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Coppola fleshes out the vision of the film a bit in conversation with Germain: "I'm trying to say, what's really possible? Do we really have to live in this kind of pay-per-view world in which everybody's going to be in debt and a few people are going to own whatever the key resources are?

"Or are we going to live in a world that is really created by artists and scientists, and is just uplifting for people. Because we could." Coppola adds that in this future he envisions, "Everyone's going to be an artist. That's the destiny of the human being. We're not going to worry about doing dumb work."

Coppola's effusions provide more evidence, if any was needed, that even great artists can be idiots. But his "educated stab at future history" also reminds us of the powerfully ambiguous image of the city concentrated in the word "megalopolis." The first Megalopolis, as we saw last week, was a planned city in fourth-century B.C. Greece, an Attic Brasilia intended to serve as a unifying capital for a federation of city states. This would be a city greater than Athens, the supreme monument to the greatness of Greek culture. You can still visit Megalopolis today, but it is just a small town, a historical curiosity. The dreams that fueled its construction were never realized.

Still, the name of that failed experiment persisted as a symbol of the human ambition to build the City. It was given currency in our own time by the French geographer Jean Gottmann, who lived in the United States for several decades. But Gottmann's megalopolis, described in a 1961 book of that name, was crucially different from its predecessors. Unlike the classic planned cities over the centuries, Gottmann's megalopolis evolved without conscious direction. It was an urban system, not a city, far too complex to be "planned" as a city might be constructed from scratch, but not so complex as to defy understanding.

For Gottmann, the megalopolis was bursting with vitality. It marked a new stage in human evolution. And he could be withering about complaints against the "insecurity, criminality, and hostility" of everyday urban life. Such "moaning," he said in a 1986 essay, is "caused by short memories. Today, even wealthy people dare to go about their business in cities without being guarded by armed escort, which was a necessity, generally accepted, in the cities and towns of yore."

But for many others, megalopolis is the Inferno. Coppola's vision for the City of the future is radically opposed to Gottmann's. Note that the bad guys in Coppola's Megalopolis, we're told, will be "business forces." They would presumably be kindred spirits to the dominant elite in Fritz Lang's great 1926 film, Metropolis, a dystopian vision of the twenty-first-century City.

Others would dissent both from Gottmann's vision and from Coppola's. They would suggest that both visions are infected by hubris. In the vein of Wendell Berry, they would champion the local, the small, the modest human community. Such folk often regard the megalopolis as a kind of cancer; their loathing is palpable.

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August (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45