Microlopolis
Francis Ford Coppola, Edith Wharton, and the cities within us
Next year, Dash begins high school. In most parts of the country, this is a transition that, while significant for the student, doesn’t require a whole lot of strategy - you go to the high school in your town. Done! But in NYC, students embark upon a journey that resembles the college application process, but more byzantine and arbitrary - a bureaucratic nightmare of academic tiers, lottery numbers, and hot-potato anxiety passed off frantically between family members on a quarter-hourly basis.
One of the consequences of this process is that we’ve been taking Dash on a bunch of school tours, mostly in the evenings. I dreaded this prospect at first: The thought of leaving home late in the day to survey the torture chambers of secondary education made my bones quietly shatter. But after the first couple of outings, I was surprised to discover that I not only survived but actually enjoyed it.
Yes, a parental investment in my son’s personal development might play a small role. But these visits are also filling an obscure emotional need for me. After four and a half years staring at a computer screen in my apartment all day, these visits return me to a city in action. We take the rush-hour train through the metropolitan bustle to meet teachers and students donating their spare time to the continuity of their communities. Their palpable enthusiasm spreads easily to their exhausted guests, who struggling through their stress in pursuit of a more rewarding future.
These warm sensations are accompanied by the serendipitous rewards that inflect any urban outing. One evening, we walked onto a cafeteria terrace in Long Island City to behold a searingly beautiful sunset that I would never have seen while churning out the day’s final emails in the living room. On another, we accidentally stood in an angled hallway that allowed us to see two architectural icons - the Empire State Building and the Chrysler - golden in the waning light of separate windows, a view unique to the spot we were standing in. I’m such a sentimental nerd for this town, but in our post-pandemic, late-capitalist society of isolation and fear, I don’t get the chance to wallow in it nearly as much as I’d like.
These school visits - with their visual splendors of a twilit city and their dogged hope for a rising generation - are part of what has kept Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in my head for the past few weeks. Look, I wish I could tell you it was a masterpiece. Hell, I wish I could tell you it was “good.” I wish we lived in a world where its massive financial failure won’t make it more difficult for other strange, sui generis follies to rise in our nation’s multiplexes. But I sure don’t wish I had skipped it.
For those who haven’t been following along, Megapolis is Coppola’s self-funded swan song, the harder-they-fall final testament of an 85-year-old dreamer. It is beautiful, sincere nonsense set in a pseudo-Shakespearean key. It is a Roman epic that embodies the decline and fall that it preaches against. And, at heart, it’s the most unabashedly hopeful work of art I’ve encountered in many years - embracing optimism not as a cynical commercial ploy or quiet food for comfort, but as a subject worthy of passionate defense.
Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a powerful city planner in the retro-futuristic city of New Rome. He’s something of a chaotic-good Robert Moses - a prickly egomaniac with a compassionate utopian vision. He broods atop skyscrapers, mourns his dead wife, loses his ability to stop time(???), falls in love with the daughter of the corrupt mayor, gets shot in the face, recovers, and somehow(???) builds the Megalopolis, a city within a city that, alas, suffers from visual and narrative vagueness but nonetheless represents the harnessing of technology and creativity to establish a paradise for The People.
On a storytelling level, very little of this holds together. In this sense, it’s similar to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman - another collection of gorgeous sets in search of a narrative, which barely manages to use its formidable visual genius to embody its themes of saving a civilization in collapse. Yet despite Batman’s deep flaws, I’ve probably seen it more than any other film (see cross-reference) - and I suspect I’ll likewise revisit Megalopolis more than once.
The city, you see, is worth saving. New Rome is America, sure, and of course it’s New York too, but it’s also that little visionary flame that burns in all of us at some point in our life - the idea that coming together in our millions presents an opportunity to be our best selves, that, despite the expense and inconvenience and anguish, we are enriched, not impoverished, by our constant contact with others. With a historic election coming up, this dream feels more distant than ever - yet I’ll still take solace in facing the worst from this particular point, surrounded by millions of others. Coppola helped remind me why I’m even bothering with this place, and that goes a long way.
By contrast, Edith Wharton has helped shed light on the chilly embrace of isolation that pursues us even in crowds. For years, Hope has wanted to watch the film version of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (directed in 1993 by Coppola’s contemporary Martin Scorsese), but I’m the kind of jerk who keeps saying no, I need to read the book first. Well, for some reason I decided that flying to a North Carolina wedding was the perfect moment to read about social and emotional stratification in Old New York, and here we are.
In contrast to Megalopolis, the social world Wharton paints in her novel is a sort of upper-crust dystopia, where the barriers to possibility are clear, silent, and irrevocable. This version of 1870s Manhattan features all manner of life and light, but very little that the privileged characters have cultural permission to touch - the vigor plays out on the peripheries of their stolid, respectable lives. The story’s central romance involves a man who stands very clearly within those limits and a woman who flits dangerously around them. Anytime the story brings them out of the city’s bounds - a cottage upstate, a ferry ride - they encounter a slight loosening of restraints, which tighten back up as soon as they reenter their urban panopticon.
I’m far from a member of the societal elite, but I found myself unexpectedly relating to Newland Archer’s struggle against the walls of his New York trap. This is primarily psychological - working from home has compressed me into rigid ruts of habit, and sometimes I’ll look up and realize it’s been weeks since I left my general section of Brooklyn. In the middle of middle age, possibilities seem fewer, and I don’t feel nearly as much of a connection to the vastness and variety of it as I used to.
But there’s also a political component. I live in a neighborhood to which I have very little social connection. My overwhelmingly white, middle-class friends are all at least a half-hour away, and I rarely have meaningful contact with people that aren’t like me. While walking the dog every day, we primarily pass by Hasidic Jews, residents of the nearby housing projects, or transient art students. We’re not part of their lives, and they’re not part of ours. In this city of severe inequality and limited mobility, my own solipsistic experience here is worlds away from that encountered by the more privileged and, especially, the less privileged. And if this election goes the wrong way, the divide will only get wider.
At the conclusion of The Age of Innocence, Wharton demonstrates that the city does, inevitably, change - but that people might have a harder time of it. Presented with the possibilities of a dawning age, Archer retreats into the cool comforts of a safer past. I find it all too easy to imagine a similar fate for myself - falling further away from the New York of today out of fear and fatigue, clinging to the familiar at the expense of the golden city I always dreamed of.
Taken together, the vastly different experiences of Megalopolis and The Age of Innocence point to a similar conclusion: We live in the cities we imagine for ourselves. They can be edens or hells, treats or traps. The mass of people and buildings that surrounds us is too big to be any one thing, so we project onto it the visions that organize our minds. Is the city a vast field of potential, ripe for joyful improvements? Maybe. Or is it a narrow warren of checks, curbs, and confinements that prevent us from pursuing what we truly want? Also maybe.
Tying together these two extremes is another recent artistic experience that made the city its subject. A few weeks ago, we went to see an exhibition at Cooper Union by my friends Jen Ray and Jason Forrest, collectively working as the Data Vandals. Their ongoing collaboration foregrounds the question of what exactly it means to live and work in a city as sprawling and unruly as New York. For this exhibit, Jen, as a visual artist, and Jason, as a data visualization expert, took a wealth of publicly available statistics about Cooper Union’s East Village neighborhood and used it as the basis for an interactive installation of paintings, sculptures, and events.
The results were funny, playful, and informative. It was a celebration that didn’t shy away from the darker, more unjust elements of the area’s past and present. But more importantly, the work didn’t seek to make a simple statement, but invited viewers to join a conversation. The series of displays conveying details about the neighborhood’s history and demographics all converged around the viewer to ask where YOU fit into it. To make this question concrete, a full wall was devoted to gathering information about attendees, who were given stickers to represent themselves on a series of charts exploring where we came from, what we came for, and how we saw ourselves. It was the creation of a group self-portrait in real time.
In other words, this wasn’t simply a place to come and look dispassionately at art. For the weekend the exhibit was up, it was transformed into a locus of community, with guests from all sorts of backgrounds running panel discussions and workshops and performances and tours to both focus the wider world onto the the Data Vandals’ findings and reflect them back out into the city that spawned them.
Like Megalopolis - and The Age of Innocence in its very different way - the Data Vandals brought out the urban geek in me. That’s how, one rainy evening, I found myself surrounded by an audience of natives and transplants and international visitors listening to a comedian and NYC tour guide who had been invited to riff on the exhibit’s themes. Sure, sitting and guffawing to cracks about Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg is my idea of a hot Saturday night. But as my eye drifted past the presenter to the gallery’s front windows, I could also see the partygoing masses cascading through the mist. Every shape of person walking every shape of dog. The streetlights’ glare catching on the quivering leaves of historic Cooper Square. I felt a connection to the joy and adventure of city life that has been depressingly rare these past few years. For the first time in too long, I thought that maybe this is the city I’d most like to live in - the one right here.
Yes,
It’s a hell of a town.