Melania (2026) and The People Who Love It

I watched Melania last weekend in a multiplex theater located in the heart of a huge shopping center in Birmingham, Alabama. When I bought my ticket, I was surprised to see that some of the seats had already been chosen. This is not a normal experience lately. In theaters like this one recently I’ve watched Oscar-buzz films, kids movies, beloved classics, horror, action thrillers, comedies, and dramas, and in the past 18 months I haven’t once shared the theater with more than ten people. You can imagine my surprise, then, as the commercials for Coca-Cola and Cadillac and Amazon streamed before the show, when every seat in the theater filled up—I’m not exaggerating—and the room rang with the bygone buzz of crunching popcorn, slurping soda, crinkling candy wrappers, and soft conversation.

My surprise deepened as I surveyed the room. This audience, I am confident, was unlike any audience at a recent screening in America, because it was all women. Let me not mislead you. There were two men there: myself and one other guy, a single father who brought his daughters to the show. But, with these two exceptions, the audience was otherwise made up of dozens of women. They arrived in groups of two to five, and they skewed mostly, but not exclusively, to the upper boundaries of middle age. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I will probably never see it again.

I don’t give a damn about the hyperpolitics of Melania. If you want to take this strange fact about a theater full of women as evidence about which “side” might be “winning” the culture war, you are welcome to draw your conclusions. I’m not here to do that. I’m here to consider the film and try to understand what could bring so many people out to see it.

Melania is bizarre and stupid, a deeply cynical exposition of navel-gazing banality masquerading as a biopic which manages, somehow, to be both flashy and incredibly dull at the same time. You could cut the film into 104 slices, one for each soul-crunching minute of its self-indulgent runtime, and not a single one of them will excite or motivate or inspire you in any way. I started the film with a sense of purpose, attempting to read the minute tells of the subject’s real feelings, or to divine some meaning from the visual style, the non sequiturs, the nods and winks, and all of Brett Ratner’s odd choices, but this exercise left me feeling, about halfway through, strangely numb and vaguely ill, like facing a blank wall while traveling backwards on a train moving slowly through a never-ending tunnel. It sucks.

And there are indeed some odd choices here. There is, for example, the Rolling Stones song “Gimme Shelter” rolling over the opening scene, the backup singer screaming “RAPE! MURDER! IT’S JUST A SHOT AWAY!” while the First Lady (Elect) boards an airplane. There is the rest of the soundtrack, which alternates between classical music and rock like a project executed by an undergraduate film student who cannot decide if they wish to channel Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese for their BFA thesis. There are the indulgently long cuts; the scenes that do nothing to help the story. We spend a moment, for instance, watching the Secret Service wave a metal detector over an Israeli woman visiting Trump Tower to speak to Melania about the hostage crisis in Gaza. Why? Then there are also apparent mistakes masquerading as choices. Why do “old-fashioned” Super 8 or 16mm frames begin to appear for select shots about two-thirds of the way through the movie? Was this was an idea that someone came up with two weeks into the production, or did something go wrong with a whole bunch of shots and they had to salvage what they could?¹ Who cares?! It’s a jumble of a film which requires every bit of Hollywood flash its experienced producers can deploy to simply cohere. It only manages to achieve this because it progresses through time in a linear way, and time, as a byproduct of our existence as organisms rooted in time and space, has a tendency to feel coherent if you go from start to fucking finish.

Now, again, listen: I may just be a jaded fool. My experience was not universal. The women in Birmingham seemed to thoroughly enjoy the picture. They laughed at the very rare moments when the film did something funny. They stuck around after the credits to talk it over. They whispered asides to each other while the film played.

Perhaps one of these asides offers a clue to what they saw in it. Around the time when Melania is meeting with event planner David Monn, talking about drinkware and paper choices, one of the women in my row turned to her friend and whispered, “I know why she made this movie. I bet she wants the world to see just how much she works her butt off behind the scenes.” I think she’s right. That makes a lot of sense. Further, I think it offers a great insight into who this film is for, and why that theater was so uncharacteristically full last weekend.

It is an accident of chance that I happened to watch the episode of Celebrity Wife Swap featuring Dara Gottfried and Tanya Thicke the night before I watched Melania, because an offhand statement Thicke made in the show stuck with me, for some reason, and then resonated deeply with the aside I heard in the theater. Like all episodes of Wife Swap, this one tries to create dramatic tension by swapping characters representing easy-to-understand opposites and then allowing viewers to judge each other by viewing the swapped wives through the eyes of the opposite family. Some episodes might contrast, for example, extreme permissiveness with extreme discipline by placing a mom who lets her children eat anything they want into the household of another woman who forces her children to eat a vegan diet. Even better if one wife is from New Jersey and the other Midwestern, maybe; one black and the other white; one plump and the other thin. The producers place these characters in three or four awkward situations per family, and then bring the couples together to confront each other in a debrief when it’s all done.

The Gottfried-Thicke episode explores a few of these dichotomies. Thicke lives on an estate in California; Gottfried lives in an apartment in New York. Gottfried is casual, while Thicke seems more reserved. Thicke enjoys spending money on fine furnishings, clothing, jewelry, hosting dinner parties; Gottfried is practical and thrifty. The producers place these women and their celebrity husbands in situations designed to maximize these differences, and then we go to the debrief.

It is here that I wish to pause. After a tense exchange between Thicke and her husband about whether he has tried to buy her love with gifts, she announces, “People think, ‘oh, well maybe Tanya has a staff, and she doesn’t work, and she doesn’t do anything,’ well that’s not true. I work very, very hard in my house. Everything that I have there, I did. Every fabric has been picked out by me. Every color on the wall, I found in a magazine that I liked and wanted it like that.” And then, while comical music plays to emphasize the point, she returns some sapphire or diamond earrings that she had earlier removed in protest back to her ears and says, “I’m taking this back, because I work that hard.”

There are no right and wrong characters on Wife Swap. There are only archetypes. Viewers who find Thicke’s ideas about work in the home ridiculous are not, I believe, the target audience of Melania. Viewers who might be philosophically or spiritually unsettled by drawers full of jewelry and overstuffed closets in their home are unlikely to identify with Melania. Viewers who believe that deploying their taste to furnish a home or make an event qualifies as hard work might like the film. Those who believe that taking care of their bodies and dressing up to put on a respectable face for their partners, and especially those who believe that they ought to receive some nice gifts and a comfortable life in exchange for this labor, are very likely to identify with Melania.

I don’t think this, in itself, tells us much about how this audience will vote in the midterms, or what sorts of beliefs about other people they might share. Both liberals and conservatives fit these archetypes. The unprecedented way this audience turned out to see this bizarre and polarizing film does suggest, however, that they feel somehow seen by it, that it says something to them and says something about them. That, I believe, is exactly what supporters say about the bizarre and polarizing political tendency represented by the subjects in the film. Someone sees me. I am not here to argue for or against this point of view, but I think it offers a strong clue about why they chose to make their way to the theater in such an intentional way last weekend, and if I was a political scientist, betting man, or nervous type I might think carefully about what that augurs for the future.

In parting, one more anecdote. After the credits had all wound their way over the top of the darkened screen, and the aggressively nonchalant teens working at the theater descended on the auditorium with brooms and dustpans, a woman leaving the theater stopped my partner to ask her whether she liked the film. After they talked it over for a few moments the woman said, “It sure did make me think. I’m going to have to change what I eat if I ever want to wear clothes like that.”

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1. The film suggests that this is how Melania’s father used to capture family memories back in the Slovenian SSR—let’s not stop to think about that too carefully—but then he is clearly nowhere to be found in all but one of these grainy shots. Are we to believe that he was there, clutching a little antique Canon camera when the President-Elect and First Lady disembarked from their limousine at the Blair House in Washington the day before the inauguration? Are we to believe that the producers then took this amateur film to be processed, created a digital copy, and cut it into the print? ↩︎