Megalopolis: The Unfortunate Illusion of Profundity

A movie review and some digressions on a debate

Jordan Peterson strikes me as one of the most difficult people in the world to have a conversation with. By that, I don’t mean that he lacks a cordial disposition, or the ability to listen, or that he’s particularly rude, or anything along those lines. I mean, quite literally, he seems to excel at making conversations difficult, obscure, needlessly and endlessly complicated. Ask him a simple question and watch him respond like it's some high-level mathematical equation:

This moment became a meme for good reason. There is a place, especially when speaking of the endlessly complicated topic of scriptural exegesis, for taking a step back and re-examining our presuppositions. But Peterson doesn’t want to take a simple step back; he wants to sprint in the opposite direction. He constantly and consistently acts like there is no such thing as a straightforward question, or at the least, continually demonstrates a severe allergy to anything even resembling a straightforward answer. Speaking with Peterson these days requires a process of patient decoding, which is why in his recent discussion with Richard Dawkins, the eminently merciful Alex O’Connor was brought in, nominally to moderate, but it seems primarily to act as a sort of interpreter for Peterson. 

It’s not that Peterson is operating on some unassailable level of intellectual acuity, so philosophically advanced that it takes a well-read and thoughtful guy like O’Connor to translate his brilliant deductions into common parlance. Quite the opposite, in fact: Peterson imbues the simplest of inquiries with the impregnable profundity of the most obscurely perspicacious archaism. If you’re not paying attention, you could mistake his balderdash for insight, but for the vast majority of the conversation in question (and most conversations I’ve seen from him recently), he’s just being needlessly difficult.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis suffers from extremely similar foibles. The pitch for the spiritual sequel to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has all the trappings of a potential magnum opus. Witness: the first century BCE Catilinarian conspiracy transposed into the modern day, a sci-fi and fantastical re-imagining of American culture in the form of New York City reborn as “New Rome,” the elites of society engaging in high-rolling, bacchanal festivities clad in appropriately Latin garb. Amidst this spectacle, the visionary Caesar (Adam Driver), enigmatic creator of the futuristic building material (and disoriented metaphor) known as“Megalon,”¹ finds himself up against Mayor Cicero’s (Giancarlo Esposito) preservation of the status quo, and both of their worlds are thrown into turmoil when Cicero’s party-girl daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) strikes up a working relationship with Caesar. These higher than life characters speak of art and literature, dream of bright and aspirational futures, quote Ovid and Shakespeare,² and occasionally use superpowers to freeze time.

The film is hopelessly lost in its own ambition in a way that I recognize. More than once over the years, I’ve witnessed a filmmaker ruin their own work through re-working it too many times. It’s a trap that’s far too easy to fall into: the filmmaker understands their film better than anyone else, so if they work on it too much or too long, they inevitably begin to make changes to keep it interesting for themselves, and spread over a long enough period of time, this can result in a film utterly losing it’s original focus. As the saying goes: finished is always better than perfect.

I suspect Megalopolis suffered from a bit of this developmental difficulty over its lengthy production. Coppola, reportedly, has been trying to get this film made for something like 40 years, and as a result, the film feels exactly like an idea that’s been workshopped and re-tweaked for, well, something like 40 years. I’m delighted that a filmmaker of Coppola’s prowess was able to execute on his vision with little to no artistic compromise but I also sincerely wish I, or anyone, could understand the movie.

Not to say that it’s completely devoid of meaning. Some symbolism is clear, some character beats connect, some lines resonate, and many of the performances shine. Adam Driver is eminently watchable, be it in high drama art mode or relishing in pure SNL silliness, and both ends of that spectrum are present in this film. Shia Labeouf, of all people, steals the whole show (for better or worse) playing Clodio, a wackadoodle, incestuous rich kid who runs the gauntlet from irresponsible party boy to amoral populist political figure.³ Nathalie Emmanuel embodies her character with the general disposition and delivery of a six-year-old which, while a bizarre choice (and one I assume had to be a directorial note), made for some hilariously entertaining scenes.

But at the end of it all, the film is mostly nonsense. One can more or less distill a thesis from the whole, a few cogent statements on progress and ambition, a few discernible gestures towards idealism and hope, but any emotional impact these themes could have conveyed is drowned in a sea of idiosyncratic ridiculousness. I’m certain there are meanings I missed and implications I did not pick up on, but I suspect quite strongly that to suffuse the film in depth and significance would require a healthy serving of rather speculative eisegesis.

That being said, I could be wrong. A couple repeat viewings and some next-level analysis could reveal a hidden masterpiece at the core of the film that eluded me upon my first viewing and a half.⁴ I sincerely doubt it, but I openly admit that I did not understand large portions of the film, and while I would credit that misunderstanding to critically poor storytelling, I’m open to being wrong.

Dr. Peterson, on the other hand, I understand completely. I may wax poetic about his word salads and lengthy faux-substantive tangents, but at the end of the day I’m able to comprehend what he’s saying, which is precisely why I come down as harshly as I do. Peterson puts a remarkable amount of effort and a voluminous amount of words into not committing to an answer. It’s almost comical to see the gentle and measured moments where O’Connor, admirably keeping his composure, interrupts Peterson’s attempts to pivot with a desperate: “surely you understand what you are being asked?”

It took a bit of reflection for me to realize what Dr. Peterson is doing when he exegetes scripture, but the conclusion is actually quite simple: Peterson is doing theology without theology and attempting spiritual exegesis without the Spirit. A psychological examination of evolutionary human traits encoded within ancient myths could be an interesting exercise in the abstract, but Peterson repeatedly acts as if the abstracted Jungian archetypes are the authorial intent of the text. He sidesteps clear theological readings in favor of filtrated myth, ignoring things like John’s utilization of the symbolism of the Pascal Lamb to promote a notion that John is actually making abstract statements about sacrifice and its role in societal and individual progress. He pulls so far back from the details of these stories in pursuit of misstated archetypal reductions of their characters that by the end of his examination, he’s not even really talking about the story he’s talking about.⁵ He tries to defend the veracity of a given tale by insisting its mythic and metaphorical connotations are all that truly matter, but I can’t help thinking his real motivation is to avoid letting his predominantly Christian audience realize that he is still thoroughly an atheist. In practice, he explicates a hermeneutic of confusion, a conceited effort to replace ambiguity with obfuscation and eschew clarity at all costs.

Megalopolis and Peterson’s approach to scripture share this unfortunate commonality— the illusion of profundity. When abject nonsense takes the form of a drunken ramble, we have no issues identifying and dismissing it as such. But when abject nonsense puts on the garb of high art or pseudo-philosophical acuity, suddenly it shakes us into a posture of doubt. There’s an intentionality to Peterson’s ramblings, just as there is an intentionality to the beautiful images in Megalopolis, and both boast an impressive vocabulary and the occasional genuine moment of depth or sagacity (usually in the form of paraphrasing ancient philosophers). And because both are delivered in a muddled, confusing, yet boldly confident manner, until we are given permission to call them what they are, we may feel pressured to give them more credit than they’ve earned.⁶

I don’t ascribe malice in either case. Dr. Peterson strikes me as sincere, though desperately misguided, and Coppola strikes me as the same, though much more forgivably. An artist’s hubris is more noble than that of someone in Peterson’s position, who both chooses to speak as an authority and should know better. Coppola’s honest artistic failures are well worth the criticism levied against them, but the world is made better by their existence, while Peterson’s injudicious misrepresentations of Christianity do more harm than good.

Despite my mostly critical tone, I actually enjoyed Megalopolis. Coppola clearly wanted to make this movie and genuine, unfettered artistic expression with a 120 million dollar budget is nothing if not entertaining. For all the jokes I will make about it and criticisms I will levy against it, I’m glad this film exists and would much rather spend two hours baffled by its absurdity that bored by whatever reboot or derivative-meta-self-aware remake is currently winning the box office.

But I did not enjoy listening to the conversation between Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Peterson. While it had entertaining moments, the majority was a frustrating slog between a man who cares nothing for symbols or spirituality and a man who cares a lot about both, but doesn’t believe in them outside of their very Dawkins-esque utility.

If you have no religious convictions, you will take no offense at reducing spirituality to an abstraction and nothing more, but when a nonbeliever doing so suddenly becomes a cultural thought leader in the Christian space, well, now we have a problem. It is worrisome when the closest thing to Patristic spiritual exegesis of the Bible some people have is not the careful kerygmatic theology of those with Christian conviction (or at least a basic understanding of Biblical scholarship), but instead the largely baseless and speculative psychological abstractions of someone with no true skin in the game.

So at the end of it all, Dr. Peterson’s exegesis shares the same hubris as Megalopolis’ mysterious “Megalon” substance: an abstract concept desperately attempting to coalesce into something significant, yet too fractured by its frantic imagination and distracted by its own digressions to make any meaningful sense.

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1. Don’t ask, the movie doesn’t really tell. The substance is for buildings and also can…heal wounds? And Caesar is accused of using his wife’s dead body to create it? And…things?

2. Early in the film, apropos of nothing, Driver delivers the entirety of the “to be or not to be” monologue. Though the funniest Shakespeare reference has to be when Shia Labeouf’s character frustratedly screams “will no one rid me of this fucking cousin??”

3. I think he also…becomes Trump at one point? He starts shouting about making the country great again and deporting immigrants.

4. The power went out in the theater on my first viewing, so I’ve seen the first half of the movie twice.

5. He desperately, DESPERATELY needs to listen to his own advice and go back to following rule #10 of his 12 rules for life.

6. A good example is Megalopolis’ infamous fake quote marketing campaign. This was obviously a mistake, but there’s a moment in the movie with a similar phenomena. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius is quoted as having said: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” Thing is, the quote appears nowhere in his works, instead it appears to originate with Leo Tolstoy mistakenly attributing it to him. Someone determined to find brilliance in Megalopolis might say the marketing campaign was done intentionally in conjunction with this false attribution to make a statement about…something, when in reality, both are clearly just blunders.