Inspired by Kat Rosenfield’s hyperambiguous pan of Coppola’s Megalopolis, I went with my filmmaker cinephile son-in-law to see it firsthand and participate in this very weird reflection on this very weird moment in history. Her review brought to mind the failed tightrope walker from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The tightrope walker tried to cross over to an unknown destiny. He was jeered at by the crowd, he was jeered at by his own conscience, he lost his faith and balance and he fell to his death. Zarathustra honored him for taking the risk and for failing. Rosenfield seemed to want to pick up Coppola’s broken body and honor it with an honorable burial. Which is weird, come to think of it, because this film is modeled on Rome, its protagonist is a man named Cesar, and the comment I posted in Rosenfield’s review was “So you come to praise this movie, not bury it?”

Pretty much everything associated with this movie concerns burials and questions of what deserves honor, or ridicule or an ironic blendings of the two. And ah, sahib, it is this very question all the way down, apparently to infinite depths. Except, if you pay attention, the depth effect is obviously just an infinity mirror of self-consciousness looking into own self-consciousness and seeing its own self-consciousness reflected in itself, ad infinitum. The whole infinity effect is produced inside the dimensions of a stage. But maybe this is precisely Coppola’s point? So is it a feature? A bug? A stupid gimmick?

Like the film, like this time this film critiques, our film-watching experience was so self-consciously aware of its own awareness of its own experience that the film itself became one layer in a stack of meta-experiences reflecting on other meta-experiences. I doubt it is possible to watch this film without watching yourself watching it, while also imagining the experience of those enlisted in the making of the film and the state of being of someone who would make a film like this. This is a reflection on grand decadence from a perspective of the most grandiose decadence. To watch it is to step into a hall of mirrors, and to become crazy.

Coppola’s now got me, and any other sucker who buys a ticket all wound up in his egotistic vision. We’re so busy asking ourselves what people like us ought to think about a film like this by a director like Coppola, it no longer occurs to us to just become absorbed in the film and involved with the characters and to be moved however the art actually, in fact, moves us.

So shoveling aside all meta-bullshit, how was it to watch this movie? At about the ten-minute mark, I began waiting for it to end. I was watching it and straining to be generous, trying to see what it had to offer. But, experientially, the closest comparison I can make the 2016 AI experiment-parody Sunspring, which shackled talented actors to a script that computationally imitated meaningful human speech without meaning anything at all. I suppose we could call the effect this sort of thing has on meaning-seeking minds “hallucinatory” or “dream-like”. But we could also call it “boggling at nonsense”.

Now another text comes to mind, a debate between two architects. And I swear it is pure coincidence that Coppola’s Cesar character is, in addition to being Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, also an architect — a Howard Roarke with magic powers.

The debate took place in 1982 at the very height of postmodernism, pitting antimodernist Christopher Alexander against ultrapostmodernist Peter Eisenman:

Alexander: …when I make an arcade I have a very simple purpose, and that is to try to make it feel absolutely comfortable — physically, emotionally, practically, and absolutely. This is pretty hard to do. … The thing that strikes me about your friend’s building — if I understood you correctly — is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.

Eisenman: That is correct.

Alexander: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.

The two luminaries go back and forth for awhile, with Eisenman defending the importance of reflecting the anxious, uncomfortable and disharmonious state of the world through architecture, and Alexander insisting that the role of architecture should be to materially improve the state of the world by creating comfortable and harmonious structures thereby reducing anxiety.

Eisenman: I am not preaching disharmony. I am suggesting that disharmony might be part of the cosmology that we exist in. I am not saying right or wrong. My children live with an unconscious fear that they may not live out their natural lives. I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety. An architecture that puts its head in the sand and goes back to neoclassicism, and Schinkel, Lutyens, and Ledoux, does not seem to be a way of dealing with the present anxiety. Most of what my colleagues are doing today does not seem to be the way to go. Equally, I do not believe that the way to go, as you suggest, is to put up structures to make people feel comfortable, to preclude that anxiety. What is a person to do if he cannot react against anxiety or see it pictured in his life? After all, that is what all those evil Struwwel Peter characters are for in German fairy tales.

Alexander: Don’t you think there is enough anxiety at present? Do you really think we need to manufacture more anxiety in the form of buildings?

And there we are.

I’ll suggest that Megalopolis is just another bucketful of the water we are drowning in.