By Michael Marano

As a dick-waving demonstration of fascist corporate and political power, Melania would make a great double bill with Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Melania, directed by Brett Ratner. Screening at AMC Theaters

One of Melania Trump’s many vacant gazes in Melania.

I went into Melania, the new documentary by Brett Ratner about our current First Lady, ready to treat it as a work of fascist propaganda. It’s certainly fascist. As Benito Mussolini said, fascism is “the merger of state and corporate power.” Melania is an open declaration of this ideology, a bribe extended from corporate overlord Jeff Bezos to the Trump administration. His Amazon corporation paid $40 million for the film, of which $28 million was shoveled directly into Mrs. Trump’s bulging Hermès Birkin handbag. Then Bezos committed another $35 million to promote the movie. Corporate and state power are betrothed here in a bond more enduring, sincere, and loving than any other marital situation depicted in the film.

As a dick-waving demonstration of fascist corporate and political power, Melania would make a great double bill with Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

But by no means is Melania—propaganda.

Propaganda, by definition, propagates—it sows specific socio-political ideas. Melania does not propagate. The film operates under the assumption that its viewers have assimilated (or been assimilated by) the cultural and political ideas it presents. The movie needs no substance in and of itself, because it assumes the audience brings the substance into the theater with them. In this way, it’s like an Amazon algorithm. It markets itself to an audience that has already been marketed to.

Again, Melania does… not… propagate.

It confirms the empty mythologies of the Trump brand.

Ergo, it’s not propaganda.

It’s confirmaganda.

And if you think that portmanteau is a bit of 1984-ish, Orwellian newspeak, you’re right. The mechanics of this piece of shit movie are Orwellian, and only that language can describe it. The backbone of Melania is pure “doublethink,” the newspeak term for, “holding two contradictory beliefs or opinions while accepting both as true.”

We see sweet, angelic, caring Melania, the immigrant wife of the most anti-immigrant president ever, (and that includes Woodrow Wilson, who authorized the Palmer Raids), lighting a candle for her late mother at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the very consecration of which was to accommodate New York’s growing immigrant populations. We see Melania looking on with as much solemnity as her plastic surgeries enable her to muster, as her Shrek-ish hubby places a wreath at Arlington. We hear her in voiceover talk of the honor and sacrifice of US Service Personnel, knowing full well that Trump, who likes “people that weren’t captured” called such fallen Service Members “suckers” and “losers.”

We see conspicuously assertive shots of Melania and Trump holding hands, while there are innumerable bits of news video showing her swatting away his hand when he tries to hold hers. Even within the self-contained world of the film, doublethink festers. Devoted, ‘stand-by-your-man’ Melania couldn’t have been bothered to watch the certification of her husband’s election and, after his Inauguration, Melania, producer of this exercise in inanity, makes sure the film clearly illustrates that she and Trump sleep in different parts of the White House.

It’s doublethink to think Melania is a documentary at all. A documentary has a thesis. This doesn’t. Despite the baroque opulence of its settings, the film is a projection of negative space. Doublethink creates voids into which nonexistent meanings can be inserted. Those contradictory ideas allow for no solidity. No tangibility. Melania’s utterly empty and vacuous voiceovers, which sound as if they were generated by AI, give the illusion of meaningfulness to Trump acolytes. These platitudes drift nicely into the cotton-wool-soft vacuity created by doublethink, which requires “you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” It’s Melania‘s “final, most essential command,” issued from what I can only call “The Melania-stry of Truth.”

Example?

The movie begins with Melania clicking and clacking in her high heels into a motorcade leaving Mar-a-Lago as the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” blares on the soundtrack. It’s a portrait of privilege and elegance, protected by the best security our tax dollars can provide.

“Gimme Shelter“?!

The substance of “Gimme Shelter” is paranoia, political upheaval, psychological implosion, the brutality of war, rape, fear, murder, and gunshots on the streets. It’s an apocalyptic screed from the globally turbulent era of the late 1960s, the darkest, most brutal imaginings of which are playing out right the fuck now in Minneapolis, courtesy of Melania’s authoritarian sugar daddy.

Melania pulls the soul out of the song, and the emotional and political reality that created it, and makes it weightless—just a thing to edit beats to while the First Lady moves like a kabuki-faced gynoid from a Robert Palmer video, circa 1983.

Doublethink at play?

To an audience eager for confirmation of the Trump mythology, ingesting Melania as passively as filter feeders ingest particulate matter near a sewer plant, “Gimme Shelter” is just a spiffy classic rock song, a thing to make Melania look cool as she struts—despite what the lyrics are blaring over the theater speakers: “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.”

All that I mention above, the aggressive lack of substance, underlines that Melania is an atrocious, badly made movie. Evil as they are, the Satanic cinematic genius of Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation can’t be denied. But those were works of propaganda, the propagation of which requires innovation, competence, and craft for the purpose of injecting their ideas into the minds of their audiences. Confirmaganda requires the opposite—utterly shitty, numbing filmmaking that doesn’t dominate through its presentation of ideas, but the removal of ideas. As O’Brien said in 1984: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

The human minds welcoming Melania haven’t been torn apart in Room 101. The lasting achievement of Melania is that it reinforces your love of Melania—Big Mother—through generous doses of aggressive, assertively dull banality.

Author, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano didn’t have the time to go into what a disgusting, rapey creep Melania director Brett Ratner (allegedly) is. Google his name and “Epstein Files.” But he can say he was delighted that one of his spell check functions suggested “Rat Meat” in place of “Ratner.”