Plan Nein From Outer Space

I think I've finally settled on what the Melania "movie" most reminds me of: It's a perfume commercial. It's one of those old-style perfume commercials, one that sells a never-described scent while claiming it to be "sophisticated," or "alluring," which are not things you can smell but represent only what the ad company presumes you have been aspiring towards, all your sorry television-watching life. You may not be as successful as you like, my sophisticated couch potatoes, but with a bottle of this, purchasable at any nearby Macy's, you will have the stink of someone successful.

That is what the Melania movie appears to be about. Jeff Bezos' Amazon needed to come up with a mechanism for bribing Donald Trump and his preternaturally vapid non-entity of a wife, spending $40 million to create a faux-documentary about her, and much of the early debate about the "film" was whether it was a bribe shaped like a movie or a movie shaped like a bribe. But it is not either of those things. It's a bribe shaped like a bribe.

When Tom Homan accepted $50,000 in FBI sting money stuffed into a Cava bag, nobody had to think about whether it was mostly a bribe or mostly a Cava bag. The Cava bag was, obviously, the outer wrapper. That it was from Cava is pure happenstance; the bribe could have been in a Chipotle bag, a Taco Bell bag, or a small wooden box sealed with beeswax and it would not have changed the bribe into anything else.

The only real speculation over Melania was whether Amazon would attempt to wrap the bribe in a thick enough wrapper to hide, at least a little bit, the bribe nature of the bribe, and we learned the answer to that within hours of the first unlucky critics stumbling out of theaters. This one was a bribe bribe. There was no grand artistic vision, there was no attempt at a script, the whole thing was a phone-it-in play meant to be over and done with as soon as possible.

The Independent

Instead, Melania focuses on 20 days running up to the second Trump inauguration in January 2025. “Everyone wants to know,” Melania growls in voiceover, “so here it is.” Perhaps her lack of specificity on what exactly people want to know is deliberate. The documentary – with a runtime of 104 minutes – covers everything from the design of place settings and the width of hat ribbons to her excitement for her son Barron’s hypothetical “beautiful family” and sadness at the 2024 death of her mother. [...]

To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.

It's the decision to put a camera on Melania for 20 days and make a movie of whatever falls out of it that gives away the game. What is interesting about Melania Trump, according to the woman herself, the pre-disgraced Epstein-linked sex pest director tasked with cobbling together the film, and everyone else put to the task? Not her childhood. Not her immigration. Not her marriage, or her beliefs, or God forbid her thoughts. Talking about any of those things might have resulted in mild discomfort, the sort of discomfort that art relies on but which the Trumps may be too empty to even feel, much less tolerate.

So nobody involved even bothered to try: Instead, it's just a 90 minute "film" that tries to turn 20 days worth of picking dresses, color schemes, menus, and otherwise gliding around being sophisticated and alluring into a plotless, message-averse blob. That's all Amazon could stomach, in wrapping up the bribe, and when it became obvious that watching an emotionless Nosferatu make interior design decisions for an hour and a half still couldn't be plausibly called a "documentary" the director prevailed on Nosferatu to at least punch it up by reading off some daily affirmations.

Get a camera in, shoot whatever footage can be shot in 20 days, slap some Live, Laugh, Love styled wisdom in the audio tracks and shove that sucker out the door. That is how you know it was never even meant to be a movie. It was a bribe first, second, third, and always. Nobody working on this thing gave a flying damn about pretending otherwise.

Hunter Walker:

Having watched Melania, I can also say that the camera work was awful. There's these Super 8 bits (apparently shot by Ratner himself) that are introduced like 3/4 of the way through with no clear purpose.

Oh, I know this one! Generally, when the later parts of a movie are filmed "by the director himself" on a home-movie grade camera and without a full crew on set, that usually means that the producers ran out of cash partway through, the crew walked out rather than work for free, and the director is now frantically trying to cobble together enough footage to create a releasable, if tremendously shitty, product. The goal becomes whatever it takes to fulfill the contract, even if this failure will haunt me to the end of my days.

If you're producing a movie that relies on strictly sequential shoots—if your premise is "we've got the 20 days before the inauguration to gather footage," it's not like you can film the last days before the first ones—and something unexpected happens on day 15, you have to improvise. One of your cameras broke but the production is too cheap to have wrangled a spare? Super 8 time! Your third cinematographer quits, having gotten so nauseous from the gas of entitled vapidity wafting through every scene that they could no longer walk or speak? Time for the director to pick up Mr. Super 8! And so on.

You might be asking how a mocumentary without professional actors or meaningful effects could cost an alleged $40 million over 20 days of scriptless shooting, and the answer is: Because it was a bribe. $28 million of that sum went directly to "star" Melania, possibly as a check or possibly in multiple Cava bags. We can imagine that additional fees went to whatever Trump-related businesses the production had to deal with. Brett Ratner probably did not come all that cheap, disgraced or no, and traditional Hollywood accounting systems are nine-tenths scam in the best of times.

So yeah, there are plenty of ways a 20-day shoot could suddenly be hit with enough difficulty in its final days to break out ye old Super 8. Doesn't make it an artistic choice.

It was a bribe meant primarily to funnel money to Donald and Melania Trump, there was so little effort put into getting a "real" movie out of it that it appears the production may have narrowly avoided collapse.

$28 million went into Melania's own pocket—a bribe.

$12 million went into cobbling together a few weeks of footage into a propagandistic homage to the Trumps being glamorous while accomplishing or conveying approximately f--k-all—also a bribe.

An additional $35 million was spent to promote the Glamorous Trump Family Film to a weary nation—all of it a bribe.

It is all bribe. There's no wrapper, it's all just bribe.

The Guardian:

It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

And so it goes on. Melania moves through the action like a listless automaton, talking constantly but saying nothing, squired from Mar-a-Lago to Trump Tower to her final destination, the White House. What drama there is chiefly hinges on her concern that her white blouse is too loose at the neck and needs to be cut and then tightened, much to the consternation of the fitters. Melania misses her mother, she says, but she loves Michael Jackson and Barron and possibly her husband as well, although Trump himself is mostly a background presence here, shuffling in at intervals to brag about his election win and complain that his inauguration clashes with the televised college football playoffs. “They probably did it on purpose,” he says. [...]

The star rating for this film was corrected on 2 February 2026. A formatting issue led an earlier version to be awarded one star, when the reviewer’s intention was zero.

And this is why, watching the footage, there is this uncanny feeling that we have seen this all before. We have. It's a very particular sort of cinematography, of narration, of aspiration.

This whole f--king thing is a 90-minute perfume commercial for a perfume that does not exist. It is selling sophistication, and glamor, and allure, with Melania Trump playing the part of an empty but terribly expensive bottle. Presenting:

Calvin Klein's Obsession
(For Fascists)

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

Or because I enable a violent pseudo-state that kidnaps children, murders protestors, and assaults citizens.

Or because my husband is a pestilent racist.

Or because my family is raking in billions by reengineering the whole of government into a machine for collecting bribes, favors, and dispensations.

Look, we are so glamorous.

Ignore our acts.

Aspire to be me.

Dream of becoming so vapid that you threaten to drift away at any moment, so devoid of responsibility or morality or interest in the world outside yourself that you become a balloon in designer clothing.

If you are wondering if the bribe is truly as unwatchable as critics are claiming, I'll note that almost immediately after the Kennedy Center Melania premiere Donald announced that he would be shutting down the Kennedy Center for two full years, allegedly for yet another round of "remodeling." So there you go: Melania is a film so bad that the theater at which it premiered had to be closed down after showing it.

Possibly for remodeling. Or possibly for an exorcism.

You would hope, being a normal, rational person, that a $75 million propaganda campaign meant to glamorous a horrifically crooked first family would be wasted effort. But if you are a normal, rational person, you know that perfume advertisements are gobsmackingly effective in convincing human beings that they need to stink in very particular, branded ways. Car commercials, even larger-than-is-usual fast food burgers are all marketed for their luxury, their allure, their ability to make you, sitting there, into the sexiest possible potential mate.

Melania was able to recoup about 10% of the invested bribe money in its opening weekend ($7 million on an advertisement budget of $35 million isn't considered good, mind you) and, to a certain segment of people with more aspirations than sense, imagining yourself part of a world in which you don't have to care about kidnapped children being fed rotting food in government detention camps because you are just so terribly glamorous is so, so alluring.

Okay, well that's laying it on a bit thick. No, very thick. Actually, now I'm not even sure Kayleigh has a mom.

But there is a cult that falls for this sort of stuff, or at least wants to pretend it has. The three main audiences for Melania can be broken down as follows:

1. The Supplicants: Namely, the Kennedy Center premiere crowd, which consisted entirely of sullen important people who needed to be seen bending the knee to Trump yet-a-freaking-gain.
2. The Aspirants: Women who aspire to be glamorous like Melania, in the same way that MAGA men aspire to be "masculine" like Donald Can Barely Make It Up A Flight Of Stairs Himself.
3. The Enforcers.

That last one is where Amazon may recoup most of its cash from. We already have at least one report of a pro-MAGA military commander demanding his unit see Melania with their families. And no, it isn't clear how watching Melania Trump make fashion choices helps with "warfighting," so we're going to have to ask Secretary of Vodka Pete Hegseth to clarify that one for us the next time he's seen upright.

From The Daily Beast:

The unit commander in question is alleged to have worn red MAGA hats in the past and “made it very clear” how he feels about those who do not support the administration’s agenda.

He is also alleged to have made seeing Melania count as one of the three “unit activity events” service members are required to attend each month. Such events are designed to promote bonds within combat units and their families.

The letter said, “…he ‘advised’ our unit members and their families to join him and his wife and children for a showing of that new documentary called ‘Melania’ at an off-base movie theater… When he said ‘advised’, we know what that meant.

“We feel helpless to try to fight against what he is doing here.”

Yep, there's your target audience, Amazon. Military families forced to watch your propaganda flick to stay in the good graces of their weird-as-hell local General Jack D. Ripper. Maybe you can jack up ticket prices near military bases, really squeeze those tortured families dry.

While this is obviously worrying, in a "military commanders should probably not be openly fetishizing the commander in chief's wife" sort of way and in several others that are probably a lot more important, the truth of it is that Melania is likely to be gone and forgotten sooner, rather than later. Of all the things we all have to worry about, this particular bribe is not high on the list. It won't work.

Anyone who is hollow enough to admire Melania Trump despite her indifference to her husband's lifelong grotesqueries and corruption was already on the Trump train. Anyone who is rightfully contemptuous of this fascist and anti-American administration is not likely to say Well I don't like the institutionalized mass torture of children like Liam Ramos and the execution of Americans like Renee Good but this footage of Melania Antoinette choosing party decor has now convinced me the end of the republic is worth it.

No, it just emphasizes the impossible rift between American wealth and American decency. It emphasizes the vacuousness with which the Epstein-linked upper classes sail through their lives no matter who gets shot or who can't afford medication down here in the real world.

When rightwing blusterer Charlie Kirk was murdered, there was a grand far-right attempt to turn him into a national martyr. Trump lowered flags in honor of his fellow racist liar. An ostentatious memorial was held. Conservatives were supposed to rally around Kirk's death, a Horst Wessel moment for a fascist fringe that had been praying fervently for one to happen.

It did not work. The reason it didn't work is because while Charlie Kirk may have been a notorious figure on the internet and on the political fringes, being famous on the internet doesn't amount to jack-shit in the meat world: Being one of the most influential anti-democratic, sedition-backing loudmouths in politics was still a near-unknown in popular culture because most people just do not give a damn about those fights.

Melania will not happen because Melania herself has devoted all of her being to being ... empty. Featureless. Her only vocation is being seen, and even that only according to her own whims and schedules; she is the avatar of all the Mar-a-Lago patrons who flock to the club to preen, kiss the ring, mull new rounds of plastic surgery and mock the little people for being born into small families in small places. That is what our elites aspire to. That is what they think counts as success.

If anything, it is remarkable that as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to seep through seemingly every cranny of the American upper class, there is nobody in that class that appears to even care about the stink. There are no real attempts to distance themselves from each other's scandals. Epstein went from house arrest back to his old social circles, filled to the brim with Trump administration officials, in a matter of months; his wealthy friends appeared to mostly feel sympathy for this poor fellow traveler who had the misfortune to be caught.

To all of these people, life appears to be nothing more than one unending party. Their travails amount to picking out wardrobes, choosing menus, picking out music. Nothing more.

So we'll have to grant at least that much: This Amazon bribe wrapped in the thinnest pretense of movie may turn out to be a useful document even if that was never intended. Here we are, with our deepening suspicions that our elites are nothing but disinterested meat-mannequins and adrift pleasure-seekers, and here comes a big $75 million bribe to announce that yes, actually, that is how they aspire to be seen. We don't have it wrong.