#23: MegaLOLpolis
Death By Consumption
10/8/24 - 10/14/24
Stepping out of a restaurant last night, into an evening that had somehow gotten 20 degrees cooler while we were inside, my friend Emily said, "You must love this. So much weather is happening." I have never felt so seen. I don't know why, but nothing bores me more than an endless stretch of beautiful days, like we had for the previous 10 or so days in NY. Where's the excitement? Where is the drama?! So now that we've hard swerved into October, where the sun is still mercifully warm but only if you're directly in it, and the nights are blustery and cold, I feel like I'm truly coming alive again. Sure, my love of interesting weather is only going to come back to bite me when it's my turn to experience whatever absolutely horrific natural disaster climate change has in store for me, but for now I'm going to enjoy getting to wear a comfy hoodie while looking out a window and saying stuff like, "Wow, the wind's really shaking that tree!" This is how you cling to sanity in an insane world.
Megalopolis (2024) — at Regal Essex
What do you say about this movie? It is so stupid and thinks it is so smart. It's audacious, self-serious, overly sincere, gaudy, nonsensical... and kind of perfect? I watched it with my jaw hanging open for nearly three hours. I loved it. The haters are wrong!
Francis Ford Coppola clearly went a little insane making this, but I would argue that it proves we just need more rich, experienced directors to go a little nuts while making what they think is their magnum opus. This is the clearest look we've gotten at a director's id laid bare on the screen since Bradley Cooper's Maestro. This is Francis Ford Coppola doing JLo's This Is Me... Now. It has the politics of Ayn Rand on meth and the aesthetics of an Amazon Prime original, all delivered in the dialogue of children doing improv on the playground. Is this the first true covid brain fog movie?
Specific lines keep rattling around in my empty skull: "You're anal as hell, Cesar. I, on the other hand, am oral as hell." "Revenge tastes best in a dress." (??? But also I kind of get it. I bet it does!) And my personal favorite: "Check out my boner!" That last line is delivered by Jon Voight, and the sequence that follows is the funniest scene ever captured on film. I laughed until I cried, and every couple minutes until the final credits I'd remember what we had just seen and I'd lose myself to laughter again. Was it intentionally funny? If you get hung up on questions like that, this might not be the movie for you.
From beginning to end, I never knew for a second what a character was going to say or do next. Adam Driver played both a major Star Wars villain and Hannah's weird boyfriend on Girls, making him the only actor who could pull off this exact role, which somehow combines those characters. Why does he need to recite Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy in full? Why is he using Megalon, this magical new material he discovered (from inside his dead wife's body??? the science is very confusing) for his grand invention which is just... moving sidewalks? And why do these moving sidewalks blow everyone's damn minds? This is not a place for questions or answers, this is Megalopolis!
As we left the theater, some film bro quipped to his friend, "That made me hate, like... all movies," to which I would respond that that's a you problem. Megalopolis is the work of a mad man, made for a mad society, living in a mad world. And in an industry where people are putting Lady Gaga in their films and then cutting her from nearly every scene, at least we have one director still willing to give us some truly kooky shit. Stop trying to tame Francis Ford Coppola!
The Entity (1982) — on Criterion
"Based on the true story" of a single mother who says she was repeatedly raped and assaulted by a poltergeist, this movie was released and then immediately overshadowed by Poltergeist. But nothing in Poltergeist compares to the horrors of The Entity. Barbara Hershey stars, and what she has to do on screen is genuinely shocking, even 40 years later. The repeated scenes in which Barbara acts out getting assaulted by an invisible entity — with one rape happening in front of her children — are shocking, and honestly, at times difficult to watch. There is some brutal shit in this movie. (The final word of the movie is literally "cunt," which was clearly meant to put a harsh punctuation mark on the violence against women we've endured, but is, in 2024, destined to make any gay watching absolutely scream with delight.)
The most famous scene involves a latex, lifelike boob that you see get squeezed and groped by invisible fingers, special effects that feel simultaneously impressive and silly, and supposedly earned the movie the nickname "The En-Titty," with teenage boys reportedly going to see the film multiple times just for this scene. But the most impressive part of the movie for me was the focus of it — rather than trucking along as a boilerplate thriller, with a predictable sequence of tense scenes and jump-scares, the movie actually spends the majority of its runtime highlighting Barbara Hershey's character's struggle to get the men in her life to believe her. That focus on her desperation and solitude turns this somewhat dated thriller into a still-relevant exploration of how much effort it takes for women to get their accusations taken seriously, and how easily men can brush off violence against women, despite all evidence.
Overall, the film drags on a little too long, but I found it genuinely shocking (if any movie needed a trigger warning, it honestly might be this one) and surprisingly relevant. Martin Scorsese listed it higher than Psycho and The Shining on his list of the best horror movies, which either means it is that good, or that Marty just loves watching a ghost grope a titty.
Black Swans, by Eve Babitz (1993) — paperback
Eve Babitz grew up! In this collection, we find Eve in her 40s, a little less wild but still a little problematic. It's the late 1980s and early 1990s so lots of intense stuff is happening, but it's really on you if you expected party girl Eve to actually write about the Rodney King trial, rather than writing about how she completely missed the LA riots outside because she was spending days in a hotel room having sex with a guy. I found it a little surprising and more than a little melancholy to go immediately from reading Slow Days, Fast Company last week, where Eve is wild and young, with her LA full of drugs and sex and Jim Morrison, only to flash forward to middle-aged Eve, doing 12-step programs and mourning her friends lost to AIDS. Still, though, she remains as sharp as ever, the same droll voice making sobriety just as glamorous as her wild party days, decades before every bar served $18 mocktails.
Not to pit two divas against each other (even though everyone already has), but why has social media clung to Joan Didion more than Eve Babitz? Do the girlies not know about her? It certainly feels like Eve is tailor-made for the TikTok generation: a woman who proudly has big tits and is smart, who goes to AA and then out salsa dancing, who flirts with rock stars and movie stars but can also give you directions to a parking lot around the corner that's 75 cents cheaper than this one. I think, if I have to pick, I'm choosing Babitz, though I might switch my allegiances back to Didion once the weather gets a little colder.
Negative Space, by B.R. Yeager (2020) — paperback
We've made a hard thematic transition from LA summer into "spooky season" with this one, a strange, meandering novel about high school kids who get sucked into a new drug called WHORL that seems to unleash demonic forces. Or something? I'll be honest, I didn't know what was going on half the time in this book, but it does capture a fantastic sense of dread and malaise, the kind I imagine would feel familiar to kids growing up these days, especially in an industrially gutted small town. In the book, the local high school has been beset by a suicide epidemic, which is obsessively tracked on a Reddit-style message board, where anonymous people post photos of the suicides or even accurately predict the next one. Things quickly devolve from there into a swirl of mind control, evil visions, lurking horrors, and distracted parents who don't really give a shit. It's basically like: "what if the kids in It were terrorized by a clown but barely cared about him because the internet and deindustrialization had already destroyed their will to live?" Bleak!
Ta-Nehisi Coates on "The Ezra Klein Show" — on Apple Podcasts/Spotify/etc.
One thing I'm consciously trying not to do is hate-share anything I consumed over the week (or at least, if I'm going to hate-share, there better be something interesting to say about it beyond "this sucks"). So I'm not going to share any of the genuinely infuriating interviews Ta-Nehisi has been subjected to on his press tour for his new book, but I'm sure you've seen clips. This interview by Ezra Klein, however, is thoughtful and measured, the kind we unfortunately don't really get in the media anymore.
I honestly can't believe I'm saying this about Ezra Klein, who used to drive me NUTS, but really the majority of his coverage on Israel/Palestine has been very, very good, so I'm not surprised that he had the best interview yet with Ta-Nehisi. They both push each other in respectful but forceful ways, admit where they have biases or blind spots, disagree on plenty, but agree on the central point of Ta-Nehisi's book (which is about the West Bank, NOT Gaza, a crucial point which basically every interviewer seems to ignore), which is that Israel is an apartheid state, and that apartheid is bad. A simple statement that, of course, makes many people short-circuit, as we've been seeing all over the place lately. As Ezra says at one point:
EZRA KLEIN: I sometimes feel things like apartheid, like, shut some people’s minds down. You get into this like technical, well, in South Africa, and I don’t know enough to have that argument with people. But I have read enough, including you, on the American South and the Jim Crow era, that the first day I was in the West Bank, I said the first thing, almost, that I thought was this is what it must have felt like.
This interview won't stop the next shipment of US bombs from burning a Palestinian child alive, it won't feed the people being deliberately starved to death by Israel, it won't prevent Netanyahu and his government of right-wing freaks from doing everything in their power to help Trump get re-elected, it might not even change your mind on any of this. But, if nothing else, Ta-Nehisi's clear-eyed way of speaking about what he saw in the West Bank is refreshing and desperately needed in a world where we almost never get to hear from Palestinians themselves. As Ta-Nehisi says in the interview:
TA-NEHISI COATES: How can it be that my book is going to be the biggest bestselling whatever of the Palestinian narrative? That, to me, is the essence of the tragedy right there.
TA-NEHISI COATES: It’s one of the reasons why I’m uncomfortable with, I guess, not even just this conversation, but maybe everything I’m doing with the trip. Because it’s like, dude, I talked to so many people who have a deeper sense and a sharper sense than I do of this. You know what I mean? There are people who have lived this. You know what I mean? And not just lived this, can do the scholarship of it. They can talk about it, and can think about it, and have a kind of fluency in it that I just don’t. And I just feel like that is a question that I would like to see more Palestinians asked.