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 definition of power might be something like "making something happen." A more metaphysical answer might be "the actualization of potential existence by actual existence." A 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 desire or will--and in so doing explains why power is universally seen as something good or desirable by humans. All three definitions, though, show with equal clarity the basic directionality or teleology of power: 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.
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 being 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. Potential being is actualized by already actual being, and in so doing produces more actual being: someone makes something happen. Without either actual term, power is incoherent and cannot exist.
In being fulfilled, though, in causing something to be, 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.
(Of course, though God himself has eternally 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, out of sheer gratuitous generosity. When he wills or desires it, he can make things happen, and so wield power.)
All 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 willed things that they saw as desirable but as yet only possible and so in need of being actualized--or, more simply, because they wanted what they wanted to happen. For this reason, though, the end of power is always and everywhere not power itself, but what you want: power is only and solely a means.
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 it is entirely unintentional. Rather, what makes the film great is precisely its artistic devotion to vividly and truthfully 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 for me. 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. 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 in the background of every shot.
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 the specific changes she will need: they agree with each one enthusiastically. Then she leaves the room, and for about thirty seconds the camera lingers on these four people as they cluster around the table, talking in rushed, tense, oddly frustrated voices, trying to conform to her demands. "It is impossible," the male Asian tailor says. Then the camera follows the female Asian tailor as she leaves the room, in and around golden walls and golden paneling, and begins to climb a golden 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 throughout the film. Yet this aesthetic is, when one looks at it objectively, rather strange. In many different scenes, Melania tries on and requests alterations to and finally performs in a number of different outfits: but both the outfits and her alterations are always more or less the same.
Melania's aesthetic, it turns out, can be rather easily summarized: 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 not nearly straight enough. Every time she dons these similar black-and-white straight garments, her fashion designers praise them--but she simply stares stiffly in the mirror, tensely checking to make sure that she is as black and white and straight as she should be.
At one point, her designer tells her that a 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? Or is that really the question?
