Jesse Hawken
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182: Back to the Cluuub: Megalopolis and The Fountainhead (with Jacob Bacharach)
🕑 Added 2024-10-22 15:07:12 +0000 UTCThe author Jacob Bacharach returns to continue this podcast’s look at Megalopolis. On this episode we compare Coppola’s latest to another overheated epic about a visionary architect, King Vidor’s ludicrous 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
Coppola has acknowledged the film version of The Fountainhead as a key influence on Megalopolis, but what Jacob and I value about these two films is how they each rebuke the reactionary source material: Vidor does it through hyperbole while Coppola rejects Rand’s philosophy outright in his parable about America as a near-future Roman Empire. And both films are intensely personal projects with Vidor pointing the way towards the future of cinematic language (no doubt inspiring Paul Verhoeven and the Coen Brothers) and Coppola emptying out his bag of tricks to finally finish a deranged project he spent half his life hoping to make.
And Jacob and I contrast the ways we each saw Megalopolis: from a packed out IMAX cinema in Toronto with a live-streamed Coppola q&a and the full “immersive” presentation to being the only people in a suburban cinema in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was the best time we each had in a movie theatre in eons.
Follow Jacob Bacharach on Twitter and visit jacobbacharach.com
“Ayn Rand Made Me a Communist”, by Jacob Bacharach for the New Republic, January 27, 2016
Trailer for The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)
Second trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis (that got pulled by Lionsgate)
Comments
Jesper Ohlsson
*unrelated clip of a shirtless Coppola from the set of Apocalypse Now, talking very energetically about a whole bunch of stuff that's hard to follow*
Jesper Ohlsson
My two gay dads are back to giggle derisively at someone's Very Important Work. The "I don't think of you" line from the Fountainhead made me think that one of the most memorable (in the sense of being used as a gif:ed internet-dunk) moment from Mad Men, the elevator scene when the main guy says "I don't think about you at all", is probably a lift/direct-nod to the Fountainhead. I never saw Mad Men, but it makes sense that it's basically another critique of an Aynd Rand-esque man that came from nothing, rose to greatness by his own grit and grift and intellect, except it's abundantly clear at the end what an abyss of nothing you turn yourself into by standing at an Olympian remove from everyone around you. And his excellence is the most contemptible profession in the modern time - making ads for stupid bullshit. Finally, "t-symmetry" sounds like an incel-coined term to avoid feeling gay when talking about male beauty. //EDIT: The Fountainhead's insistence on building trains everywhere would be seen as soy, gay and neo-marxist carelord shit now.
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