Time and Utopia in 'The Goat Song' and 'Megalopolis'

• In Event: Cinematic Decadence

Abstract

The first review is for Konstantin Vaginov’s novel The Goat Song (1927), which concerns the travails and debaucheries of Leningrad bohemians conscious that they are living in the end times; the second review is for Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Megalopolis (2024), which is about an architect trying to mastermind a wholly new way for everyone to live. Different premises, sure — Vaginov is oriented toward the end of the past, while Coppola toward the beginning of the future—but in their divergent approaches to temporality we can sus out a shared obsession with social imagining in its most liberatory and destructive forms.

Author

• Charles McKenna Smith, UC Berkeley