The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

(Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 12: Megalopolis — or, the Decline and Miraculous Resurrection of American Empire

·1 hr 28 min·5 clips

Coppola's earlier films used restrained special effects; here, the visual style is dominated by Neri Oxman's material ecology.

Episode 12 opens with a topic suggested by Izzy Litka and eagerly picked up by Jason Chaudhry: Francis Ford Coppola’s *Megalopolis*. The conversation puts the film in a live political atmosphere right away. It was recorded on Friday, November 8, just a couple of days after the U.S. national election, and that timing matters because the movie is plainly trying to be political. The hosts treat the film’s long gestation as part of the story. They keep coming back to historical situation, political context, social context, and the strange fact of the movie arriving now. The discussion stays well beyond plot summary. It asks what kind of political imagination the film is reaching for, and where that imagination starts to wobble. Architecture comes up fast and stays central. The episode lingers on design language, including references to material ecology and the wider aesthetic philosophy behind the film’s look. That design logic is not treated as a side note. It becomes one of the movie’s main claims about power, form, and the future. The hosts also frame the central figure as a composite of imperial and architectural references. They connect it to figures and ideas tied to domination, urban power, and heroic individualism. The discussion pulls in references that point toward Caesar, Robert Moses, Howard Roark, and Walter Gropius. The result is a portrait of an aesthetic worldview that is ambitious, masculine, and deeply reactionary. There is a steady sense that the movie wants to organize itself around monumental visions of civilization. The hosts keep testing that ambition against what actually shows up on screen. The gap between aspiration and execution becomes one of the episode’s running critiques, and one of its running jokes. The film’s surfaces are glossy, but the gloss itself is part of what they are trying to read. The conversation also pushes on the idea of art as distraction during crisis. Rather than offering escape, the movie’s polish is described as too thin to cover anything up. Its visual grandeur does not console, and it does not really distract. That failure ends up being one of the more interesting things about it. The tone stays analytical without getting stiff. The speakers move through theory, pop culture, architecture, and political context with a measured back-and-forth. They pause, restate, and sharpen points as they go, which lets the discussion build instead of snapping to a quick verdict. They are not impressed by the film’s self-mythology. Coppola’s project gets treated as something closer to a bad design firm or a bad architecture firm on Instagram than a visionary triumph. The joke lands because the surrounding critique earns it. The film’s style is not neutral, and the episode keeps showing why. At the same time, the discussion does not flatten the movie’s scale. The hosts acknowledge Coppola’s stubborn ambition and the way the film keeps reaching for a civic or civilizational register. They just do not give that ambition a free pass. The result is a critique that is skeptical without being simplistic. The episode ends with a clear judgment. The film is not redeemed by its size, and its failure is not interesting only because it is large. What matters is the way its politics, its aesthetics, and its bad faith are all tangled together. The conversation makes that knot easy to see without reducing it to a slogan.

As heard by us

A sharp, theory-led look at Megalopolis that treats style as argument.

Pop Cultural Marxism reads Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis as politics first, and keeps circling the questions that matter: what architecture means in this movie, what empire looks like when it turns into style, and why a film this long in the making can feel so out of step…

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If you want a sharp, political read on Megalopolis, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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