Marie Antoinette With Rose by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783
Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story… The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
My husband was working on a screenplay as I watched Melania on Netflix. He had already told me he was too busy to watch it, much less parse each frame, as was my intention, from a journalist and media critic's POV. I knew the semiotics—the propaganda tools—would be fascinating, and disheartening. I had studied films frame by frame, as well as posters from 1930s Germany in grad school, and recently compared Project 2025 to Mein Kampf; there are many resonances.
So I watched the movie, and later that night, I downloaded the book, which reads as though it was ghostwritten by a campaign speechwriter. But the documentary is something else. It's the saga of a nearly middle-aged woman and mother from a working class family, her youth spent under communism, struggling to find her purpose and her voice. The problem is that she is being used by a propaganda machine and a husband who admits towards the end of the film that she is "difficult." It's 2 a.m. when the newly inaugurated president utters this word, he and Melania are exhausted, and the beautiful gown she's been wearing all day is slipping under her breast- line even though she asked her designer Hervé, to make it really "straight." She hikes it up. Trump softens the "difficult," with, "She's a wonderful first lady," and peels away to his solitary quarters. Did they kiss goodnight? I can't remember. "Goodnight Mr. President," the cameraman says.
I didn't time the segments but I'd say that more than half the footage is Melania modelling her spiky shoes and beautiful clothes as she looks in a mirror, surrounded by glitter, gold, light, and fawning employees. She is an object, a objet d'art, objectified for the pleasure of men when she was still a young woman, and now for American acolytes.
I kept thinking about Versailles, and all its glitter and gold, and of Le Petit Trianon, the château and its surrounding park that the 20-year-old Louis XVI gave to his 19-year-old wife, Marie Antoinette, for her exclusive use. Melania has found her privacy, also, in the projects she has initiated, always with children in mind, and the efforts she has made to connect with other "first ladies." There's a zoom call between Melania and Mme. Macron. It seems they know each other well and are both concerned about the impact of social media on children as well as cyberbullying. When I mentioned this seemingly friendly connection to a French/German friend who—serendipitously—lives near Versailles, she said with wry understatement, "It must have been AI generated." But I do not think so, which gives me pause. Is Melania's effort to work, find purpose and a voice genuine? I believe it is despite the obvious obstacles. Here is a woman struggling to break the glass prison in which she lives, however difficult the effort.
Before long the propaganda kicks in again, or it goes in and out like a pendulum. When Melania watches television, it is always tuned to FOX News, and when she meets a released Israeli hostage, there is no mention of the devastation in Gaza, or its people, the Palestinian people. Nonetheless, the encounter is warm, and Melania is kind. So how would someone who does not know about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza respond to this? Positively, of course, which was the intention.
Melania is a princess, married to a prince, the fantasy does not abate. Protected by the Secret Service, her honor guard, she is fearful nonetheless. The filming started after the assassination attempt and she is not feeling safe. She wonders if her family will be protected when they get out of the limo on inauguration day. She knows her son Barron will not want to be exposed and greet anyone, "and I respect that," she says, a mother's recompense for his disrupted, cloistered childhood.
In conclusion, let us imagine, by comparison, July, 1789 in Paris, France, which we can view as either a lesson, or a warning. For two years before the Estates General assembled at Versailles in May of that year, families were suffering. The economy had shrunk. The spectacle of nobility at Versailles with all its glitter and gold, the decadence, the debauchery, no longer entertained or assuaged the ordinary people. They became a mob. More than liberty, equality and fraternity, they were rioting for bread and relief from taxes.