Melania 2026 and the Fossilization of Power

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?

It is in truth here that the film's entire genius lies: that it is an entirely self-conscious, fully declarative statement of self-fashioning. If the film has anything to say about Melania, it is precisely that for her there is no boundary between public and private life, between interiority and performance. Melania Trump treats her own life like a Behind-the-Scenes documentary on the technical aspects of special effects for a Star Trek DVD extra. Look, she says, Here is how me and my team of technicians used hard work, professionalism, teamwork, and skill to craft the iconic "Melania Trump" that you remember from the blockbuster films "The 2025 Presidential Inauguration" and "The 2025 Presidential Inauguration 2: The Starlight Ball."

Of course, like most such Behind-the-Scenes films, most of what Melania shows us is a mere filmic gloss on the existence of highly technical skills too boring to literally present on film: but for all that, it has a stilted power of its own. 

In an early scene, Melania meets with the event planner for her pre-Inauguration Candlelight Dinner for the donors to the Trump Campaign. The planner tells her, with exaggerated gusto but an oddly nervous, stilted manner, that she will be the very first to see what he is about to show her: that no one else, even President Trump, has seen this before. Then he shows her the giant oversized invitation for the Dinner, in the color that, as he nervously tells her, she previously picked out herself. Many people frame these, she admonishes him as she looks approvingly over the invitation: he reminds her again that she already decided on all the details. Then, in a voice-over, Melania admits that yes, in fact there was a previous unfilmed meeting at which they had already decided on everything. In the end, then, the film Melania tells us essentially nothing about how or why Melania and her team makes the technical decisions they do--all it does is remind us that the technical skill is there, or in other words that Melania has power and we do not.

Is any of this real? Probably not. Yet it manages, nonetheless, to capture a certain reality nonetheless, if it is only the reality of unreality. Are these people Melania Trump's friends? No. Are they her servants? No. Is she their customer? Again no. The relation that between Melania and these people is precisely and solely the relation of power: yet it is a very strange form of power. 

Melania gives commands, and in that sense exercises will: but these commands have no obvious relation to any will or desire of her own. She makes stiff, precise comments so that her dresses will reflect a certain stiff, precise aesthetic. But in fact, one could just as easily argue that those stiff, precise dresses and stiff, precise comments alike are just there to ensure that her onscreen persona is similarly stiff and precise. Her words, in short, are as much a self-fashioned performance, or rather a performance of self-fashioning, as her dresses.

Melania's power is laser-focused, not on the world, but on herself: a reality further underscored by the entirely personalistic way in which the film handles Melania's "Be Best" initiatives to help children. At different points in the film we witness a Zoom meeting with Brigitte Macron and an in-person meeting with Queen Rania of Jordan, both ostensibly in the interests of her initiatives to help children globally and domestically. In both, though, specifics are hard to come by. Brigitte Macron asks her, somewhat tentatively, if she is planning to restart the initiatives from "last time"--and Melania answers, stiffly but oddly defensively, that in fact she has been continuing them over the past four years. Queen Rania asks nearly the same question, with the same tentativeness. One could be mistaken, perhaps, for thinking that these people do not know each other very well.

Yet both conversations feature nothing more than vague statements and promises to work together. Children in the US, Melania tells Brigitte over Zoom, are in front of screens for an average of eight hours a day. As Brigitte tells her of a bill passed in France to ban cellphones for children under 11, Melania writes notes in a large block letters on a yellow ruled paper, where they are clearly legible for the camera. Only three percent of kids in foster-care in America attend university, Melania tells Queen Rania as the two of them sit in a huge darkened, wood-paneled, room, silhouetted together in a table at a window. We need to do better. Both, though, are eager to work with Melania. I am with you for anything, Brigitte tells Melania as the camera focuses on her stiff, triumphant smile.

One might expect a film on a First Lady's philanthropic efforts to focus to some degree on the power of her efforts over and in the world. If she is working to improve the lives of children, one might perhaps expect to see some of the children whose lives have been ostensibly improved. Yet we see none of this--merely a few stilted, aestheticized interactions with the wives of foreign leaders. Before the end credits, the film presents a black-and-white text list of her accomplishments as First Lady--among which are being the "first First Lady in history to be the driving force behind the main concepts of Executive Order." Yet at no point in Melania do we see any effect of Melania on the real world or real people: we merely see her labor, over and with and through subordinate technicians, to fashion and present herself on film. The Be Best initiative may be important for offscreen foster children: but in Melania Trump's self-presentation, her real impact and legacy is Melania Trump.

But who is Melania Trump? Or, perhaps more immediately, what is it like to be Melania Trump? What does she think and feel? What does she want? What is the will and desire of Melania on which her power depends?

Nearly all of the public fascination with Melania Trump since 2015 has centered on her odd privacy, on the fact that she does not give interviews, does not give her opinions, does not show her personality, does not say what she thinks or what she wants. The fascination of Melania for the general public, as with most hidden things, has been primarily that of mystery. Melania, we have all assumed up till now, is a real person, with a real interior life, real opinions and thoughts and desires and wishes. If she has chosen to keep these things hidden, as with interiority in general, the resultant hiddenness only increases the fascination and power of interiority, its preternatural power to impact our interiorities also. 

What makes Melania the film both a great and a terrifying film is that it functions at almost every level and in every scene as a definite, self-conscious, declarative statement to the contrary. No, Melania tells us in Melania. There is nothing hidden here. This is who I am.

This is a truly stunning statement: a remarkable instantiation of the "triumphant nullity" that Jean Baudrillard saw as the core of American global power. If Melania the person is really and truly identical to Melania the self-fashioned image, then Melania is the first human person in the history of the universe to be entirely without wishes or desires. She is the Ubermensch for which America has always waited: the walking, talking, self-posing image.

This is an overstatement. As a matter of fact, the film Melania does make some small gestures towards the emotional and interior self-disclosure usually expected of subjects in biographical documentaries. If her voice-overs are to be believed, Melania Trump is proud of her son Barron--especially proud of how well and confidently he handles himself and his feelings on camera. She hopes he will have a beautiful family of his own one day. She thinks that her decision as a teenager to follow her dreams and pursue modeling by moving to Milan and Paris was a big decision, ultimately rooted in her very high personal standards for achievement. As an immigrant, she believes that what makes America so special is its commitment to individual rights. She tells us that no one has ever suffered like her husband, whom people attempted to incarcerate and assassinate. Her reverence for the military is rooted in the fact that they die to protect the Constitution and our individual rights. Et cetera.

In the end, though, the film's attempt to show us Melania Trump's interior life is confined to more or less one single conscious gesture: the recurring assertion of her feelings of sadness over her mother's death almost exactly a year before the January 2025 inauguration of Donald Trump. I miss my mother, Melania tells us in a number of similar voice-overs over shots of Melania doing various things and not looking any different. And who can doubt that this is true?

Yet in what is the film's most strangely haunting scene, she visits St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, an alien-looking stone Gothic structure entirely unlike the aesthetics of the rest of the film. Yet though her voice-over tells us that she did so to have a moment for myself, the Cathedral is surrounded by people watching her, and though empty within, the camera obtrusively follows her up the main aisle to the altar, where she lights a candle across three or four obtrusively-edited and intercut shots to a soundtrack of literal clapping (in an African-American Gospel track). Then, almost without pausing, she heads right back down the aisle again and out of the Church. 

Here, though, she is accosted by several Catholic priests and a bishop, short middle-aged, entirely unphotogenic men in dumpy cassocks who seem to come from an entirely different film, or perhaps from a strange land called real life. As she stiffly tells them how important St. Patrick's Cathedral was to her mother, one of them rather hurriedly asks her if he can give her a blessing: and as the camera cuts between stone statues of saints, the priest gives an impromptu blessing asking for her to receive grace and for her mother to be admitted to heaven.

This scene is the emotional core of the whole film--if only for underscoring the profound horror of Melania Trump's moment-to-moment consciousness, which even in an ostensible gesture of personal grief and worship cannot escape being an over-the-top performance for the cameras. Still, in the priests of the Catholic Church, the film finds an odd counterpoint to the totalizing world of appearance and status that envelops every other character in the film. And in the brief, wordless shots of the statues of saints and Christ watching as the priest blesses her, the film suggests--for the first and only time--that there might, after all be a viewer out there not so easily occluded or fooled as its audience, and perhaps less concerned with aesthetics. 

If "missing my mother" is the one fully approved interior feeling (though not desire or will) that the film allows Melania, the most common emotion she shows in the film is entirely different: fear. In a central scene, she and Trump meet with the people planning the Inauguration, and are told about the route their cab will take. Will we be getting out of the car? Melania interrupts to ask tensely. The planners are circumspect, telling her that they certainly will, but that they won't say where with the cameras on. Will it be safe? Melania asks, almost angrily, as Trump looks at her sidelong. The planners assure her that it will be. Everyone will know where we're likely to get out of the car, Melania responds tensely. Then, as the camera continues to focus on her face: It's not safe. Barron doesn't feel safe. I know he won't be getting out of the car. 

Throughout the film, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in 2024, though not actually shown, recurs as a sort of emotional motif, as does Melania's fear of the continuing possibility of assassination and danger in general. The Inauguration itself is moved indoors to the Capitol One arena due to cold--and Melania expresses relief that she will no longer have to be outside. I felt much safer inside, she tells us.

Yet one cannot, perhaps, help feeling that Melania's fear is not entirely confined to the possibility of her husband being murdered. Indeed, one cannot help suspecting, as the film goes on, that Melania's fear goes very deep indeed, and is perhaps the real reason why her filmic self-disclosure seems to consist largely of increasingly desperate efforts at self-occlusion. 

In fact, when one reflects on the film Melania as a whole, in fact, it starts to seem like a rather brilliant game of hide-and-seek, a masterclass in the art of concealing things precisely by pretending to reveal them. The entire film can be summed up in any one of thousands of separate shots of Melania Trump, immaculately put together, her face utterly blank, mirrored sunglasses over her eyes, showing by her body language and the small motions of her face and body that she knows she is being watched. Here I am, Melania tells the camera, the cameraman, and the audience. Watch me disclose myself to the camera. Yet when the camera has looked away, we find that we have seen nothing: nothing at all.

This reality is made even more striking by its direct contrast with the person who might be imagined to be the true subject of Melania, but who in reality appears rarely and never in a particularly personal light: I mean, of course, her husband, President Donald J. Trump. The irony, though, is that while the film Melania does not function particularly well as propaganda for the person and/or brand Melania Trump, it is in fact quite effective as propaganda for the person (if not precisely the politics) of Donald Trump. 

Put simply, apart perhaps from fleeting Catholic priests, Trump is by far the thing most closely approximating a human person to appear in the film. He achieves this feat, as he does in general, precisely by being a grotesque, larger-than-life child, whose emotions are always and entirely on the surface, and usually of the pettiest kind. Yet what Trump's enemies still forget, after all these years of me telling them, is that childishness, even where it is annoying, is almost always sympathetic: so that a man who pouts and brags alternately in real time in response to blame or praise, love or hate, is much more likely to appeal to people than push them away. The other thing about Trump that Melania reveals, though, which is not always so apparent, is that a great part of what makes Trump an appealing figure to many Americans is precisely his contrast with the overwhelming majority of American media figures of wealth or power or knowledge. 

Alas, poor Melania. In the end, she was perhaps always destined, and perhaps even chosen, precisely to be the cold and forbidding contrast to set Trump's relative warmth against. Never is this aesthetic effect more powerfully present than in Melania. Melania is a critical, nerve-wracking perfectionist in managing the work of others: Trump is (both in Melania and from the account of a person I know who worked for him) a kindly and oblivious boss, shaking the hands of the hired help in hotels and giving big tips to the maids at the Blair Residence. Melania is a perfectly put-together assemblage of white and black; Trump is a huge, fat slob with half a headful of fuzz and an air of not knowing where he is. Where Melania's entire person is defined by setting herself apart from Americans, from the ordinary, the poor, the unfashionable, the unbeautiful, the uncontrolled and un-perfectly-poised, the emotional stuff of humanity, Trump exists to replicate and magnify the pettiest grudges and least attractive attributes and most grotesque physicality and emotionality of the most ordinary and unlikeable American. Most fundamentally, Melania, like most famous or powerful people in America in the world, is ultimately a cold, fearful, forbidding wall: Trump is an open book.

When Melania interacts with her famous husband for the first time in the film, the director shoots it as though it were a business meeting in a horror film. Melania sits perfectly still in her huge, ornate office in Trump Towers, with a prominent golden statue of an embracing couple in the corner, dwarfed by the desk at which she sits, framed in silhouette by the glass window behind her. Trump's voice over the phone is rushed, ebullient, oddly pleading, like a child begging for praise from his mother: he asks her if she saw the voting certification ceremony, and she says she did not, because she had meetings all day. Then, for a few minutes, he rambles about the quality of his victory, his vote totals in the electoral college, how he won all the swing states, how no one has ever seen anything like it. Melania, though, does not sound impressed. She says goodbye. Through the whole scene, we never see a single sign of emotion in her face or voice. The performance is flawless.

Yet if Melania is frozen and stiff and afraid, constantly playing in desperate self-disclosure to hide herself from an ever-present camera...well, perhaps she really does have good reason to be afraid. Perhaps a woman from Slovenia whose mother was a fashion designer, who worked in modeling in Milan and Paris, who knew Jeffrey Epstein, who married Donald Trump, has good reason to be afraid. If nothing else, she certainly has good reason to be afraid of us: her audience, the American public, who has for decades fed on pictures of her face and body and for decades mocked and derided and violated her person.

The film Melania is directed by Brett Ratner, the director of the Rush Hour films and also a notorious sexual creep who has not directed since 2017, when more than a dozen women came forward with accusations against him. As this, his comeback film, is making its way into theaters, he is appearing prominently in the Epstein files.

In any case, no one can deny the hypnotic power of his filmmaking in Melania: though much of it comes from the unusually intrusive way he maneuvers his camera into and around his subjects, up the aisles of churches and into the faces of scared subordinates, and unusually intrusive way he scores his overwhelming images with blaring, unsubtle music. This is horror directing at its finest, though: and nothing can take away from the overwhelming artistry of his filmic climax, perhaps the best portrayal of human souls being imprisoned in an alien realm of spiritual evil since David Lynch's Twin Peaks. 

Most of Melania, as already specified, is dedicated to watching Melania ostensibly prepare for the Presidential Inauguration, but mostly intimidate subordinates and perform fearfully for the cameras while throwing out layer upon layer of self-disclosing obfuscation. Then, though, we follow Trump and Melania to Washington, DC: and everything goes to hell.

I am, still, overwhelmed just thinking about the Inauguration scenes of Melania: in the theater, I had to cover my eyes at various points to stop myself having a panic attack. The film, put simply, portrays the Inauguration of the President United States as an overwhelming, overpowering barrage of tension and discomfort and confinement and horror, huge rooms and narrow corridors and confining, accusing gazes and leering, grotesque men of power. I cannot fully account for how the film turns Jeff Bezos, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and above all Elon Musk (bizarrely pulling a young woman onto his lap?) into horror jump scares--nor how it turns marching bands and acrobats and military bands into something approaching the grotesque native rituals of sacrifice from Apocalypse Now. I cannot understand how the mere mention that there are three Inauguration Balls yet to come made my heart sink into a pit of hopelessness from which I have not yet entirely emerged.

Yet part of the answer, of course, is merely that we are seeing all this through Melania's eyes--or rather, seeing it while laser-focused on her fearful, frozen visage, in various straight-jacket-like assemblies of precise, straight white and black, being maneuvered and directed and told what to do and made to march hither and thither by various men in suits as her huge animalistic husband lumbers at her side. If you finish the film Melania without thanking God that you are not a powerful person in America in the year 2026, then I think I can never trust you. Put simply, the film portrays power in America as an endless, exhausting, purposeless performance to a hostile, cruel, cannibalistic audience of grotesque, grinning, hollow skulls. 

I entitled this essay "the Fossilization of Power" because I really and truly believe that that is what the film Melania really presents, its true insight into the nature of power in America in the 2020s. Put simply, there are two entirely different ideas of what power is, and of what makes it desirable, that are visible in this film, and indeed throughout human history.

By the one, older idea, which I tried to articulate clumsily above, human political and social power comes from and is essentially dependent on human will and desire. Powerful human beings appeal to other human beings by revealing their interiorities and wills and desires to them, and either persuading their subjects to will and desire what they will and desire, or else trying to convince them that they in fact already will and desire the same things as them. This, as I have argued at length, is what legitimacy consists of: the belief of subjects that rulers in fact want what they want, which is to say their subjects' good. 

Then there is the vision of power present in this film, in a number of ancient and Medieval and Early Modern societies, and to a great and growing degree in America today. By this vision, power is something essentially alien, transcendent, perhaps even divine. It has nothing to do with human will or desire--indeed is in most cases directly hostile to it. The power of kings and Presidents and models is like the power of meteorites or plagues or famines or storms or wild leopards--which is to say, a power whose origins is not will or desire human or divine but only bare brute inert fact, that cannot be understood or willed or desired by any human person, but only worked around or fled or or fought or harnessed or perhaps worshipped.

By this model, importantly, human beings achieve power not through being human, but precisely through ceasing to be human--which is to say, ceasing to will or desire in any way comprehensible or accessible to human persons. Through sheer caprice, acting at random and for no purpose like a tornado or a mudslide, human beings achieve a kind of likeness to the divine, a kind of participation in power. At the very least, they can convince others that they are things like hurricanes or lions: powerful, iconic things that must be respected. Alternately, they can simply stop willing or desiring at all, becoming as much as possible inert, unthinking, unacting, unwilling, undesiring, and hence fundamentally inhuman and inorganic entities, like winds blowing, like rain falling, like stones sliding down a mountainside.

Hence, by the fossilization of power I mean fossilization in something rather close to a literal sense. In the present day, as in other past societies I could mention, people have learned to project and wield power precisely by ceasing as much as possible to will or desire or act in any recognizable human way, and hence in a real sense turning to stone or becoming inorganic, just as organic tissue of animals is gradually petrified and turns to stone under the force of fossilization. They have learned to freeze their face into place, to not react to things said or done by others, to walk stiffly, to dress only in black.

In the year 362, the Roman Emperor Constantius II entered Rome in triumph: and as his contemporary Ammianus pointed out in a famous account, in doing so he sought to present himself, quite self-consciously, as a stone statue. Constantius kept his face fixed in a single expression, looking forward, did not react to any of the acclamations or shouts around him, did not react to the jostling of his carriage, did not wipe his nose or face. Any Roman of his day would have understood the point of the performance, which was precisely to demonstrate that the Emperor was something more or at least other to human beings, and therefore worthy to rule over them. The performance was artificial, yes: but as Ammianus pointed out, this was itself a sign of the Emperor's unique self-control, self-mastery, his power of self-fashioning and self-performing, which was in the final balance the true emblem of his power. Power over the world, in other words, comes from power over the self.

If Melania presents a rather harsher and more exacting picture, it is in part because we live in a rather harsher and more exacting age. Constantius could spend most of his life among his soldiers on campaign or behind purple curtains, only rarely and at intervals having to perform for an audience. Melania's entire life from childhood has been spent existing as a model and wife of Trump and First Lady, which is to say, as an image of desirability and power, the inert and inhuman entity that opposes and nullifies desire and causes extrinsic action, the essential human means for the pervasive modern genre of advertising/pornography. And if Constantius could only perform as as statue, an image, Melania has from her childhood been turned into an image and turned herself into an image, picture after picture, video after video, ad after ad, until her entire face and body has been refashioned into, known as, seen as, little more than the the material of images, the stuff of which dreams are made.

The ending of Melania is one of the most powerful and devastating filmic scenes of horror I know of. Finally, after a very, very long day, Melania and Trump return to the White House, walking tired and exhausted to an audience of only bored attendants--and the ever-present, intrusive camera, that Melania continues to smile enticingly at. In voice-over, Melania tells us that on such days Time stops existing, that though she has been awake now for 22 hours straight, this is worth it to create a day that will be remembered forever. And as her husband shuffles in exhaustion, she continues to smile stiffly and walk stiffly, as perfectly poised as 22 hours before, her dress and every hair still in place.

Finally, though, the First Couple reach what are presumably their private chambers--the image of the interiority of man, the inner self. The camera, unwontedly, pulls back, and Trump opens the door and begins to go in, then freezes. "Someone's in here," he says. 

I cannot really convey the bizarre, otherworldly horror I experienced in that moment--though this clip perhaps begins to do so. Then, though, Melania turns and looks full into the camera: and in another moment of existential horror, coyly beckons the camera forward, to look into the room. And in it, indeed, are two blank-faced men in suits, bearing a silver tray.

Then Melania and Trump are back in the hallway and preparing for bed, Trump looking as exhausted as his 78 years would suggest. Now, though, the man behind the camera, Brett Ratner presumably, is speaking to the First Couple directly, like a ghost. "Isn't this incredible?" he asks them. "We're in the White House. How does it feel?"

"It's incredible," Trump acknowledges. "It's incredible," Melania agrees. 

"Look at that painting," one of them says. "A Monet!"

Here, after all, is power: not Trump, not Melania, but merely the cultic power of objects, truly inert and inorganic entities that cannot feel or will or desire, that have tongues but do not talk, that have ears but do not hear. To them, even Trump and Melania are little more than devotees, worshipers, fans.

And this is, perhaps, the real problem with conceptualizing power as something essentially alien to human will and desire--that it leaves in the end no reason at all why human beings should desire power, choose it, or even respect it. After all, human desire for power depends essentially on the fact that there are things that human beings want to happen: and a stone does not want anything to happen. If power is a stone, the stone may well smash me, but there seems little point in worshiping it. Or, as Chesterton said about giants, if a giant is stronger than me, that is no reason why I should bow down and worship it. Certainly, if Christianity stands for anything, it is the claim that even in the case of the truly transcendent and foreign and other and divine, only something fundamentally good, which is to say, with a fundamental relationship with the human will and human desire, can ultimately draw the human will or command human respect and obedience. Only a God who can become man can rule man as God.

Or, at the very least, if power is something finally incompatible with human will and desire, then the taking on of power by man can only ever be a thing of horror. To become powerful in such a world can only ever be the confinement of the human will, the freezing of the human heart, the hiding and violating and destruction of human interiority itself, the turning of flesh to stone. And this is the vision of Melania. 

Or, perhaps, one merely has to die. Trump gestures to the Monet on the wall: this was given in honor of JFK, he says. Then he goes to bed. But as he does, the camera zooms in on the plaque, to show that the painting was gifted in honor of the murdered President after his death. A man has been killed, and become a name on a metal plaque on a painting on a wall in a building: all dead, all inert, all inorganic, all powerful. 

I do not believe that the director of the film Melania is part of a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States: but certainly the film Melania appears to want Donald Trump to be assassinated. Well, after all, every movie needs a hero, doesn't it?

The film's final climax, though, is something just as horrifying as the turning of a live man into a dead hero: the turning of Melania Trump into an image. First, we see shots of paintings on the White House wall: portraits of past First Ladies. Then, we watch in fast-action montage as Melania poses and poses again, adjusting and being adjusted in her person, photograph after photograph snapping. Then, the film freezes on a single image: her final portrait, in black and white, hung on the White House wall. 

It is, quite literally, the end of The Shining: but it is also, in the film Melania's worldview, the true perfect destiny of the person Melania, the destiny she has been seeking and preparing for throughout the whole film. All those efforts at self-fashioning, all those hours of preparation, all those thousand adjustments, all those commands to subordinates...all so that she could at last be as she was always meant to be, perfectly black and white, totally straight: an image, and powerful. That being achieved, of course the film is over.

Of course, despite the film's best efforts, Melania Trump the person is still alive; and may God have mercy on her soul, and save us all from the vision of power embodied in the film Melania. Amen.