Francis Ford Coppola’s Contentious Utopia w/ Kate Wagner

The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie or not, the uncontestable fact is it is rich in ideas and offers much to talk about.

To talk about the movie I spoke with The Nation’s architectural critic Kate Wagner. We discuss the movie’s relationship to early 20^th century modernism as well as earlier movies such as Metropolis and the fiction of Ayn Rand. A major topic of conversation is the film’s reactionary gender politics.

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