November 15th 2024 update: the good folks at Movies We Dig let me bother them about Megalopolis (2024) on their podcast ^

It was the summer of 2021. My husband and I had traveled for the first time since the onset of the pandemic and were on our way back to Boston, where we were living at the time, and where I was working as a classics professor. We landed at Logan airport without incident but an electrical storm had come in behind us. We were instructed to wait while the lightning passed over us, making it too dangerous to release bags to the carousel. We waited, masked, in that hot, heavy room. Then my phone suddenly exploded with activity. Twitter DMs from about a dozen people. What was going on? Adam Driver had been featured in an ad for a designer cologne, running on a purple beach with a yellow horse before diving into blue water. In the final, blurry seconds of this video, the figures of man and animal combine. Ever so briefly, we see Adam Driver as a centaur. 

The assimilation of Adam Driver to a creature of myth, while visually confounding, felt somehow inevitable. But the Twitter community was right to assume that I in particular needed to see this. Although somewhat lapsed now, I had been a regular participant on the since-deteriorated social media platform for a number of years, where I had spent time discussing ancient Greece and Rome within a wide and vibrant online community, sharing parts of my own research and teaching. I had also become an unrepentant Adam Driver stan, which I found impossible to hide on Twitter. Indeed, the entanglement of Adam Driver’s artistic output with internet commentary is itself a phenomenon of interest, from the memeification of his turn in Marriage Story (2019) to the paparazzi photos of the actor (force?-)fed by Lady Gaga on the set of House of Gucci (2021). Occasionally, there were even crossover engagements between Adam Driver and classicizing material. Beyond his brief manifestation as a centaur, Adam Driver, for instance, recites Latin precepts from Andreas Capellanus’ De Amore in his role as the sex criminal Jacques le Gris in The Last Duel (2021). (This troubling collocation is quite effective in emphasizing the often-present threat of violence in Latin “love” literature, as well as drawing attention to the danger of assenting uncritically to an actor’s own sex appeal. I honestly worry about Reylos watching this film.) 

But very little could prepare me for the news that Adam Driver would be starring in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024), a modern retelling of an ancient event, the Catilinarian Conspiracy (63 BCE), for whom one of the primary sources, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), has been the research focus of my academic career. I’ve written one book about Cicero, and have another, co-authored with Mathias Hanses, in progress. In fact, I was working on a new article on Cicero’s Catilinarians when Coppola took to Instagram to announce the primary creative influences on the film (a series of civilizationalist texts, including Cicero). Adam Driver would be playing Catiline himself. Frankly, it all felt like a fever dream of my own making.

And watching Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024), as it turns out, also feels like a fever dream. Enthusiasts will be able to discern some historical referents: Catiline’s apparent adultery with a Vestal Virgin, Catiline’s alleged murder of his wife, Clodius and the Bona Dea scandal. As well as general dramatis personae: Cicero, Catiline (here in a father-son relationship, but historically coevals), Clodius Pulcher and Clodia, Crassus, etc. (Julius Caesar was also one of the historical actors, but is only alluded to in the names of characters: “Caesar” Catiline; “Julia” Cicero. I think the repeated invocation of the name “Caesar” in this film is actually one of the reasons why it’s so confusing to general audiences, even if it’s true that the historical Catiline anticipated Caesarian reforms.) Over the course of the film, there are quotations and allusions to Sappho, Catullus, Cicero, and Ovid.

But be assured that none of this amounts to narrative coherence. People left our screening within the first 15 mins. One man who did stay to the end fell asleep face down across three theater seats. (Incidentally–very few people are seeing this film. It cost $140 million to make, and has grossed $4 million in its opening weekend. Coppola sold his wineries for this!) It’s incoherent, and, yes, feverish, gaudy, tacky, and somehow both over- and underwritten, as well as over- and underacted. It’s often quite unpleasant to watch. The framing of New York as late republican Rome is artless and assents uncritically to a familiar white supremacist talking point in the argument of translatio imperii (i.e., “America is the new Rome”). Giancarlo Esposito as Cicero and Nathalie Emmanuel as his daughter (“Julia” Cicero) are refreshing casting choices but ultimately enact what Lisa Lowe has called the “simulacrum of inclusiveness” given an overwhelmingly white cast. (Laurence Fishburne is criminally underused!) I think there are possibly two scenes which pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, but the representation of women throughout the film as greedy and oversexed (intended to argue for the corruption and decadence of Rome’s republican “fall”?), or else dutiful to male genius, is puerile. Aubrey Plaza’s “Wow Platinum” (that’s her name?) filled me with deep despair. There are some reflections on popularist politics that do reflect both ancient and modern issues, but these tensions are concluded both crudely and naively. And I haven’t even got to the fact that Adam Driver as Catiline, the genius architect and social reformer (?), has the power to stop time! I am not joking! But this actually comes up much less than you would expect. 

Could Coppola’s Megalopolis be intended as a satire? Some of the scenes are so zany that they could only, surely, be parody. The film, however, takes Adam Driver/Catiline seriously as a reformer–as the white male genius auteur who can shepherd in an enlightened future. And Coppola clearly sees an image of himself in all this. A scene between Cicero and Catiline has “Franklyn” Cicero say something like: “You know, my name is actually Francis…!” And this statement ultimately gets at the heart of the matter for me. The greatest discomfort I feel is in the idea that Rome really is a mirror of modern society–the asserted connections are ones which now feel false and alienating. The invitation to see oneself in Cicero (or even Catiline), has long been the dominant mode of classical discourse. Yet just as classical scholarship is beginning to step outside of the mode of role-playing ancient figures, entering into a critically discursive positionality which discerns the power dynamics at play, we receive a magnum opus from a directorial giant which is not only incoherent but at its heart fundamentally reductionist. Coppola’s representation of Rome does engage ancient source material, but it is more committed to the restaging of familiar tropes. It could be seen as self-annotating satire. But the absolutely straight-faced ending, in which Adam Driver leads us into a utopian future, suggests otherwise.