If you let your mind go blank and concentrate, really concentrate, on what it's like inside a luxury SUV the moment the door closes—the precision-tuned chunk; the sudden, expensive dimness; the air-lock stillness; the heavy muffling of outside sounds—you’ll have a sense of what it’s like to sit through Melania, Amazon’s new pseudo-documentary about Melania Trump. There are scenes that take place at Mar-a-Lago and scenes that take place in the White House, but really the whole film is set in an abstract non-place, a sealed cabin of opulence from which the external world is discernible only at a tranquilized remove. The scenery dissolves, narcotically, from one plush interior to the next, each backdrop so impersonal that it seems cut off from geography itself. You remember it more as a series of words than a series of places. All the bland signifiers of contemporary aspiration whisper past: high-end, bespoke, exclusive, premium. At one point, Melania takes credit for “upgrading Camp David.” I kept expecting someone to call Article 1 of the Constitution “top shelf.”
Down we glide in the five-star hotel’s elevator, polished to a mirror shine. The gold double doors swing open. Men in black suits line the walks. Melania, in beetle-shell sunglasses, strides onto the private jet, strides into the interior designer’s office, strides into the couturier’s fitting room. She leans over the table in the studio where the tableware designer is helping her choose crystal glasses. She leans back in a white chair 11 feet wide. Men bob around her, asking her wishes, pressing their hands to their hearts. Her face is expressionless. Her voice is toneless. Up in the air above first class is a world numb and untroubled by sensation, a world where feeling has no place. “I can show you,” a fashion designer gushes, “some beautiful shades of greige.” But the scene has already dissolved, and Melania’s gone, down the long carpet to the next limousine, up to the next room full of flowers no one looks at, eyes narrowed, insatiable, bored, like a shark that’s already been fed.
How did this happen? How did I end up seeing this film at 11:35 a.m. at the Regal in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, possibly the least premium space on the planet, while devouring a bag of Skittles more viscerally compelling than anything on the screen? It was over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, reportedly, that Melania first pitched Jeff Bezos on the idea of a documentary about her life. Other accounts forward different origin stories; however it got started, in late 2024, the idea quickly took shape. A director was found: Brett Ratner, who’d helmed hits like Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2, and X-Men: The Last Stand but hadn’t worked in Hollywood since 2017, when numerous women, including actors Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge, came forward with accounts of sexual assault and harassment. Melania would be his comeback vehicle. The film, it was decided, would follow its star through the 20 days leading up to the second inauguration of her husband, Donald Trump, as president of the United States. Early in the movie, Donald calls Melania to tell her that the Electoral College has confirmed his victory. The cameras are on her. The moment is historic. The scene calls for excitement. Language is a poor medium to convey the detachment with which Melania says, “Congrats.”
When the film was finished, the time came to sell the rights. The law, of course, prohibits paying a bribe to the president, a fact that I mention only in passing, as a curiosity, irrelevant to our story. The law does not prohibit a film studio—say, one whose corporate parent has wide-ranging business interests across a range of industries, which frequently bring it up against the limits of federal regulation—from paying the president’s wife’s production company any amount it pleases to acquire the documentary she made about herself. Jeff Bezos owns both The Washington Post and the world’s most gleaming cranium; the contents of each have pivoted sharply to the right since Trump returned to the White House. Amazon paid $40 million to license Melania and another $35 million to market it. These figures are orders of magnitude more than those that other recent high-profile documentaries have commanded; in fact, Amazon paid more for Melania than it had ever paid for any single piece of content. (In Amazon's defense, it was in a pretty furious bidding war; the second-largest offer, from Disney, was $14 million.) Amazon leaders, according to The New York Times, barred employees in the entertainment division from opting out of work on the movie. Two-thirds of the film’s staff requested to have their names removed from the credits. Melania kept more than 70 percent of the cut herself, which would be at least $28 million, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Melania purports to be a documentary, but that is, I’m sorry, horseshit. Some scenes do capture real moments—the inauguration would have been tough to reenact—but there are others so transparently staged that even I could tell, on a Saturday morning, as I stress-ate a movie-theater pepperoni pizza so awful it may have legally qualified as a hallucinogenic. (Don’t ask. This pizza was grim. They had to go “to the back” just to find it. I think it had probably been back there since the last time Trump was president. The Skittles should have been enough for me. I was physically and spiritually on tilt.) There’s one scene late in the movie that is particularly striking in its casual relationship to plausibility. We’ve just seen footage from the inaugural balls; now, supposedly, the Trumps are returning to their living quarters at the White House. The scene goes something like this:
Donald Trump [looking suspiciously fresh and alert]: It’s 2 a.m. now!
Melania Trump [with mid-morning energy, her hair and makeup flawless]: I can’t believe it is the night of the inauguration, and I have been awake and out in public for 22 hours.
Brett Ratner [off-screen]: It would be so weird if we were filming this two weeks after the inauguration and only pretending like it was still the same night, wouldn’t it? Luckily, that’s not what’s happening! Not even a little bit!
[The camera zooms in on a calendar showing a date exactly two weeks after the inauguration. Melania steps in front of it.]
Melania: That calendar is wrong.
[Sunlight streams in through the cracks in the drapes. Outside, birds are chirping. We hear the rumble of a school bus driving by.]
Donald [yawning theatrically]: Well, I’m off to bed, it being 2 a.m. and all.
Melania: Congrats.
There is a discernible political project underneath all of Melania’s white-leather anhedonia. The film is trying to invent a feminine dimension of Trumpism. Authoritarian right-wing movements generally elevate a female ideal as well as a male one, the terms of which you can fill in for yourself: motherhood as a woman’s highest purpose, selfless commitment to family, obedience, personal sacrifice, uncomplaining devotion. One of the weird things about MAGA—which is arguably rooted in misogyny to a degree unusual even for a right-wing populist party—is its failure to find and promote a symbol for such an ideal. The women who’ve risen to power in Trump’s inner circle, the Kristi Noems and Lauren Boeberts and Laura Loomers, have largely behaved in ways that the right itself would see as masculine. They’re aggressive. They’re pugnacious. They favor violent solutions to problems. They attack their critics. They act more or less like Trump himself; they just wear more makeup. (Actually, let me correct that. They wear different makeup.) And the same is true, in a slightly different way, of the hordes of MAGA-adjacent online influencers, tradwives and anti-vax moms and the rest. They may talk up a conservative ideal of femininity as a submissive and nurturing force, but their actual personas are too combative and boisterous to adhere to it. They’re in the trenches 24/7, fighting their battles against mainstream culture. They exist to justify themselves.
The Melania of Melania is very different. Her numbness, in a way, is the whole point: Silent, passive, and aloof, she offers a powerful contrast to the Trumpian qualities of bombast and rage and noise. She doesn’t present herself as warm or caring, exactly—she’s too queenly for that; even the scene in the movie that’s most clearly intended to show her empathetic side, a meeting with a woman taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7 attacks and subsequently released, makes a point of opening with a shot of the woman being wanded by security. (Supplicants may be permitted into the royal presence, but they’re still supplicants.) But Melania is punctuated by voice-overs that emphasize, one by one, all the greatest hits of traditionally feminine roles, then describe how those roles are perfectly embodied by Melania herself. None of this is subtle. Melania, Melania tells us, is a loyal daughter, a dutiful wife, a loving mother. Her ambitions as first lady lie in two directions: first, in gracing the White House with beauty and style (upgrading Camp David!); second, in working on behalf of children.
The signature move of right-wing authoritarianism is to depict the state as personally embodied by the ruler: I am the nation, therefore to be patriotic is to love me, and therefore to speak out against me is treasonous. In a similar way, Melania attempts to localize the virtues of womanhood and motherhood in the persona of the first lady. It then tries to depict those virtues as naturally supportive of, and submissive to, the goals of the patriarchal ruler. And look, I’m just a guy who hoovers up a whole movie pizza before noon, but it seems pretty obvious how this would help a regime like Trump’s, doesn’t it? A government primarily animated by cruelty is liable to alienate large numbers of its own citizens. But if you can make some of those wavering supporters feel that your cruelty is deployed in the defense of, and with the blessing of, a woman who symbolizes maternal compassion, wifely loyalty, and female grace, then presto chango, aren't some of them likely to feel that they have permission to endorse your cruelty? Aren’t some of them likely to come back?
But I’m making this sound way more sophisticated than it is. I cannot overstate the extent to which the dialogue attempting this act of gender sublimation is Melania going, like, “My greatest role is mother, because children are the future,” in a voice so bored you wonder whether she can feel her own lips. I also can’t overstate how intensely twisted and Trump-world typical it is that the job of directing a propaganda film designed to make women feel like gender traitors for not supporting Trump would go to a male director who was drummed out of Hollywood following numerous reports of sexual violence. There’s a moment early in the movie when Ratner, who often speaks from behind the camera, asks Melania her favorite song. They’re riding in the back of yet another airless black SUV. She says “Billie Jean,” by Michael Jackson, which is an undeniably great song, though Jackson may not be the clear choice of artist to name-check if your husband, you yourself, and the man directing your vanity documentary were all part of Jeffrey Epstein’s extended social circle. Regardless, Ratner dials it up on his phone. The two of them start singing along. “She’s just a girl who says that I am the one,” croon the man accused of sexual assault and the wife of the man found liable of sexual assault in court, and I’m sitting there in the theater with my hideous pizza slice frozen halfway to my mouth and my eyes the size of a Cadillac Escalade’s rearview mirrors, and I’m pretty sure the matrix of dog whistles and bad vibes on-screen is warping into the sixth dimension at this point, but on the other hand, it’s one of the very few moments in Melania when Melania seems to be having any fun.
