Zarathustra, coming a mere 24 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, is best known for its prophet’s declaration that “God is dead.” The main character’s moniker makes a mockery of the Christian deity — Zarathustra is the Germanized name of the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, a precursor to Christianity that may have later influenced it. With God dead, Zarathustra was to be a counter-gospel.

What was to replace God? Nietzsche explains: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” He goes on: “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.…”

Zarathustra speaks in parables grouped under various headings, often on themes dear to the hearts of reactionaries. “On Women” is a moving, and deeply un-PC, reflection on the animal passions that motivate relations between the sexes, with a bit of trolling thrown in. “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy.” As Zarathustra is about to part from the old woman he is talking to, she promises him a “little truth”: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Zarathustra occasionally hits on politics, and when he does, it is to denounce the rabble and peddlers of equality. The Christian and his spiritual descendant, the socialist, he says, preach egalitarianism as a cover for a desire to tear down what is strong, life-affirming, and healthy in man. 

If you think much of this sounds like Andrew Tate and other manosphere influencers, you are correct. But Nietzsche deserves full credit for getting there first. 

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While young reactionaries today look back at a simpler time, in which supposedly all normal people had a community, a partner, and a secure job, Nietzsche was already living a lonely, sexually frustrated existence in 19th-century Germany. He might have had sex once at a brothel — where he may or may not have contracted syphilis — but otherwise he either was rebuffed by women or kept them at a distance. The man who effusively praised conquerors like Napoleon and Alexander, and expressed contempt for Christian morality, was constantly sick, felt overwhelmed by social gatherings, and had trouble tolerating bright lights and loud noises. As the intellectual historian Peter Gay wrote in the introduction to The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s “life was a dramatic one, but all his drama was interior.”

More than a century after Zarathustra was published, I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? Didn’t I see through both Christianity and Left-wing political ideas that denied the obvious truth that some human beings were more valuable than others? When Nietzsche discussed the Overman, I thought he meant me. Or at least, someone I might one day become. 

In truth, just about anyone else in the world would have been a better candidate. Like Nietzsche, I was smart and introverted, with poor social graces. I had ideas about the opposite sex and what women should or did want, but little practical experience with them. To understand Nietzsche as cope for losers, though, would be to miss out on his continuing relevance.

If many of us began thinking of ourselves as Übermenschen without much evidence, the fault was with us, rather than Nietzsche, whose real message was that although life was ultimately tragic, we were to find meaning in the struggle. He stressed resilience, self-assurance, and emotional and intellectual detachment from the mob. In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation. We are naturally unequal, but we can all become something better than we currently are. Nietzsche was, to some extent, a 19th-century self-help guru.

Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness. With the death of God, this world is all we have left, and we must take it seriously. There is profound beauty in the journey toward becoming something better. At the same time, we have no choice but to remain self-aware enough to poke fun at ourselves. (“I no longer trust myself since I aspire to the height, and nobody trusts me any more; how did this happen? I change too fast: my today refutes my yesterday.”) Nietzsche uses humor not in the modern way that avoids judgment or responsibility; rather, his trolling works because the underlying point is deadly serious. He taught that there was hope, and even if you failed, you could get some laughs along the way, many of them at your own expense. What else to make of a man who published an autobiography with chapter titles such as “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”?

Nietzsche’s ideas today sometimes seem banal, but only because we have fully incorporated his worldview. I now take for granted that humans are often driven by resentment, and the desire to tear things down rather than any positive vision of the good. Also, people aren’t always honest about their motivations, even with themselves, and this is especially true on sensitive and emotional topics like politics, or what a person looks for in a romantic partner. Freud admired Nietzsche and hit on many of the same themes, as does some of the most up-to-date work in psychology and anthropology.

When people make Nietzschean points on X (formerly Twitter), we roll our eyes at the lack of originality. But Nietzsche showed remarkable foresight in understanding the motivations behind socialism in the late 19th century, before it would come to dominate large swaths of the world. The entire 20th century in a sense stands as a testament to his prescience, with one nation after another witnessing Left-wing revolutions descend into barbarism, despite their association with beautiful words and ideals. Echoes of these instincts can be found among wokes and degrowthers, and in the self-pitying rhetoric of the populist Right. Even many stock phrases in use today originate with Nietzsche: “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” 

The other great tragic force of the 20th century was German nationalism, particularly in its most virulent form, Nazism. Nietzsche’s ideas took off in his native country beginning around 1890, and were an inspiration to militarists up to 1945. Pocket editions of Zarathustra were distributed to soldiers on the front lines in World War I, and according to the historian Steven Aschheim, it was among the three most popular books taken into battle, along with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament. His thought also became an inspiration for the Nazis — this, despite the fact that he opposed anti-Semitism, mocked German nationalism, and condemned conformity and obedience to the state.

As with many continental philosophers, it is often difficult to pin down exactly what Nietzsche believed, and if you start with the assumption that writers will see their work bastardized in the popular imagination, it is easy to understand how Nietzscheism in practice came to be co-opted by fascists. Praise for the salutary effects of war and contempt for weakness are staples of his books. Aschheim writes that although Hitler and his followers appropriated other figures from German history, “the particular Nazi emphasis on Nietzsche derived from his peculiar capacity to legitimate them.” It is no accident, then, that in addition to being praised and cited by Hitler, Nietzsche today has disciples that include race-obsessed far-Right intellectuals like Costin Alamariu, better known as “Bronze Age Pervert.”

Left-leaning adherents of Nietzsche blamed his sister’s appropriation of his legacy after his death for the way he was supposedly misread. Some German nationalists agreed. Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi theoretician, sarcastically remarked in 1937 that the only things keeping Nietzsche from being a National Socialist thinker were that he was not a nationalist, not a socialist, and rejected a racial worldview. Nonetheless, such critiques were ignored by Nazi dogma, which promoted the philosopher’s love of war and contempt for Christianity. The most charitable thing one can say about attempts to absolve Nietzsche for his impact on German nationalism is that if a thinker gets interpreted wrongly again and again, he surely deserves at least some of the blame. (Though admittedly, the idea of trying to cancel Nietzsche in his grave strikes me as amusing.)

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The truth is that it has been possible for individuals and movements with wildly contradictory views to embrace Nietzsche. There are postmodern Nietzscheans, nationalist and anti-nationalist Nietzscheans, and, in my heart at least, Nietzschean liberals. This last philosophy accepts his insights into human inequality and the psychology of resentment, while remaining skeptical of his attempts to assert a positive vision that can be imposed on society. Celebrating the idea of a heroic struggle, or one man’s will to overcome obstacles, can be useful in terms of self-improvement or even creating a cultural movement, but such impulses are likely to end in disaster if they are elevated to a governing philosophy.

We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money. Nietzsche did not spell out the politics he supported, but he did provide an endless number of quotes that can be easily appropriated by those wanting to commit atrocities. And young people on X and TikTok, particularly those attracted to far-Right influencers, are often getting a bastardized version of Nietzsche, twisted to fit a political agenda. Better to go back to the original source. If you think the lesson of Nietzsche is that he agrees with your politics, it is more likely that you are a member of the rabble than a champion of individualism standing apart from it. 

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life. 

If one day the world does reject me, I will return to the void I emerged from, and look back at the whole thing with a laugh. Nietzsche went mad, perhaps from syphilis, but the sense that life is a cosmic joke is so intensely apparent in his writing that I find it difficult to imagine him ever having truly suffered.

If you know much about the philosopher, such visceral reactions are unsurprising, not least given his electrifying style — to say nothing of his appropriation by some of the darkest forces of the 20th century. Yet, if the Right are welcome to Nietzsche’s more reactionary positions, I’m instead keen to speak to my Leftist comrades and to explain why and where it is still valuable to read Nietzsche productively: as long as we recognize that, in learning from Nietzsche, we are using the master’s tools to fight against his far less thoughtful heirs.

Friedrich Nietzsche began his academic career a prodigy. Winning an academic chair at the tender age of 24, he soon dazzled his contemporaries. But disappointed by the conservative German academy, he came to live as a reclusive wanderer, living off a small pension and increasingly sick and lonely, with madness soon following. Had he remained lucid a while longer, he’d have likely been astonished by his influence, becoming a canonical figure for everyone from Michel Foucault to Julius Evola. Unfortunately, this also included the Nazis, who aped Nietzschean language of will, power, and violence to provide their movement with intellectual glamour. This profoundly chilled the initial reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-American world. Plenty agreed with Bertrand Russell’s characterization of the Second World War as “his” war, with many Leftists characterizing Nietzsche as a proto-fascist thinker.

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Things began to change by mid-century, when Nietzsche’s reputation enjoyed a phoenix-like rebirth. As post-war philosophies like existentialism grew in prestige, Nietzsche was read to be an important predecessor. That was clear enough in Sixties France, when a generation of French intellectuals was tiring of Marx and looking for new sources of philosophical inspiration. Among them was Gilles Deleuze, a man of the Left and a giant of radical thinking. He’d read Nietzsche as the great critic of bourgeois moralism and power, heralding liberation from discipline and control in the name of difference and self-creation.

The problem with such an approach was it was hard to square with Nietzsche’s own insistence that — of all the “rabble” — he most despised “socialists” who undermined the instincts of the lower orders for submission. For Nietzsche, progressive movements from liberalism to democracy were equal expressions of cultural decline. Their roots lay in Christian slave morality: which had the positive effect of deepening the soul of man, but which also meant a collapse into egalitarianism. Socialism itself was, as Nietzsche put it in The Will to Power, “the residue of Christianity and Rousseau in a de-Christianized world”. As for his own political preferences, Nietzsche was often critical of conservatives, but not for being too extreme. Rather, they weren’t active enough to counteract the spreading nihilism now so ensconced in Western culture.

Given these instincts for hierarchy and elitism, it should come as no surprise that Nietzsche has once more become a darling of today’s illiberal Right. But his impact on the contemporary Left is rather more complicated. To be sure, many liberals and Leftists continue to resent him. That’s clear enough from the reception of Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Written by the Marxist scholar Domenico Losurdo, the book foregrounds Nietzsche’s hatred of egalitarianism, to say nothing of his endorsement of aristocratic radicalism and slavery. As Ronald Beiner, a retired professor at the University of Toronto has put it, there is no whitewashing Nietzsche’s frequent misanthropy against most of the human species.

To be clear, none of these thinkers hold that the Left should simply bid adieu to Nietzsche — as if one could. But they do caution against thoughtlessly failing to recognize his own starkly anti-egalitarian views, let alone painting him as some kind of proto-Judith Butler. As far as it goes, this is good advice. At the same time, though, I think there is still much that liberals and Leftists can learn from Nietzsche.

For one thing, he offers important insights into the religious roots of modernity and its politics. These remain under-appreciated by progressive thinkers, many of whom treat religion either as one worldview to be tolerated like any other, or else as a ruling ideology to be ruthlessly crushed. Certainly, the Right isn’t particularly engaging here. At their most facile, many conservatives see Nietzsche’s militant hatred of Christianity and paint him as an unbridled atheist. Somewhat better, but still crude, are those like Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray who note Nietzsche’s stress on the cultural nihilism that emerges with the death of God. And yet they see few problems in trying to oil and water Nietzsche by drawing on his insights to defend a kind of “cultural Christianity” — while ignoring his claims that it is the woke activists who are the most obvious standard bearers of the Christianity’s herd morality today.

The philosopher’s most careful readers have always observed how Nietzsche argued that Christianity religious beliefs were not decaying because they encountered some external enemy, but because of forces internal to Christianity itself. As Nietzsche himself chronicled, Christianity’s universalistic morality — focused on defending itself as the “truth” — led Christian thinkers to develop increasingly sophisticated and proto-scientific approaches to the world. Finally, Christian morality’s idealization of the truth led Christian thinkers to the most striking inference of all: that the Christian metaphysical worldview itself is false.

This is key to understanding Nietzsche’s seemingly bizarre claim that the modern Left represents a more sincere inheritor of Christian morality than the Right. After the Christian will to truth led to the secularization of the metaphysics, the morality of Christianity continued in secularized form as liberalism, socialism, democracy, alongside many other progressive doctrines. It wasn’t Frantz Fanon who coined the phrase “the wretched of the earth” but the Gospel of Matthew, where the apostle wrote that the poor will know God is on their side. Understanding their religious roots, in short, can help many on the Left better grasp their own history — with Nietzsche an incisive if hostile guide.

Nor is that the only reason the Left should take Nietzsche seriously. After all, he offers vivid insights into the nature of resentment. Nietzsche often lampooned the conservatives and nationalists of his day as petty tyrants avenging themselves on the world. By and large, however, Nietzsche’s writings on resentment locate it in the psychologies of the lower orders, who disdain the aristocrat’s pride and seek to elevate themselves by presenting their suffering as divine. This concealed desire for revenge, dolled up in moralistic grandeur, is characteristic of Christianity and its contemporary Leftist offshoots.

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There’s obviously some truth in this accusation — just consider Leftist efforts to indulge in what progressive philosopher Richard Rorty, in Achieving Our Country, called the “America sucks” mode of public discourse. All the same, many Nietzscheans underestimate or dismiss the extent to which resentment can equally motivate the Right. Their condemnation of victim rhetoric aside, many conservatives clearly love to present themselves as victims of Left-wing silencing. This continues a longstanding Rightist tendency of exempting themselves from condemnation for participating in cultural practices (think: cancellation and victim posturing) they otherwise criticize. Not that resentment is quite identical across the political spectrum. For progressives, it often emerges in those who lack power and status, and who use a moralistic screen to assail the elite. On the Right, though, resentment usually means punching down.

To explain what I mean, consider the example of race in America. As the civil rights movement got going, in the middle of the last century, many southern whites saw equality as an unbearable attack on their race-based aristocracy. Even now, the Right rejects plenty of social programs, even ones with undeniable benefits like student debt forgiveness and universal public healthcare, by claiming that “if I didn’t get help, neither should they”. And, of course, an enormous amount of the racist rhetoric around being “replaced” by immigrants isn’t really about the idea that whites will disappear. Only the most paranoid fanatics suggest white Americans will literally be prevented from existing as before. Rather, it’s a classic example of Nietzschean resentment: that whites will no longer be an unambiguous majority, losing an abstract but strongly sentimentalized claim to call America “their” superior country at the expense of all others.

The examples can be multiplied, but I think the point is clear. Nietzsche’s account of resentment is indispensable to understanding swathes of Right-wing discourse, including the statements by some of the loudest and wealthiest men on earth. More to the point, this theoretical value echoes in the realm of practical politics. Consider religion. To be clear, there’s every reason for Leftists to be fiercely critical of reactionary and idolatrous forms of religious nationalism, especially the Baalesque version of Christianity popular in the White House these days. But when we follow Nietzsche in recognizing the genealogical links between Christianity and the morality of modern Leftism, we can better acknowledge that more radical, progressive side to religious doctrine, clear enough during abolitionism or the civil rights era. Nietzsche’s disgust for humanity notwithstanding, that surely makes him useful.

This is the story of a vertiginous collapse of popularity. Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to wild public acclaim. Thousands line his route shouting support, waving their palms aloft, laying their cloaks on the road as he travels into town on a donkey. It is the welcome of a conquering hero, not all that different from victorious Roman generals arriving in Rome. This is what success looks like.

But within a few days of this triumphal entry, the same crowd will be screaming for his blood. Nervous politicians, with one eye on popular sentiment, will give in to the crowd and send him to his death. Hanging on a terrifying Roman instrument of torture and death, he will drip with the spit of jeering passers-by. There he will suffocate and die, abandoned by most of his friends and followers, a tiny footnote in the long history of Roman cruelty. This is what failure looks like.

What changed? One of the things you could say that Jesus wasn’t very good at expectation management, especially with regard to his political intentions. About such an important matter as whether he was the Messiah, the messaging was, at best, just a little oblique. Yes, there was an encounter with a Samaritan woman whom many would have regarded as an unreliable witness. “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one who will proclaim all things to us,” she says. And Jesus replies: “I am he.” But even the woman wasn’t totally clear: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” she mused immediately afterwards. And then there is that funny theme in Mark’s Gospel — the so-called Messianic Secret — where Jesus goes around telling those who see him as the Messiah to keep quiet about it. But in the absence of clear messaging, stories spread. This was the one, they whispered.

But what was their expectation? The Messiah had long been a figure of myth. Part-religious, part-political, he was to be the one who would take Israel back to the glory days of David and Solomon. Akin to those Trump MAGA hats, the Messiah was the leader of the Make Israel Great Again movement. Messianic success meant kicking out the occupying Romans. It meant big temples and cheering crowds. Messianic success is national pride, power and popularity. The people of Israel wanted someone a bit like Samson. He too had some heavenly intervention associated with his birth, and he killed 3,000 Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone.

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It’s not exactly when and how the crowd cottoned on to the fact that Jesus wasn’t into any of this. But whenever and however the murmurations of the crowd shifted shape, very soon the over-hyped, ramped-up excitement of Palm Sunday collapsed into acrimonious disappointment. This odd man from Nazareth, with his northern accent and dubious choice of friends, was a fraud. A failure.

When I was studying at a theological college, we were asked a terrifying question. Should a “successful” priest be fêted by his congregation, or end up being crucified by them? Those who are called to hold a mirror up to others are never going to be popular.

I remember reading the extraordinary 1948 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis called Christ Recrucified. It tells of a Passion play put on in Anatolia, where a popular shepherd boy, Manolios, is chosen to play the part of Jesus. During rehearsals, a group of starving refugees arrive. They are from a nearby village that had been devastated by the Turks, but they are turned away. And the cowardly clergy fear that if it stands with the refugees, the village will turn against the church. So it too rejects the refugees and turns against Manolios who supports them. Manolios had taken his new role as Jesus a little too seriously. He is murdered by the villagers. “Two thousand years have gone by and men crucify you still,” says Father Fotis, one of the few remaining godly priests.

The Church of England is a dying church. Everybody says so. Numbers are down, churches are being turned into luxury flats, vocations abandoned. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned in failure. But what are we to make of this failure from the perspective of Holy Week? Throughout his preaching, Jesus was keen on the language of inversions. The first will be last and the last will be first; those who lose their life will find it; take down the mighty, lift up the lowly. Should we not think of success and failure within a similar inverted frame?

Some of the most irritating churches I know are ones that are just a little too pleased with themselves, particularly about how successful they are (yes, mea culpa). They tick all the right boxes. They attract lots of enthusiastic, successful and articulate young people, they have sound finances, slick advertising, beautiful buildings, and amazing choirs, they do lots of good work in the community. Heaven spare us from cocky, successful churches. They so depress me.

Conversely, some of the most important churches in which I have been a priest are what others might — and do — think of as failures. They look terrible to the Diocesan statistician. People sometimes squabble with each other. The organist is a bit rubbish. The church is not a looker. The heating breaks down, the roof leaks. People can have some very strange views. I love these churches because they are me. I too am a bit rubbish. I too am a failure in the deepest parts of my being. And the only thing that keeps these places together — the only thing that keeps me together— is reliance on something other than me.

Which is why my own ecclesiology — what I think a church should be like — is Alcoholics Anonymous, but with incense and vestments. At AA we have to admit our weakness, and accept that we have no power within ourselves to help ourselves. These are the big theological must-haves… along with a trust that God will do the rest. Everything else about church is aesthetics and solidarity, which I like a lot, but as a second-order concern.

The Reverend Richard Coles, a friend of mine, often tells me he thinks of church as “organized goodness”. It’s a lovely idea, but I don’t exactly buy it. Not least because I don’t think of Christians as being especially good (atheists have long complained about this association, and rightly so). If anything, Christians are the ones who know we are not especially good. Or, to borrow Jesus’ words: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” That’s the whole problem with the successful church — they don’t really understand that they, too, are sick.

Now let me row back on something. I don’t actually think that there are distinct things called “successful” and “unsuccessful” churches. All churches are complicated mixtures of both. No church — evangelical, Catholic, liberal — has a monopoly on smugness. But nonetheless, success as an ideology is absolute kryptonite to the Easter story. Nietzsche was right in a way: Christianity is for losers.

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That’s why I hope the next Archbishop of Canterbury will shrug his shoulders a little when asked — as he inevitably will be — how he will revive the fortunes of the Church of England. He must scorn cheap routes to numerical success. And I beg him to forget about all those centrally devised initiatives that your predecessor was so keen on: money redirected to big successful churches, greater enthusiasm breathlessly heralded as the latest route to growth. Jesus was down to a tiny handful of followers when he changed the world. Of course, if I were the Archbishop’s media adviser I’d advise the Archbishop not to say any of that too openly. People like success. The media likes success. Best not to encourage the crowd to turn upon you right away. That will happen in its own time and there won’t be much you can do about it when it does. The last Archbishop failed disastrously, and so will the next. Remember what Samuel Beckett said: “Never mind. Fail again. Fail better.”

But, whisper it: Jesus played chicken with total and absolute disaster, and he won. The resurrection is not about the magic — though I grant that’s the eye-catching bit. The resurrection is about how love transforms failure into genuine triumph. The abandoned man covered in spit and blood, stinking of death — yes, Ecce Homo — is the site of a renewed humanity. And that’s exactly why I love failed churches. Because they remind me that there is hope for us all, even losers like you and me. Happy Easter, losers.

Then, near the discussion’s end, this awkward event grew downright mortifying, for several reasons. The moderator, Dennis Lim of the New York Film Festival, asked Lee and DeNiro, who’d already seen Megalopolis, to share their impressions of it. DeNiro’s contributions had been largely fragmentary and incoherent, and so his stuttering non-answer to this expected question was at least in-character, if also suspicious. Lee, who’d been speaking in circles most of the time, leaned forward and spoke another circle and then flung out a hand and said that we viewers should just watch the film ourselves, as if desperate to shed the hideous burden of this question. I squirmed in my seat as I watched this. But this weird reticence, Lee and DeNiro refusing to choke out any real praise for his film, did not seem to bother or even register with Coppola. He began talking about his film and how its themes applied to America. He’d earlier described it as “a Roman epic set in modern America as Rome”, and now he spoke explicitly about how America not only is like Rome. It is Rome — that is, a decadent global power that might be in its last days as a republic.

At this point, Lee and DeNiro leapt in with embarrassingly stupid comments about Donald Trump. They seemed intent on turning the end of this film discussion into a panic session about the forthcoming election, but Coppola was in a much more serene and magnanimous mood. And his view of America’s troubles was more broad-minded than Lee’s and DeNiro’s. He focused less on Trump in particular, than on a more general rot in the American polity, owing to hyper-partisanship, failed governance, and extreme inequality. He said he intentionally filled his production with Trump supporters, such as Jon Voight, and others who’d been exiled or cancelled for bad behaviour, such as Shia LeBeouf. And despite the dark implications of his movie’s thematic setup — America as late-republican Rome — he seemed genially committed to a larger mood of optimism, and to fostering a spirit of “cooperation” among political enemies. People are “geniuses”, he said, and he suggested that this innate genius could well see America through this troubled moment, though he didn’t say where his film came down on these matters.

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Such an introduction to a movie, where show business figures try to wrap it in their show-business politics, and where its creator lays out the historical parallels it’s explicitly drawing, inclines a viewer to treat it as an argument, or a set of ideas, rather than simply as visual entertainment. This effect is reinforced by the movie’s subtitle: A Fable. You see this onscreen under the big title and you start ruminating about what it’s supposedly to be a fable of, and, if you’re an intellectual quibbler like I am, whether it’ll be a wise or plausible fable.

But Megalopolis works against this somewhat literal inclination in a couple of ways. First, the film is such a spectacular mess that its meaning as a fable is more elusive than it probably should be. Second, the fable’s big teaching turns out to be so perverse in its details, its underlying ideas so bad and dumb, that you can spend two-thirds of Megalopolis in a very odd state of movie suspense, thinking, “Nah, Coppola can’t be trying to tell us that.”

And yet, Megalopolis is kind of a cool film. Lee and DeNiro should have been able to muster at least a few gee-whiz adjectives about it, even if their ultimate take was a thumbs-down, as it will be for many viewers. They should have been able to call it “wild”, “beautiful”, “sexy”, “funny”, or just “inventive”. It says unflattering things about either their decency as friends of Francis Coppola or their cognitive functioning as aging men that they couldn’t.

Megalopolis is set, fabulously, in a city called New Rome, a baroque version of New York City with many details and accents imported, via CGI, from the old Rome. As Coppola let us know in the preview discussion, New Rome’s inhabitants are acting out an updated version of old Rome’s signal political drama, when a decadent Republic teetered toward the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. Accordingly, New Rome is an arena of quarrelling elites, many of them related by either marriage or blood. The two principal antagonists are the city’s hidebound and corrupt, but also humble and dutiful, mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and a visionary architect with one or two magical powers named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Cesar wants to mold the city into the beautiful new shape it has in his extraordinary mind, while Cicero wants to serve the interests that give him his power and, thus, to keep the city pretty much as it is.

On the edges of this primary conflict scheme a multi-generational cast of entitled New Romans, including Cicero’s beautiful daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), an old and wealthy banker named Crassus (Voigt), and Cesar’s deranged and politically ambitious cousin Pulcher (Lebeouf), who hates him. Just outside of this tight circle of blood and money and power, striving busily to sleep her way into its centre, is sexpot finance reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza).

As Wow Platinum’s name should suggest, Coppola has overcooked pretty much everything in this movie. When, early on, Cesar arrives at a civic event MC’d by Mayor Cicero and then decides to make himself the centre of attention, he does so by yelling Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, in its entirety. In this political world, ceremony yields completely to power, and so everyone turns from Cicero and lends their ear to the younger, louder MC. Whatever you think of the narrative sense of this speech, you can’t deny that Adam Driver is exactly the man to give it.

In this scene we get two of the real, if unreliable, strengths of Megalopolis. (To be clear, every strength of Megalopolis is unreliable, amply mixed with folly.) The first is what you might call the movie’s sociology, how it shows New Rome’s aristocracy floating above the laws and manners that people of lower classes observe as a matter of course. Coppola does this casually, showing rich people wandering into and despoiling public events without even thinking. For them, the distinctions between stage and seating, performer and spectator, yours and mine, are erased with impunity, at their whim. These are chillingly bland and human-scale power claims. They feel politically sick in an intimate way, like being robbed on the street, in front of your kids.

Another real, unreliable strength of Megalopolis is its cast. Coppola encourages his actors to match the film’s overall atmosphere of chaos and excess in their performances, which mostly pays off. Megalopolis is filled with fantastic overacting. Adam Driver thrives, of course, in this madness, as does Shia Leboeuf, and Jon Voigt is a total hoot as Crassus. As the slurring, seemingly brain-damaged ringmaster at a Madison Square Garden chariot race, Donald Pitts steals that long and elaborate scene and gives the film’s funniest, most outré performance. As Wow Platinum, though, Aubrey Plaza doesn’t achieve as happy a balance between intentionally and unintentionally funny.

Coppola’s method of unrelenting excess, his overall willingness to flirt with self-parody, enables a good deal of crazy fun, as well as some visually beautiful cinema, but it also enables self-parody. Now, self-parody at this advanced level can be entertaining, too, but the lack of storytelling discipline in Megalopolis becomes a more fundamental sort of drag. That the movie is often confusing is to be expected, and, for me anyway, tolerated. The bigger problem is that it’s so disjointed, with so many scenes so disconnected from those around them, and with some of those scenes dissolving so fully into psychedelia, that one’s sense of narrative movement sometimes goes dead. It’s weird to feel mired in chaos, bored and impatient amid so much visual and dramatic novelty, but that feeling threatens to dominate the latter half of the film.

The biggest problem with Megalopolis, though, was an ongoing drama inside my own head about the meaning of this fable. I will come out and say the thing I couldn’t let myself believe, because I think Coppola means it to be obvious from the beginning and not a plot point or object of suspense, as it was for me: the movie’s hero really is Cesar Catilina. He’s the only one brave enough to tackle the future, creative enough to make it beautiful. My own resistance early in the film stemmed from the fact that Cesar’s grand vision for New Rome seemed to involve tearing down scores of large buildings with people living in them and turning the vast acreage of newly vacant land into, like, parks and civic centre, which would be linked by magical conveyors, functionally identical to the moving walkways in airports, and cute little bubble-cars like in The Jetsons. It’s true that all of this would be made from magic leaves that Cesar can create, and so it would be in some way “ecological”. But, still, I couldn’t help wondering where all the people would live in a city being redesigned by a visionary architect who didn’t consider them at all, except sometimes to resent them for their obstreperous complaining about him blowing up their homes.

My problem, to put it in historical terms, was that Cesar Catilina seemed a lot like Robert Moses, the unelected planner who sought to pave over greater New York City in the Fifties and Sixties, and that Cesar’s vision for New Rome bore an ominous resemblance to the great disasters of civic modernism, especially the planned city of Brasilia. I couldn’t believe I was watching a fable about how one of the great, unappreciated geniuses of our civilisation was this guy who almost ruined New York City, and how one of its great, unappreciated achievements was that haunted skeleton of a city, Brasilia. But I was wrong in my disbelief. Coppola really did model Cesar Catilina on Robert Moses. He really is telling us that the grand disasters of civic modernism are something for us New Romans strive for. He really is hopeful we’ll come to see this ourselves.

Suggested reading

How Fritz Lang invented fantasy

By Sam Jennings

Here is my dilemma in dealing with Francis Coppola and the message of his Megalopolis. I find his optimism not just admirable and likeable but also wise, especially in contrast with the political panic of his famous interlocutors on that New York stage. In trying to turn a film discussion into an emergency forum on the November election, Lee and DeNiro resembled the radicalised teenagers of social media, who see themselves as the Main Characters in a drama of ongoing crisis, in the light of which everyone is obliged to listen to their hysterical takes, and art must be reduced to a subordinate branch of crisis politics.

Coppola, on other hand, isn’t all that worked up about things. He seems to think that we humans are pretty smart, pretty good at solving problems, and so, while there are no guarantees, there’s a good chance we can handle whatever challenges the future will cast before us. I think this attitude is not only healthier, more conducive both to everyday happiness and to addressing the problems themselves, but sounder and more accurate in its picture of the world. It’s hard to reconcile my fond appreciation of this outlook with the character he’s created to embody it in his strange new film. I don’t think I’ll ever see another movie that so energetically expresses such a healthy and admirable outlook via such undeniably bad ideas. I’m all for a can-do approach to the world’s problems, just not the can-do approach of Robert Moses.

Still, now that I’ve accepted that its lesson is what I couldn’t believe, I’m eager to see Coppola’s movie fable a second time. Perhaps like Nietzsche after facing his “most abysmal thought”, that the idiot facts of the world are going to keep repeating themselves forever, I’ll experience Megalopolis with fresh eyes, gain an even fuller appreciation of its absurd spectacle. Despite our disagreements about Robert Moses, I can’t help being touched by Francis Coppola’s surprising optimism, and so I kind of expect to like his film at least a little more the second time than I did the first.