“Could you let me in without a ticket? You and I both don’t want to give money to the Trumps.”
The worker behind the movie counter bit her lip in sympathetic hesitation.
“I know, I just don’t want to lose my job.”
“Of course. Maybe you just accidentally let slip which cinema it’s in.”
“Yeah, it’s cinema three or five.”
Very few Sydney theatres were still screening Melania a week after its release. The historic box-office losses for this US$40 million “documentary” about the first lady of the United States, marketed with an additional US$35 million, are the only drops of satisfaction to be wrung from its existence. Florida would freeze over before I helped mitigate those losses at even a concession price.
Loitering near cinemas three and five, I followed a woman dressed in Mar-a-Lago colours—ice white, warm white, off white, pearl, cream and light beige—into number five. A dozen people sat waiting, frankly more than I expected. But the screening cancellations widened the catchment area: this must have been the convergence of every white-haired Floridian expat within a twenty-kilometre radius.
I set the timer for three minutes. Like staring at a solar eclipse, watching this for any length of time might cause severe and lifelong retinal damage. Three minutes was as much as I would bear for the journalistic pretence of an informed review. As the trailers and advertisements rolled, I pondered how we got here.
Melania is the afterbirth of American big business’s marriage to the authoritarian, even fascist, right. Like Gonerill and Regan in their father King Lear’s court, Paramount, Netflix, Disney and Amazon all vied to flatter their way into Donald Trump’s favour by purchasing production rights at extortionate prices. No Silicon Valley tech bro or Hollywood executive was willing to perform the part of truthful Cordelia. The role of Gloucester—who had his eyes gouged out despite loyalty to Lear—is played by everyone stupid enough to watch this film.
Amazon’s billionaire owner Jezz Bezos won royal favour in the end. His bribe sounds like a lot: US$75 million in total, of which, according to the Wall Street Journal, Melania pocketed US$28 million. In contrast to Qatar’s US$400 private jet gift to Donald Trump, and the US$1 billion fee for states joining the president’s new “board of peace”, it’s a bargain.
There was no need to scout for potential directors. Brett Ratner’s resume was impeccable: the Rush Hour trilogy, six allegations of rape and sexual harassment in 2017, a long-standing friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu and recent cameos in the Epstein files.
Warehouse authoritarianism met White House authoritarianism in the making of Melania. According to sources who spoke with the New York Times, Amazon employees could not opt out of production for political reasons. The world’s second-largest company cancelled screenings at Lake Theatre & Café—a small, alternative Oregon cinema—because the owner’s promotional material read: “To defeat your enemy, you must know them: Melania”.
But now the movie had begun; I started the timer.
It opens on peaceful, blue ocean waves. A sophisticated metaphor for fascism’s hypnotic promises of order and stability? But twenty seconds later, a cheap jumpscare: the camera sweeps up the sandy shore to reveal Mar-a-Lago, the Trump family residence.
We are treated to drone footage of the mansion’s rooftop and its bizarre phallic protrusions, before the camera swoops down to the ground, focused expectantly on the marble steps outside the back door. Having established our servile vantage point, Melania makes her bold appearance: an extreme close-up of her feet in python-skin Christian Louboutin heels. Fascism is a pair of silver stilettos advertising in your face forever.
We see her billowy white dress as the camera pans up to her face. Taking off her sunglasses in an attempt at personality, she steps into a black SUV. More helicoptering over Miami’s palm trees and golf courses is accompanied by “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones:
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
Rape, murder
It’s just a shot away
The security cavalcade of SUVs carrying Melania through the winding roads reinforced my deep and abiding prejudice towards big cars.
I checked the timer: still 90 seconds left.
A police car inexplicably blares its sirens to herald the arrival of Melania and her secret service detail on an airport tarmac. The camera lingers longingly on the Trump family private jet (maybe the greatest private jet ever) before Melania climbs the stairway into it.
A trio of obsequious flight staff await her with grins pasted onto their faces. “Happy New Year”, we hear Melania say, or perhaps it’s a post-edit text-to-speech program, before she turns, scowling. She drops her handbag onto a seat and catwalks down the aisle, staring directly into the camera.
By this point, 105 seconds in, I had already forgotten that this was supposed to be a documentary.
She sits and stares vacantly somewhere beyond the camera. The jet takes off and the Rolling Stones finally stop singing about rape and murder. Suddenly, somehow, Melania is now wearing a black dress and walking down a wood-panelled hallway on the jet.
“Everyone wants to know, so here it is: twenty days. Family. Business. Philanthropy. And becoming the First Lady of the United States. Again.”
The timer went off—I’d seen enough. I knew about the family. I knew about the business. I didn’t know about the philanthropy, unless she was referring to wishing her servants a happy New Year.
After returning to sunlight and reality, I wondered: was there perhaps some wisdom to be gleaned from that cinematic sludge? Because Melania Trump, more than her ideologically demented husband, the Epsteinian depravity of his circle, and the megalomania of his political class, might better reflect the mass psychological profile of the rich.
Absolute boredom. A yawning abyss without value, quality or direction, staving off the haunting incursions of nothingness with drawers and drawers of designer sunglasses, handbags, watches, stilettos, necklaces, neckties, cufflinks, ball gowns and bikinis. With private jets, fleets of luxury cars and armadas of golf carts. Wanting only more things to want, and fearing only what happens if the carousel stops.
This type of self-interest lacks the charge of malevolence or even the banality of bureaucracy. It is a vacuum that abhors itself. Material acquisition personified. The benefactors of capitalist production longing to become one with their world of commodities. If a shopping mall and a human being did a sci-fi brain-machine switcheroo, it would be Melania Trump.
They’re Democrats, Republicans, liberals, fascists—and none of them, really. They’re in Miami, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, London, Moscow, Mumbai and Shanghai—and nowhere in particular. The wealth of our world, the sweat, toil and torture of ordinary, everyday people, the machinery of modern society existing only to furnish them with vanity and diversion.
I remain undecided if these purely idle rich are just as bad as the fascist ideologues and depraved sadists, or whether, given their vastly greater numbers, they are even worse. But I refused to endure another 105 minutes simply to better answer this question.
