Atlas and Megalopolis progress from dystopian, decadent societies towards utopian cities-from-scratch — though one must concede that Atlas’ culminating libertarian utopia of Galt’s Gulch, is characterized by resentful separatism and withdrawal, the abandonment of the talentless by the talented while Megalopolis, is vague in scope beyond being Good and Beautiful, a gift to the world. Regardless, both Coppola and Rand’s protagonists persevere in the face of an uncompromising, ignorant world set on rejecting their innovations, a world that wants to stamp out freedom, beauty, and merit.
What is less initially apparent to the viewer are the identical, unique, and explicit narrative and ideological structures of sex and gender. Of course, both works rely on infallible, totemic male protagonists pursuing the greatness of individual projects (a modernist housing estate (!) the hero blows up out of spite in The Fountainhead and the various industrialist enterprises ultimately comprising Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged.) In Atlas Shrugged there is even a seminal parallel to the Megalon, Reardon Steel, a super-strong metal that’s the brainchild of the genius industrialist Hank Reardon. Reardon is also the love interest of the central character of the novel, the railway scion Dagny Taggart, before she discovers John Galt, who is more a papier-mache puppet for capitalism than a human being. Like she did with Reardon before him, Taggart gives herself to Galt unconditionally, sealing the ideological transfer and thus consummating the end of the book.
Above all, this, to me, is what Megalopolis shares most strongly with Rand: the transmission and ultimately the success of these great men’s ideas happens in part through sex with “strong” female counterparts, women just independent enough to resist so as to ultimately become subordinate. Within such an analysis, these women, inherently receptive, can represent the audience, the public, the youth of tomorrow, etc., but they are also, specifically women. In other words, submitting to the worldview, politics, and projects of the work itself occurs through an allegorical sexual submission.
In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark’s lover Dominique Francon is, like Coppola’s Julia, the daughter of a powerful man, in this case a quarry magnate. Similar to Julia, the publicist, Dominique is a newspaper columnist, a vessel for the public. Already the nemesis of Ellsworth Toohey, the most powerful architecture critic in literature (to my eternal chagrin), Roark is unceasingly distrustful of the masses and is wary of Francon as being in ideological bed with the enemy. Like Catalina and Julia’s, the conflict with Dominique is mediated through sex, in this case a “passionate” rape scene between her and Roark. Like Coppola does with Wow Platinum, Rand passes Dominique around to other men in the novel so as to demonstrate their inferiority to her tortured genius. However, unlike Wow, Dominique is reformed through sex, and her once-fraught passion ends in her finally belonging solely to Roark, thus signifying a total and embodied concession to Roark’s singular talent and ideological rigor.
Unfortunately, a sexist movie, in part reflects a sexist reality. Architecture is a historically male dominated profession and continues to be today. Fewer than 40% of registered architects in the US are women. From Vitruvius to the titans of modernism, western architectural history for the majority of its existence portrayed architecture as a continuing litany of great individual men. Even though architecture, being drafted and built by many human hands, has never been a solitary art, writers and filmmakers like Rand and Coppola cling to the image of the sole male architect for a reason beyond mere misunderstanding of how architecture works. Architecture, to them, is public-facing, rooted in space, an art exacted upon the landscape. It can be forced – as Megalopolis is – into existence in spite of or to acculturate an ignorant or philistine public that knows no better. Being in the world, it must be reckoned with, thus eliminating the challenge of cultivating an audience that plagues other artistic endeavors. In other words more fitting to the theme of gender: architecture is the least consensual of all arts. Its power lies in being inescapable, unlike, say, seeing a really bad movie.