Building with Megalon

Quite a few films featuring architects as main characters have been made in the 75 years since it was released, but Gary Cooper’s portrayal of Howard Roark in King Vidor’s 1949 film The Fountainhead remains the most famous big-screen architect. The film was based on Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel of the same name, in which Roark was clearly inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright — his convictions and ego made him a suitable symbol of Rand’s objectivist philosophy. In one of the most famous parts of both the book and film, Roark dynamites a building he has designed because it was modified against his wishes. 

Echoes of The Fountainhead can be found in Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s four-decades-in-the-making film pitting Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), “a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future,” against Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), “who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare,” according to the film’s website. Not only is Catilina’s ego as outsized as Roark, the story in Megalopolis also hinges, at least in part, on dynamite. In a scene early in the film, Driver’s character, sitting down in front of one of his drawings, waves his hand to direct the implosion of a building in order to create a clean slate for his Megalopolis project — a nature-inspired dream where buildings resemble and even move like plants, unlike the buildings of brick, stone, steel, and concrete that populate New Rome and other cities.

Even though Catilina is named for Lucius Sergius Catilina, who conspired to overthrow Rome in 63 BCE but was summarily executed by newly elected consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, the film's implosion harkens back to the 20th century. Not only do the buildings destroyed by Catilina resemble the public housing built in New York City around the time of The Fountainhead — public housing that required the razing of so-called slums, ironically — we learn that Catilina’s position as chairman of the Design Authority is unelected. As such, the architect is also a master builder on par with Robert Moses, whose control of numerous city agencies last century allowed him to build highways, parks, and other pieces of infrastructure in addition to public housing, reshaping New York City more than anyone else before or since.

The differences between Moses and the Catilina are numerous, especially considering that Moses was not an architect and therefore was more interested in wielding power than in designing structures. The main differences are rooted in Catilina being a character in a film, a work of fiction. Driver’s character can stop time at will and, even though we see him draw with a triangle in one scene and wield a T-square in another (as seen on the film's poster), his material of choice is Megalon, the shape-shifting, bio-adaptive building material he invented and won a Nobel Prize for. Just as Catilina’s “Time stop!” ability further entrenches the fantastical film into realms of fantasy, Megalon works as the film’s silver bullet, an element that allows Coppola to dream up future cities without having to address the physical difficulties involved in realizing them. And that is where architectural fantasy enters the picture.

After Catilina approves the implosion, he crashes a press event at the cleared site where Cicero is unveiling a proposal for a casino to be built there. It is a gaudy, uninspired design that is not so far removed from something a politician might back today. After Catilina enters the scene wearing a Wrightian cape and — oddly and inexplicably — recites all of Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” speech, he tells those assembled that, instead of a casino, the site will be the setting for his Megalopolis and it will be made with Megalon. The conflict between Catilina and Cicero is set here, on rickety catwalks elevated above the ground. Later, his love interest, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), who happens to be the mayor's daughter, visits Catilina's studio at the pinnacle of the Chrysler Building, a space with activity that, instead of resembling an architecture studio, looks more like the backstage of a theater, a circus, or even an improv troupe. There, with eyes closed, she experiences Catilina's dream, not far removed from what we see toward the end of the film.

Those who stick around after the film fades to black and actually watch the credits will see the names of the people who contributed greatly to the film's visuals and Coppola's vision for the future of cities. Credited as visual concept designer is Dean Sherriff, who worked on Godzilla x Kong and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, among other Hollywood movies. Ditto the production design by Beth Mickle and Bradley Rubin, whose credits include the latest The Guardians of the Galaxy and The Mandalorian. No wonder the final cost of the film was reportedly $120 million and at times resembles a Hollywood blockbuster rather than one of Coppola's trademark films, be it The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, or even The Conversation. Even so, with its storyline and intellectual proclivities, Megalopolis will never be mistaken for a Marvel movie.

But the name in the credits that stands out above the rest is Neri Oxman, formerly of the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab and now the head of OXMAN, the “design company advancing the unification of top-down design engineering with bottom-up biological growth.” (The studio happened to open its New York City office last week, the same week that Megalopolis screened at the New York Film Festival.) Oxman is credited as Dr. Lyra Shir, a small role in the film, but also as the “architectural and scientific advisor.” The official production notes for Megalopolis attribute the concept of Megalon to Oxman's work, single out Man-Nahāta, a “four-part model installation that looks at a changing Manhattan every 100 years but begins 400 years in the future,” and say that, “much like Cesar Catilina, Oxman is immersed in the synergy of nature and humanity as it’s revealed through design, technology, and biology.”

Speculation on the future of cities is an important part of Megalopolis, fitting given the name of the film, but it takes place alongside a bevy of social, political, and personal conflicts that should better hold the attention of filmgoers. While Catilina's Megalopolis comes across as the parametric dream of an idealistic young architect and is a bit shallow given the scale of the undertaking (are moving walkways made with Megalon really a futuristic game-changer?), Coppola's Megalopolis is a freewheeling and sometimes excessive collage of ideas and images by a master director. It is never boring or predictable. It is cluttered and complicated, but rewarding. Ultimately, it is an optimistic film that encourages people to dream, to imagine a utopian future — whether it resembles plants, or not.