Francis Ford Coppola’s Contentious Utopia
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Kate Wagner on the polarizing politics of Megalopolis.

The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie or not, the uncontestable fact is it is rich in ideas and offers much to talk about.
To talk about the movie I spoke with The Nation’s architectural critic Kate Wagner. We discuss the movie’s relationship to early 20th century modernism as well as earlier movies such as Metropolis and the fiction of Ayn Rand. A major topic of conversation is the film’s reactionary gender politics.
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More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie or not, the uncontestable fact is it is rich in ideas and offers much to talk about.
To talk about the movie I spoke with The Nation’s architectural critic Kate Wagner. We discuss the movie’s relationship to early 20th century modernism as well as earlier movies such as Metropolis and the fiction of Ayn Rand. A major topic of conversation is the film’s reactionary gender politics.

The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
The famed economist Larry Summers, not for the first time, finds himself the center of a
scandal. He’s had to take a leave from Harvard, where he teaches, because of embarrassing
emails he had with his late friend Jeffrey Epstein.
I talked to economic journalist and Nation contributor Doug Henwood, a long-time Summers
watcher, about the career of this controversial and influential figure. Summers has been one of
the most influential policy makers of his era, serving as Treasury Secretary and President of
Harvard. He has also embodied the major intellectual and political limitations of the ruling class.
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