Melania 2026 and the Fossilization of Power
What is power?
This is not, or should not be, a difficult question to answer. The most basic answer would be something like "making something happen." A metaphysical answer might be "the actualization of potential existence by actual existence." A fuller, more human answer, encompassing pretty much every society and form of power throughout history, might be something like "the ability to make what you want happen."
The human answer quite naturally connects power with some form of desire or will--and in so doing explains why power is universally seen as something good or desirable. Yet the basic directionality or teleology of power is seen just as necessarily in the other definitions: actuality actualizing potency and something making something else happen. You want power because you will or desire that something happen--and because power itself is essentially and totally ordered to making something happen, too.
Yet, if power is defined by teleology, will, and desire, it is essentially and totally dependent on things outside itself--on the will and desire and actuality of the being that wields it, and on the event that it is ordered to producing. Indeed, power is essentially and totally, not a thing in itself, even a being in itself, but merely a relation between beings and things. Potential being is actualized by already actual being, and in so doing produces more actual being: without either actual term, power is incoherent and cannot exist.
In being fulfilled, though, in causing to be what it is ordered to cause, power or potency is always and totally, as it were, used up, fulfilled, ended in the base etymological sense of the Greek telos. In the terms of Aristotelean and Thomist theology, God himself is what you get when the power of all being is entirely used up, leaving no conceivable potency whatsoever. God is finished, and in that sense powerless.
Still, though God himself already has completed in himself everything that could be, he still retains a free, contingent will that can, when and how he chooses, make other, lesser things exist, in a secondary, derivative sense, also. When he wills or desires it, he can make things happen.
All of this proem is merely a way to say that the reason why people have from the beginnings of the human race universally wanted power is because there were things they wanted to happen. Which is to say, they were actual beings of will and desire who as it happened willed and desired things to happen that were possible, but not yet actual--or, more simply, because they wanted the power to get what they wanted. What they want, though, is the end, and power only and solely the means.
Hence, power in this sense is necessarily and totally a function of human will and desire, and entirely depends upon it for both its existence and its desirability.
Or, in other words: if people in fact want something, then they will want the power to get that thing, and nothing more or less. If they want different things, then they will want the perhaps very different form or degree of power necessary to get that other thing. If they do not happen to want anything, though, they will not want power. It is, really, that simple.
I watched Melania in theaters. It is the most devastating film I have seen since The Last Showgirl. It is also one of the greatest films I have ever seen, precisely because of its brutal, unstinting look at the spiraling whirlpool that is the contemporary American cult of power.
I should say that I am not sure the film's devastating surrealism is entirely intentional--but I am also far from certain that it is entirely unintentional. Rather, what makes the film great is precisely the fact that it is entirely devoted to chronicling the artifice and craft of power as it is actually practiced by the rulers of the greatest Empire in the history of the human race--and because it centers on someone who is clearly an absolute master of this craft. Melania Trump, whatever else she may be, is a great artist--even if, like many great artists, she does not appear to consciously understand almost anything of what she is doing and why, and even if, also like many great artists, her life appears to be a living hell.
As with my review of Oppenheimer, a devastating film that compelled me to immediately struggle to process just what about it I viscerally hated, I find it very hard to capture just what made Melania such a terrifying and alienating and powerful experience. It would be easiest to just point to random details and moments in the film, moments that are indelibly graven upon my mind and heart and will probably never leave it.
Four people cluster around a glassy table in the impossibly ornate and labyrinthine and gigantic red-and-gold interior of Trump Towers, mirrors upon mirrors upon glass upon carpet curling in and ever in and around on themselves. They are waiting for Melania Trump. She enters, a stiff figure in black and white, and they jump to life and begin their performances: the French fashion designer with his exaggerated mugging and rushed faux-friendliness, the rumpled American fashion designer with his large smiles and air of suppressed tension, the two Asian tailors in black-and-white uniforms standing silent and concerned.
They show her the suit for the inauguration. Everything is perfect, she tells them with stiffly exaggerated friendliness, but the fabric is wrong, as is the waist, as is the lapel. She tells them matter-of-factly of the specific changes she will need: they agree with her enthusiastically. Then she leaves the room, and for about thirty seconds the camera lingers on the four people as they cluster around the table, talking in rushed, tense, oddly frustrated voices, and try to conform to her demands. Then the camera follows, for a long time, the female Asian tailor as she leaves the room, in and around walls and paneling, and begins to climb a spiral staircase, up and around and up and around and--
Melania Trump, more than perhaps any First Lady since Jackie Kennedy, has a style and aesthetic of her own, one manifested at great length throughout the film. Yet this aesthetic is, when one looks at it objectively, rather strange. Throughout the film, Melania tries on and requests alterations to and finally performs in a number of different outfits: and when she does so, her commands are always more or less the same.
Black and white--which, she says at one point, are "her colors"--and straight lines, which she again and again demands alterations to achieve even in already quite straight garments, making sure the small bit of white blouse showing under her black coat is straight, making sure the neckline of her strapless white-and-black ballgown is straight, making sure her inauguration coat falls straight, tensely pointing to where the white strap around her black hat seems to her rounded and "loose" and insufficiently straight. Every time she dons these similar black-and-white straight garments, her fashion designers praise them--but she simply stares stiffly in the mirror, no doubt mentally making sure that all is as it should be.
At one point, her designer tells her that the dress is "so you." But who is the "you" expressed by these severe confections of straight lines in white and black, by these oddly scripted and formal and stiff interactions with subordinates and husband and foreign leaders? Or is that really the question?
