Megalopolis & Self-Protectionism
i know this is an absurd title.
Sean Fennessey, like many others this past weekend+, joined the Megalopolis discourse and connected it to a variety of other controversial 2024 films that have had loud supporters and equally loud detractors even ahead of wider releases.
While he outlines other films like Civil War, The Substance, and Longlegs, Megalopolis seems to have been uniquely memed and aggressively critiqued both perhaps for its content as well as the story behind it (Coppola invested ~$120M of his own money to make the film and has been ruminating over it for supposedly four decades).
Fennessey’s point gets at two tensions broadly in film today:
A culture in which film criticism has become polarizing and people dig in to their belief systems with highly reductive views
The idea that the creators/protagonists of these debates are stuck in a situation where they are forced to sit squarely within a group of people and create for them (or themselves) instead of a collection of individuals that sit across a gradient of aesthetics/beliefs/desires
These dynamics apply to lots of parts of our lives today and get at a broader rise of how people think about themselves as individuals and as entities. The aggressive reinforcement or exclusion leads to increasingly opinionated and non-translational aesthetics where people feel they must fit very precisely in certain groups in order to fit in any group.
There are very few people playing with translational or intersectional aesthetics of personality or brand out of the clear lack of upside in doing so. Every now and then someone breaks out of the cultural barriers but in most cases people alienate both groups of a given venn diagram and end up with fewer supporters/fans/friends. And thus, people pander to themselves and their small group only because it is easiest, lowest-friction, and highest expected value (but not highest ceiling), and perhaps some feel they must “like” things because other people like them also do.
One could argue this dynamic creates a perverse incentive structure that rewards conformity and punishes experimentation.
Now that I’m really stepping outside my zone of competence, I’d like to take this a logical(?) step further and talk about this dynamic as it relates to the oft-discussed in private rise of the over-therapized, overly-self protective, and perhaps avoidant individuals in 2024. A different form of fitting in or getting out driven by an inability to not dig in to certain held beliefs and aesthetics without being isolationist to anyone remotely off-putting.
The rise of what some call "therapy-speak" and an intensified focus on personal boundaries has created a new form of social sorting. As people aggressively curate their social interactions, it feels as if we seek to minimize discomfort and maximize personal validation, often at the expense of diverse or challenging interactions. This mindset has led to a kind of emotional protectionism, where people reflexively avoid anyone or anything that doesn't align perfectly with their carefully constructed self-image or belief system.
Now to be clear, this isn’t me taking some stance against therapy (I go weekly). This also is not that thinly-veiled extremism we’re seeing more and more where people equate socially complex or protective beliefs to weakness. What myself, EJ, and others are doing is pointing at a practice that is supposed to be clarifying and saying perhaps we have turned it into something falsifying and destructive in how we navigate our lives not just in this moment in time but in the long-term.1
It's a different manifestation of the same tribal instinct we see in cultural criticism - a desire to find and stick with "our people" while avoiding the potential growth that comes from friction and disagreement and not viewing those things as negative.
I know, it’s ironic that this is spurred from film critique, but across each of these dynamics I would say that we’ve sacrificed our ability to navigate the grey areas of existence and to sit amongst many groups that have different gradients of beliefs. As time goes on, the tribes become more tribal, and naturally as algorithms, whether digital or the ones in people’s heads, look to sort, filter, and amplify, we probably lose quite a bit in the act of creating, talking, and living.
Thanks to Max for sending an insane amount of megalopolis tweets over the past week and Andy for thoughts.
This gets at a different question which is how and why people go to therapy or enter into this form of protectionism and whether or not therapy is really acting as a vessel or creation mechanism for this behavior that people were seeking a reason to adopt.