I’ve asked the only friend I know with an Odeon subscription to come with me to see Melania Trump’s self-titled film because I don’t want anyone spending real money on this. Before we go into Screen 9, he laughs and asks if I want a picture because on the wall in front of us is a huge, blinding light box of the woman herself. Straight suit, heels in profile, legs crossed on a chair. It’s black and white and so high contrast that she’s almost a vector. When we go inside, there’s one other person in the room and I wonder what they’re doing if it’s not for a joke of a review.

I am bored the entire time. I keep checking my phone to see how long we’ve got left. It’s not that it’s so bad it becomes funny — I’ve never seen so much b-roll. Shots of the White House at different times of the day, the sky, beach, palm trees, and busy roads of tired-red tail lights in New York and Washington. Melania takes her sunglasses off. She puts her sunglasses back on. Fake Renoir paintings in the Trump Tower penthouse. Often the camera crawls at ground level and her stilettos click along the exact kind of clean, reflective floors that allow a stiletto to click. It’s heels and bare feet over and over again as she walks all over us. Anything to fill the time.

Between these inane montages, she’s doing fittings for the clothes she’ll wear at the inauguration. Approving the design of the invitations, looking at cornice options. She gets on planes. She gets off them. There’s a video call with the French first lady about how the two of them can help kids, just generally. She hugs a hostage released from Hamas on a visible set. All the brat donors at a ball are served gold eggs for a starter. The Palisades are burning and she’s watching it on TV; close-up of her eyes that appear to become more diagonal the older she gets, as though she’s trying to hitch them into the exact right position for a halloween mask of her own face.

God, it’s boring to describe a boring film. When we went our separate ways after saying goodbye, my friend shouted that he hated me from across the road and I apologised. I left thinking: she can’t even lead the cult of personality they want her to exploit, because she has no personality to speak of. We might as well have stayed squinting at that light box outside the screen because that’s all this is. Melania as an image, a symbol, a model. She’s a model for clothes, a model for Trump. A model for an America where being an immigrant doesn’t stop you from becoming the first lady. Look! It must be true! Because she’s surrounding herself with fashion designers who are immigrants too! You know, the good, white ones.

What a cruel, empty effort from everyone involved. It doesn’t matter that the image in this film is a mirage. All those palm trees swaying in the breeze. All that matters is that the image is shown to as many people as possible, all over the world, even in a cinema in Liverpool. That way, the image can be big and bright and it can completely get in the way of reality: a country where Trump has tripled ICE’s budget, where federal agents have been told to arrest 3000 immigrants a day, and where those agents have been given immunity on a governmental level so when citizens are harassed, driven off the road, kidnapped and murdered, they can’t even call 911 for help.

ICE wear masks. This film is a bigger mask covering all of it.

On a different level maybe, I had this moment when I got home where I realised how much Melania (2026) reminded me of Taylor Swift’s recent docuseries. Another woman with the money and power to have her taste built outwards from where she’s standing — built and built until it becomes her whole world, and all she sees is her own taste reflected back in marble floors and disco balls. That and the fact both make a point of showing how they are targets. Making a story of near misses, making a story of solemnity. Titled heads. Things that don’t need to be filmed, but are, and here I am watching them like a fucking melon.

I apologised to the friend I roped into this but I want to apologise here too. I think after ten years writing about culture, I appear to have walked into the middle of the rubbish dump where all this shite is heaped. More of it coming every day. The big shared graveyard of our life. I have fallen into the trap of writing about mainstream culture that my readers already know about, instead of walking off that land where the air is fresh and there are new things growing. Things we don’t even understand yet — where my writing could be an act of translation, making sense of real art, instead of a whatever today’s review is.

At the start of Melania, Amazon’s production logo says ‘art for art’s sake,’ but that’s a lie. Art is the thing that grows outside of institutions. Art is the thing that doesn’t seek to appeal to everyone in the world at the same time via subscription-only streaming platforms. Art can rip those masks off and knock down borders. Art can mean figuring out how to do it in a new way, instead of doing what everyone else has always done. It’s not Melania doing ‘A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F. Kennedy’ except she’s dressed like an Oxbridge graduate. And I am sorry about that, because my reviews shouldn’t be stating the obvious. That’s just image-making too.

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🎭 p.s. I recommend listening to or reading This American Life’s recent episode replaying 911 calls over the past few months

🎭 p.p.s. I also recommend Decoder Ring’s episode thinking about how culture feels like it’s been stuck for the past 25 years, because yeah, wow