Thirsty for Piss

On 'Joker: Folie à Deux' and 'Megalopolis'

TCL Chinese Theatre, 2024, Photograph, via AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

It is hard to find a culture writer in America who gets deeper at the pulse of this glorious and demented country than Mo Diggs. You can find him at Cross Current and we are beyond delighted to have him in The Metropolitan Review writing on two of the very worst movies of 2024—and one, despite its failure, that Diggs can’t look away from. Movie week roars on at TMR, and who says we only write about potential Oscar winners? Please support what we do and pledge $50 so we can exist deep into the future and get you, what we think, will be the very best print issue you’ll find anywhere.

-The Editors

When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost Time. It was about a deranged criminal who illogically stabs a little girl and dumps her body in the river. But he’s cursed; now he has to see the world through her eyes. With this shift in consciousness, he goes up the river and meets all the great figures of the past (Socrates, Shakespeare). These figures are on two opposing sides: the mind and the soul.

I don’t remember much more about the idea (I wrote one page of it when I was nineteen before giving up entirely), beyond my desire to have the inevitable film adaptation play Stone Temple Pilots’ “Where the River Goes” in the closing credits. We have no problem seeing this as a dumb, bloated — if ambitious — idea.

Now imagine, instead of being a curly-haired, sixteen-year-old, morbidly obese Arab-American curmudgeon with no CV to back me up, I had the greatest cinematic streak in motion picture history, from The Godfather to Apocalypse Now. Also imagine, instead of thinking every day about my idea for three years, I did so for more than forty years. Plus, after being rejected by all the studios, I still had enough money in my own war chest to make it a reality.

Why was Megalopolis sold out when I first went to see it at the Alamo Draft House? Everyone knew it was a bomb, no? I do not want to be a reductionist, but a large part of it has to do with the fact that, after decades of doing hack work, Francis Ford Coppola finally made a film he actually wanted to make, in spite of the studios saying “no.” This wasn’t a moviegoing experience; it was a vote. A vote we all knew would make no impact, but a vote that we stood behind, good acting and coherent storytelling be damned.

Megalopolis is the worst movie I have ever seen that everybody should see. Terrible acting, terrible writing. But everyone should see it in a theater with an audience when — not if, when — it is rereleased. A theater full of laughs beats streaming it on Criterion. Why wouldn’t it be rereleased? Can anyone seriously imagine a Coppola retrospective without it? What better way to top off a weekend of classic cinema than a drunken bacchanalia of hoots and guffaws as we see architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) rebuild New Rome (yes, Coppola actually made up a fictional city that is meant to be New York, as if he were writing a DC Comic in the ‘30s) in his bold image.

Megalopolis also must be seen in Manhattan. I saw it at the Delancey/Essex Regal after the Draft House show was sold out. Talk about divine intervention. When you exit the theater, you must look out the window at the skyscrapers and think of all the insane, fevered egos, all the real-life Caesars, that envisioned them. Bad as this movie may be, it has cemented Coppola’s status as a New York filmmaker alongside Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee. What’s more, Coppola gives more insight into the lives of the powerful in New York than any other New York director.

It can even be said that this strength is also his fatal flaw. Cesar Catalina’s absurd ease in getting his visions realized reflects Coppola’s own unchecked power. Perhaps Megalopolis meant him selling his vineyards, but, also, he had vineyards.

This film is bad in the way Tommy Wiseau’s The Room was bad. Wiseau was caught up in his feelings over a break-up. Coppola was obsessed with Shakespeare and Emerson when he made this. But this is a love letter to New York. A clumsy, halting love letter that deserves its mockery. But it takes up space and flies in the face of all conventions in an inspired way. The way most of us have a Boomer relative who posts weird rants on Facebook: imagine him instead making a cinematic passion project. It’s funny how Megalopolis has an unsubtle anti-Trump Z-plot; Coppola is the cinematic equivalent of Donald Trump, going outside the system the way only a wealthy, elderly egomaniac like him can.

I have never felt so energized and blissful leaving such a spectacularly awkward turd. I can imagine the film being constantly shown at midnight cinemas, like an expensive Rocky Horror. I can imagine it having a permanent Showgirls-level status with gays. Aubrey Plaza, playing the deliciously campy TV talking head Wow Platinum, might have reached Bea Arthur-status with this. I liked Civil War more, but I am a liar if I say it stuck with me like this did. I can imagine all the batshit directors wanting to make their Megalopolis. Why not? It was club-footed, but it must have been fun to make.

If we need to find a precedent in Coppola’s filmography for such a delirious film, we need to go back further than The Godfather. Nine years earlier than The Godfather. Megalopolis reminds me most of Coppola’s 1963 B-movie debut for Roger Corman, Dementia 13. Like most of his New Hollywood cohorts, Coppola was a graduate of the Roger Corman Film School. The lesson all these directors learned: get away with as much shit as you can within the budget you have. Many of these directors were inspired by the French New Wave. Considering the budget and audience, the best they could do in their low-budget films was showing tits and ass.

Coppola’s ambitious peers looked up to him at the Roger Corman Film School. He was the first to have a legitimate “Directed By” of the group. Three years later, he directed a comedy, You’re a Big Boy Now. This time for a major studio, Warner Brothers, back when filmmakers younger than thirty were not directing many films.

Flash forward to One From the Heart, Coppola’s musical bomb that might not have landed him in movie jail, but ensured that his movies from that time forward would never be based on his ideas. An S.E. Hinton adaptation here, a John Grisham adaptation there. In this context, we understand Megalopolis as a return to Coppola doing things on screen just because he can.

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Now what’s the explanation for Joker: Folie ȧ Deux? If Megalopolis was a maverick trying to pull off one more heist, Joker, intentionally or not, is symptomatic of the modern internet. Like AI art, it strikes the viewer as “accurate” in so many ways, but “off” in ways that are uncanny and/or weird, both in the Erik Davis sense. It was as if someone asked ChatGPT for help creating a fresh take on a potential gay Joker ship. Think of it as the world’s first AI slop feature film.

It is also an unwitting vision of what happens when we let the algorithmic gods decide our fate. Lady Gaga acting poorly and Joaquin Phoenix singing horribly is analogous to Addison Rae singing and Mr. Beast having his own TV show. More than at any other time, so many youth feel entitled to fame. If director Todd Philips’s Joker run has done anything, it has rightfully elevated The King of Comedy to a higher perch than it previously had. The internet is full of schemers that want shortcuts to fame. That’s all Rupert Pupkin and Arthur Fleck ever were. Gaga’s Harley Quinn is willing to fake love to taste some fame. But where the first Joker was distanced enough to be an artistic statement on our collective delusion, this film is infected by it. Gaga is not a terrible actress and she can hang with a decent actor like Bradley Cooper, but not a master like Phoenix, whose singing is so awful it may have created a new genre: instead of the jukebox musical, the karaoke musical.

Unlike Megalopolis, it does not fall into the “so bad it’s good category.” There are too many dime-store analyses sprinkled throughout on comedy and jokes to ever allow anyone to laugh at it. I don’t think it will survive as a gay camp classic either. SPOILER ALERT: the scene of the guards raping the Joker out of Arthur Fleck will make it so only the most sadistic, methed-out gay tweakers find a film like this a Mommie Dearest-level trash classic.

Joker: Folie ȧ Deux seems like it was directed not by someone with decades of film directing experience, but a TikToker who only had experience making surreal short films for the app. If this were a TikTok channel, it would be a game-changer. One bizarre Joker cartoon voiced by Nick Cave, one short video where Arthur Fleck threatens podcaster Tim Dillon, etc. As a feature film, it is intolerable and maddening.

Film critic Chris Nashawaty has argued that the death of the summer blockbuster might be a good thing, and wrote on a similar theme not long ago. In the latter article, he listed Megalopolis alongside Joker: Folie ȧ Deux as examples of big swings and bigger misses. While it is sad that these films are not good, he argues, it is inspiring that filmmakers are taking risks again. Point taken, but I would assume a writer older than me would be more demanding. The excitement for films like Megalopolis and Joker: Folie ȧ Deux is understandable. Neither film follows the “artistic” aesthetic of most A24 films. I saw both films in the theater instead of, say, Anora, because, good as it seems, I can wait for the streaming release of a revealing, “surprisingly affecting” life of a sex worker. What helped both Megalopolis and Joker: Folie ȧ Deux is that I truly had no idea what to expect. Even though I maintain that Joker was not good, I was surprised by the ways it failed.

This is cause for concern, not celebration. We are so starved for bold risk-taking that we will support vanity projects by aging maniac millionaires. If we go by the old playground metric of whether you would drink piss if you had no water, this is a situation in which we are thirsty for piss because we haven’t had anything wet in years. Consider the fact that a film like Civil War (a rare A24 film that is actually forward-thinking — and their best-selling film, to boot) was divisive because it supposedly had no political stance (if being excited at the death of a dictator is not a political stance). Like Nashawaty says, the financial disaster of both films will probably ensure that even fewer directors who are not firmly established icons will take risks. That said, I see a nightmarish Joker: Folie ȧ Deux future where an AI Luigi Mangione sings showbiz standards to a clip-art Minion for lolz. Maybe they’ll get the clearance to have Stone Temple Pilots on the soundtrack of the closing credits.

Mo Diggs writes about tech, culture and legacy media. His Substack,

Cross Current

, looks at the intersection between the new media trends of today and the legacy media trends of yesterday. It has been mentioned in The New York Times and The Guardian.