Most who indulge in weed in a committed way experience it at one time or another: you’re sat there chonging away happily when suddenly you reach a state you mistake for ecstatic inspiration.
You become a little short of breath, your thoughts race away into elated fireworks, and you seem to experience a moment of penetrating clarity. A jumble of parts suddenly cohere into transcending insight. It is all suddenly there and it is perfect and it is timeless and it is seminal. It is THE IDEA.
Often times you experience such moments at social gatherings, and before you can write the thoughts down, you’re distracted. THE IDEA evaporates, memory wiped. Many a stoner has woken up the morning after, lamenting its loss – little realising that they are in fact the lucky ones.
It is far worse to write THE IDEA down – and then, waking the next morning, to excitedly consult your notes in a state of great excitement only to discover
Laurence Fishburne voiceover: that all that you have created is horseshit.
At this point, you normally let THE IDEA go, a little crushed by the glaring gap between your stoner self’s delusional self-belief and daylight’s sober judgement. You acknowledge that what you took for divine inspiration is a lot of rambling nonsense and move on.
It is possible for you to chase THE IDEA a while longer – to convince yourself it had all the merit you thought it had and that it was your stoned transcription that is to blame. You can go on like that, gamely plugging away at THE IDEA for months, even years – convinced its greatness is real and can be recovered, if only you smoke hard enough.
But you inevitably give up at some point. It’s hard enough to make a living out of writing without pursuing something you can’t even explain.
Laurence Fishburne voiceover: But these are the thoughts of mere mortals.
What if you are not a struggling artist but an acknowledged genius with reputation – and even a little cash to bank? What do you do with stoner inspiration then? The barriers to making it real are surely lower.
Well, perhaps not. Cultural gatekeepers in marketing, publishing, movie production and the rest will conspire to starve THE IDEA to death. They will protect your reputation from yourself by withholding cash, forcing your passion project to wither on the vine.
But what if you are not only an auteur but independently wealthy from some canny wine investments – so fabulously well off that you can fund your own project? Who will stop you then? Why shouldn’t you insist on delivering whatever the hell you want, however you want, when you want? Who is stop you from realising your genius vision then?
Laurence Fishburne voiceover: And so fall Caesar
It is that pig-headed commitment that is most to be admired about Megalopolis. Coppola has simply refused to listen to sense throughout this process. Confronted with doubts, with problems, with doubters, with mockery, he has only toked harder, burning through his sizable assets in pursuit of this endeavour. He probably told himself he had been here before. Wasn’t Apocalypse Now constantly on the brink of failure? Didn’t everyone tell him he would fail then?
He wants to live free and furious like that again, back in the good old days – and who can blame him? The trouble is, with Apocalypse he had a tale to retell, on which he could pin his flashes of inspiration. With Megalopolis he only has the flashes. There is no Nùng River providing a thread, no war connecting the thing with reality.
Drawing a parallel between the modern US and the dying roman Republic is a fun, if obvious idea. There’s plenty of mileage right now in depicting an empire rotting from the head down. But if you are going to do that you really do need a course plotted: a story, you might call it. Hell, Francis could have just decided to retell Julius Caesar and been done with it, tagging his flashes onto that plot.
But this is stoner inspiration, and that means Francis wants to weave a dozen strands into a beautiful tapestry. The effect is more like as a heap of tangled and knotted Christmas lights. There’s a bit of a Robert Moses fable in here, combined with some scifi/ time control building stuff. There’s a bit of Romeo and Juliet. An awful lot of other stuff happens, twinkly and colourful but frustrating. Beyond Shia Lebouef as a cross-dressing decadent and Jon Voight’s crossbow moment, nothing is particularly memorable.
Except that is, the experience itself. There is plenty of boring, overlong cinema to take in these days. But it is quite something to sit down in the cinema and take in the unmistakable product of a stoner inspiration projected onto the big screen. Kudos to him, for blowing all his cash, goodwill and reputation on such madness. The failure of the film isn’t really the point. It is his stoner dedication that is to be admired here, the brazen conviction to burn his bridges and a dozen careers in service of his own self belief. He pushed rode head on into disaster, murmuring the one Latin phrase his weed-addled mind could actually recall: Alea jacta est.