Amazon’s documentary “Melania” has been panned by many as a $40 million piece of propaganda. But who, exactly, is it meant to persuade? The culture editor Nadja Spiegelman and the Opinion columnists Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada break down what the film is trying to say and what it reveals about the first lady’s life and inner world. “She wanted to look gorgeous in every frame and not reveal anything,” Dowd says. “And that’s what happened.”
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Nadja Spiegelman: I’m Nadja Spiegelman, an editor at New York Times Opinion.
Over the weekend I watched “Melania” in a nearly empty Manhattan theater. All of my friends refused to see it with me. Luckily, I now get the chance to discuss it with two distinguished columnists, Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada. Thank you both so much for being here.
Maureen Dowd: Thank you, Nadja.
Carlos Lozada: Great to be here, Nadja. Let’s do some movie reviews.
Spiegelman: Yes. Let’s start by talking about how for journalists in left-leaning cities — you’re both based in D.C. — there’s a lot of joking around about what the experience of going to the movie theater to see this film is like. For example, our audio producer, Derek Arthur, and I had only one other person in the theater. She was a young woman who told us afterward that she had come because she’d seen ads for this film in the subway and been curious about what it was about.
What was your experience of going to see the film in theaters?
Dowd: It was so funny, because I went to downtown Washington and there were only a few people there. They were all journalists. Finally one of the journalists stands up in the back of the theater and goes, “Are there any civilians here?” He wanted to interview someone. And one journalist tapped me on the shoulder, Betsy Klein of CNN, and she asked, “Can I talk to you about the movie after?” And I said, “No.” And she looked shocked, and I said, “No, because I’m a journalist, Betsy.”
It was very incestuous, with just a few journalists, although I did bring my Trump-voting Republican sister, which was very revealing because that way I knew that there was a group of older white women who were going to love this movie.
Spiegelman: And Carlos, what was your moviegoing experience?
Lozada: I went to see “Melania” twice, actually, over the weekend. Because that’s how committed I am to The New York Times.
The first time was the same showing as Maureen. Basically, I think we found the earliest possible showing on Friday in D.C., and it was people from all walks of life — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN. I’m standing in the concession line, and there’s a journalist in front of me and a journalist behind me.
The second time I saw it was on Sunday, and it was not in D.C. I went out to see it in one of the malls in the D.C. suburbs of Maryland, figuring it would be a different kind of crowd. And it was very much civilians this time. It was an older crowd, much more female, no one carrying notebooks. People seemed to be enjoying themselves, and there were certainly more people than had been there that first time that I saw it. So there’s certainly an audience for the movie.
Spiegelman: I’m curious what you thought about Melania Trump before going into the film and what you thought about her after walking out of the film. Was there anything that changed through seeing this film?
Dowd: It’s interesting because I went on Trump’s first presidential exploratory trip to make a speech in Miami to Cuban Americans. It was 1999 and Melania, who was then Melania Knauss, was there. She was his girlfriend, and I liked her. I thought she was cool. And there was much more of a sense that she was in on the joke. She was laughing about how they had outfitted her in Calvin Klein to look like a politician’s girlfriend and that she’d never worn skirts that long. But she wasn’t going to give up her stilettos. There was a more sly sense to her, and that was totally absent in this film.
Spiegelman: That’s so interesting. I think we all have this fantasy that there’s something about Melania that could be a secret because she’s such a cipher that could be a secret resistance. Sort of an immigrant who’s a bomb waiting to go off as a resistant and ——
Dowd: Yeah, I think liberals have always fantasized about that, but I always thought that was silly. Remember they thought maybe she would go to the women’s resistance marches and go in disguise with a pink pussy hat. That was just wishful thinking on the part of liberals. Whatever her relationship with Trump is, whatever their deal is, she is very comfortable in this vertical solitude of the gilded world that he has set her in.
Spiegelman: “Vertical solitude of the gilded world” is — of all adjectives, that really describes the film.
Dowd: Yeah, this is like a bad episode of “The Gilded Age.”
Spiegelman: Totally.
Dowd: Without Christine Baranski, unfortunately.
Spiegelman: Before we go further, for anyone who’s managed to somehow avoid what this movie is, Carlos, can you give us a synopsis? What is this movie?
Lozada: It covers the final 20 days before President Trump’s inauguration last year, so early January 2025. And it mainly focuses on Melania’s preparation for the official events that surround the inauguration: the swearing-in ceremony itself, the inaugural balls.
She meets with her designer, with event planners, with security personnel. They throw in a few heavily scripted meetings with others, like Brigitte Macron of France and Queen Rania of Jordan. She’s flying a lot. She’s flying back and forth between Mar-a-Lago and Washington and New York. So a lot of this movie is Melania in cars, in planes, always in heels. And really the book ends are kind of perfect because it starts with her traveling to meet Hervé Pierre, her clothing designer, and then it ends with her in a photo shoot at the White House, where Pierre is hovering around her, adjusting her clothes.
At one point she says in the movie that she wants to change the role of first lady so it’s not just about official duties, but the whole movie is about her official duties. It was weird to me that they picked those 20 days. A more natural period would have been from election night, say, to Inauguration Day. There’s never an explanation for why this period mattered.
So that’s it. That’s it. It’s literally 20 days into the life of Melania, but a very curated life. You never see her really talking to, say, Barron, her son. You never see her talking to a friend. It’s a kind of lonely existence, but yet one that she seems to enjoy.
Spiegelman: You touch on so many important points that I think we’re going to have to circle back one by one to tease out even further. I agree that there’s a voice-over at the beginning where she’s like: Everybody’s been wondering about this, so here it is — the 20 days leading up to the inauguration. And it’s like: That is not what everybody has been wondering about.
It’s so curious that they chose this as a narrative structure. And to continue giving some of the context around the film — Maureen, can you fill us in just a little bit on the role that Amazon plays in the making of this movie?
Dowd: Right. Well, Amazon spent $40 million to make the movie and $35 million to promote it. And out of that, Melania pockets $28 million. Obviously, that is just a way for Jeff Bezos to curry favor. And there’s this hilarious scene in the movie where they’re having dinner the night before the inauguration at the National Building Museum and she has this paean to how great their donors are.
And they pan past Bezos and Lauren Sánchez and all the other lords of the cloud who have bought American government in this blatant way ——
Spiegelman: I mean, it’s so heavy-handed.
Dowd: Yeah. So heavy-handed. But ——
Lozada: Yeah, there’s no subtlety in that.
Dowd: No. And again, in some ways Melania and Trump are well matched, because neither of them has met an emolument that they didn’t like.
Spiegelman: For the reason that it’s intentionally sponsored and bought — and for many others — a lot of people are referring to this film as a piece of propaganda. But one of the definitions of propaganda is that it has an intention to promote a worldview or belief. What is this film promoting?
Dowd: It’s interesting because Donald Trump is the master of creating a different false reality, and he’s done that with the election for his fans that he claims was stolen from him. He’s done it with Jan. 6. And so this is Melania’s version of that. In her world, Donald Trump is a unifier and promotes dignity and compassion, and it’s mostly her getting in and out of cars. While in the split screen of the real world, we’re seeing ICE agents shoot people in the face in their cars, so it’s absurd propaganda the way his is.
Spiegelman: Carlos, what do you think? What is the film trying to promote, from a propaganda perspective?
Lozada: First thing I’ll say is that we often speak of propaganda in a pejorative sense. I find propaganda to be utterly fascinating and incredibly useful to understand politicians, whether it’s political memoirs or movies like these, where the subject of the film had a lot of control in how she’s presented. Propaganda tells you two things. It tells you how people wish to be perceived, and it tells you what they think of us, what they think of the audience, what’s going to appeal to us. And so in that sense, it’s a great mirror, too.
I think that in a sense they try to soften this administration a little bit — glamorize it, humanize it, sort of give a very different sense of what it’s about. Melania speaks in these almost like ChatGPT-generated voice-overs, which is very ——
Spiegelman: I was also thinking about ChatGPT. It’s that really flattened A.I. voice.
Lozada: Yeah, but also the words that she chooses. She says stuff like, “Every day I live with purpose and devotion, orchestrating the complexities of my life while nurturing my family’s needs.”
I don’t know what that means. That doesn’t tell you anything. Or there’s a moment when they’re at this congressional luncheon right after the inauguration and she just says, “As first lady, I constantly think about how our lawmakers can build dignity, create equal opportunity and foster compassion through the unity of all Americans.”
These are just generic, empty, political words that don’t mean anything. But when she mentions unity — I want to follow up on Maureen’s point. There’s a great moment in this movie when Donald Trump is rehearsing for his Inaugural Address and Melania’s sitting in on it. One thing he’s saying is, “I want my legacy to be that of a peacemaker.” And Melania pipes up in that moment and says, “Peacemaker and unifier.” Trump didn’t like that. He turns to the camera and says: Don’t put that in the movie. Don’t keep that in the movie. And she says: No, please keep it.
It’s not that he doesn’t want to say he’s a unifier, because he ends up saying it in the address. It’s that he doesn’t want it to be seen that she’s telling him what to say. And I thought that was a really interesting little moment in the movie, but I don’t know on what planet Donald Trump is a unifier. He’s many things, but for her it’s just important not that he be it; it’s important that he says it. In that sense, they’re very well matched because they both feel that power of repetition — simply saying something will make it seem truer than it is.
Spiegelman: That’s really interesting. But also, Carlos, the moment you point out — which is preceded by Melania sort of mischievously beckoning at the camera to come into a room that wasn’t previously planned to be filmed, when Trump is rehearsing his inauguration speech — really stands out. It’s one of the few minutes of footage in the film that don’t feel perfectly planned and scripted and also one of the few moments when you actually see Melania interacting with people who are not her staff, who aren’t just preparing her clothes or her invitations.
I’m really curious about this, because we’re talking about the film as propaganda. Melania herself produced this film. These are all very intentional choices that are being made. We mentioned loneliness earlier. You see Melania in this really lonely world. I think for the first several minutes of the film, the only things she says are “thank you” to various staff members — and “hello.”
Dowd: Yeah, and her personal Instagram was that way, too. I don’t think she seems lonely. She seems alone, to prefer not to have these ——
Lozada: That’s a good distinction.
Dowd: If anyone else had a documentary, they would have included some friends to show they had friends.
But you asked earlier what I thought differently of her after the movie, and I wanted to tell you this. My late friend André Leon Talley, who was a Vogue editor, styled Melania for her Vogue cover when she married Trump. He traveled to Paris with her and went to couturiers. He told me a few things about her: that she was very polite to the couturiers; that he saw her in the altogether and said she was the best-moisturized woman he had ever seen; and as we can see in the movie, she walks on five-inch stilettos better than any other woman in history.
He also told me that she was a great mom. And all of those things, I think, you can also tell in the movie. So what André told me long ago about her has not changed.
Spiegelman: It’s true that there’s so much of her feet. There are so many stiletto shots.
Dowd: Well, the first shot is ——
Lozada: The first thing you see of her is her feet.
Dowd: You picture her having feet like Barbie that don’t go flat.
Spiegelman: Totally. I think there’s only one shot where her shoes come off at the very end of her whole day of inauguration, where she’s been walking ——
Dowd: But then she doesn’t say, “Wow, it’s hard to do this” or “This is how I do this.” You don’t get any insight into this amazing feat of being on these skyscraper heels because normally, at that age, women are downgrading to flats or two-inch heels.
Spiegelman: Maureen, you also are someone who wears a lot of heels. What is the meaning and experience of wearing heels like this?
Dowd: Yeah, I wore heels through, like, eight presidential campaigns, and it’s hard. At some point it hurts too much to keep doing it, but she has a steely resolve about it. I would have loved to hear her secrets on that. But even on small, superficial things like that, we didn’t get any insights.
Spiegelman: Yeah.
Dowd: My dad was a police detective in D.C. and was in charge of Senate security for 20 years, and he wouldn’t get my sister a job at the Capitol because he said walking on those marble floors was so painful, you would get varicose veins. And my sister and I were wincing on her long walks on those marble floors because it had to hurt. But there’s only a glancing reference to that.
Spiegelman: I hadn’t even thought about how painful it must be to walk in six-inch stilettos on marble floors.
Dowd: I mean, also all credit to Nancy Pelosi, who also did it.
Lozada: It was almost distracting how often the focus was on the feet.
Dowd: Well she may also be rebuking all of the women in Trump’s world who have Mar-a-Lago face, who have done too much work, because obviously she’s had a lot of work that’s been done, but she’s managed to remain exquisite looking.
Spiegelman: Yeah, she does look really beautiful. I think you wrote in your piece, Maureen, that Ivanka’s nickname for Melania ——
Dowd: Yeah. She called Melania “The Portrait” and Melania called her “The Princess.” And you really could have called this documentary “The Portrait,” because that’s what it’s like — like a static kind of portrait of a beautiful woman.
Spiegelman: Let’s talk about the other choices in the film. There’s a lot of choices this film makes. One of them is with the music that it chooses. The music does a lot of work because it’s mostly shots of car parades and walking down hallways with a lot of scoring. Carlos, what do you make of the scoring?
Lozada: There’s a moment when she’s being driven to the airport in New York or something — she’s going back to Florida, I think — and she’s asked: Who’s your favorite recording artist? What’s your favorite song? And she says: Oh, I love Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean.” So they start playing “Billie Jean” and doing almost this “Carpool Karaoke” with Melania in the car.
She’s sort of bopping along to “Billie Jean” and seems to really like it, knows all the words to the song. Yet you don’t hear her. You barely hear her singing because the other person in the car is singing and they just don’t make her audible at all. So you see that she’s mouthing along to Billie Jean, but you don’t really hear Melania’s voice.
Dowd: I thought it was so funny that — so, she brings Brett Ratner out of exile. He was exiled from Hollywood for sexual transgressions. And she brings him out of exile to be the director of this movie. And then he asks who her favorite artist is, and it’s Michael Jackson. And in the midst of the Epstein files of tales of pedophilia, it’s just kind of — are we not going to have one minute without a predator being mentioned here or directing a movie? So it was kind of creepy, I thought.
You know, this isn’t about music. But for me, my favorite line of everything — I don’t know if it started with Sophie Gilbert or on Twitter or whatever — was the idea that her inaugural dress, it’s impossible to look at it now without thinking it looks like the redacted Epstein files. The black and crossing things out ——
Lozada: That was Sophie Gilbert, I think, in her piece in The Atlantic about it.
Dowd: Yeah, I thought that was a great line.
Spiegelman: It’s so funny. Maureen, you were talking about Brett Ratner earlier. You can say a lot of things about him, but one thing about him is that he knows how to tell a story — he does understand narrative. And one really notable thing about this film is how boring it is.
The only setup for narrative tension is whether the hem of her dress will be perfect by the time the inauguration happens. And even that setup — which is the setup of so many reality wedding shows, like, Will the invitations be printed on time? — gives us no narrative tension. We’re certain they will be. Everything goes right. Nothing ever goes wrong. What do you make of that choice, of creating a film that has absolutely no narrative tension?
Dowd: Yeah, it’s only revealing for what it doesn’t reveal. I just think he got his orders straight: She wanted to look gorgeous in every frame and not reveal anything, and that’s what happened.
Lozada: I will point out a couple of moments of not narrative tension but at least a little bit of a moment when the veil drops slightly. And that is during the discussion that Donald and Melania Trump are having with the events coordinator and the Secret Service director about security surrounding the inauguration.
You see how Melania is skeptical of the security arrangements, and obviously it was in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on her husband. So she asks: Is there a place where we’re supposed to get out of the car and walk? I don’t want to do that. Barron doesn’t want to do that. How could that be safe, especially with the last year?
And then the Secret Service guys are like: Let’s talk about this off camera. So that was a little moment that, to me, was interesting. It was a little, tiny glimpse into what she’s thinking, what’s going on in her head. She was afraid of leaving the car, and clearly Barron was as well. And so I appreciated that moment in the movie because it felt slightly real.
Spiegelman: Yeah, Melania’s worries about security bring us into the larger political context in which this film lands. Maureen, you had started by talking about the juxtaposition between being afraid to get out of the car and what’s happening to people around the country — being pulled out of their cars by ICE officers. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Dowd: Well, I mean, America — my dad was born in Ireland. America’s a nation of immigrants. And we’re at this horrible moment when immigrants are facing what feel like ICE thugs. I say that knowing my dad was a policeman, so I understand the difficulties. You get to that moment when you have to decide: Are you going to shoot someone, or how are you going to handle the situation? It’s a split-second decision.
But even so, their behavior is so untrained and so reckless, and it makes all police look bad. We’re at this moment when immigrants are getting dragged out of Home Depots and out of their own homes. And here is Melania — the only immigrant Trump likes — in her satin-lined cage. It’s an incredibly unpleasant juxtaposition. Yes, he brought her parents here through chain migration, but all other immigrants are suspect — unless, I guess, they’re from white European countries. His attitude toward immigrants is gross.
Spiegelman: “Gross” seems unfortunately even like an understatement. Although there is an interesting shot in the film where he and Melania are posing with the entire Mar-a-Lago staff, many of whom I would assume are also themselves immigrants. It’s impossible to tell Melania’s story without some version of an immigrant journey.
There’s a person in the documentary who is from Laos, and she talks about it being the culmination of the American dream for her to be doing the interior decoration of the White House, given that she had come to America at a young age. It’s curious to be still peddling this idea of the immigrant American dream in the context of what Trump is doing vis-à-vis immigration. Carlos, how does all this strike you?
Lozada: I hate beginning sentences with “As a,” so I won’t say, “As an immigrant.” But I’m a naturalized American citizen, born in Peru, and I was waiting to see if she would say something about this. Because that moment that you mentioned with the decorator for the White House is very early on in the movie. And later on, she says — again, it’s one of these sort of ChatGPT, generic, political-speak things you’re supposed to say. Melania says — I have the line here: “Walking into the Capitol’s Rotunda, I felt the weight of history intertwined with my own journey as an immigrant. A reminder of why I respect this nation so deeply. Everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights. Never take them for granted. Because in the end, no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.”
That’s lovely, that’s great. It’s also entirely decontextualized from the campaign her husband had just waged to win the election — a campaign that was based on the promise of mass deportations against those people who are “poisoning the blood” of the country, as Trump put it often.
Now, in her memoir — which also came out titled “Melania,” in a fit of originality — she talks about how she urged Trump to end the family separation policy at the southern border during his first term. The book came out in 2024. But here, there’s absolutely no sense that she spoke to him about any of this or that she’s aware of or cares about the fact that the rhetoric she’s giving in this movie doesn’t match up at all with what he’s actually doing. Instead, she calls him a unifier.
Now, I wouldn’t expect this movie to be a full-throated critique of the Trump administration. That’s absurd; you have to sort of let things slide when it’s the first lady. But it’s also kind of fascinating that some of those generic statements that she has are so contrary to some basic things that this administration is doing.
Spiegelman: In what way does this film manage to humanize Melania, if at all? Does it humanize her at all, Maureen, and in what way?
Dowd: No, I would say my experience of it was the reverse, because having met her at the beginning — when she and Trump were just dating — I’ve had a sense all this time that she was slyer — and as I said, in the joke a little bit more — and would be really fascinating to talk to. And now I don’t feel that way.
Spiegelman: But the film somehow made $7 million in its first weekend, which is the best opening weekend for a documentary in years.
Dowd: I do think a lot of normal people like Melania and think she’s stunning and want to see the behind the scenes. But it doesn’t really matter how much the movie makes. The point is she got a $28 million bribe from Bezos, who does a lot of business with the government, with his Blue Origin spaceships and all his companies, and it’s gross.
Spiegelman: Oh, yeah. And even if it is able to make $7 million in its first weekend, it is never going to recoup the $75 million that Amazon spent on the rights and promotion of this film. There’s no way to even think about it.
Dowd: That isn’t the point.
Spiegelman: It’s certainly not the point.
Lozada: I’m hearing from people who like this movie. I wrote a column this week, somewhat critical of the movie.
One of my earliest emails is from a guy named Phil, who wrote: “Carlos. Saw the movie and loved it. I did have a question: Who are you, and why would I care about anything you have to say? Sincerely, Phil.”
I’m reminded of a statement Michael Jordan, the basketball GOAT, made years ago when he was being pressured to support a political candidate, a Democrat in his home state of North Carolina. He famously said, “Look, Republicans buy sneakers, too.” And Republicans go to the movies, too. Melania is an iconic figure for a lot of people in America, and I think there’s going to be an audience that will go see this movie and really enjoy it. I saw some of them on Sunday.
Spiegelman: And Maureen, can you tell us a bit more about your sister’s reaction to the film? What was it like to see it with her?
Dowd: I know she’s a big Melania fan, because we’ve talked about it a lot, and she — and in fact, I was kind of fascinated, too, because I’ve always wanted to be one of these women. I don’t know how they do it, who look perfect at all moments. My sister is ——
Spiegelman: I say you look perfect right now. Melania would be proud.
Dowd: Yeah right. My sister is actually like that, so I’m kind of watching in fascination. I have a lot of vintage clothes, and they fall apart while I’m wearing them. And she is perfect down to the last scintilla of everything, to her red-soled Louboutins. I think my sister loved it and really enjoyed it and admires her. And I’m sure she’s going to go back and see it again.
Spiegelman: I want to end by asking you, since we’ve been talking about propaganda, how does “Melania” rate as a work of propaganda compared to other famous works like “Triumph of the Will,” which arguably is also very much about aesthetics. How does “Melania” rate? How many stars?
Dowd: Well, I was watching the Leni Riefenstahl documentary after I saw “Melania,” and it was so funny because she’s getting quizzed by interviewers over the years: Couldn’t you see what was coming with Hitler? You were glorifying him. And she’s like: Well, it was 1932. He was very charismatic.
I mean, it was a much more interesting documentary, in terms of the incredible thing that she was doing, and she was being semi-honest about it. So, yeah, the only thing you’re learning from “Melania” is that she’s on board with the corruption of taking money like the Trump family — and she looks great in high heels.
Spiegelman: Corrupt and looking great doing it.
Dowd: Yes. That should have been the title of the movie.
Spiegelman: Carlos, what do you think? How does this rate as a work of propaganda?
Lozada: You mentioned “Triumph of the Will.” If I remember correctly, that movie also begins with a plane ride and a motorcade, so a lot of Hitler being transported and taken around different places.
I don’t know that I’d put Ratner in the Leni Riefenstahl category. I’d be surprised if decades from now we’re still poring over the “Melania” movie as a key way to understand this time. A movie like “Triumph of the Will,” which was about one big rally in Nuremberg for Hitler in the 1930s — it’s an intensely militaristic, nationalistic movie. Everything is about the leader projecting strength. This is about a leader-adjacent character, projecting softness, reasonableness. It’s a very different, yet kind of insidious in its own way, precisely because of the contradictions and the hypocrisy that Maureen highlighted.
Dowd: Well, Hitler hated makeup. He did not want women to wear makeup, so he would not have liked this movie.
Lozada: There’s your headline. Hitler would’ve hated this movie. Everything in a movie like this is precooked and planned and created to create a certain effect. But she goes to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to mark the anniversary of her mother’s death — that’s a human moment. Very little in this movie is relatable, but lighting a candle for a loved one who has gone is a relatable moment.
Dowd: Even in the scene where she goes to St. Patrick’s — it’s a lovely moment, but then she comes out, and there are a bunch of people out there, and she doesn’t look at them or talk to them. I mean, it’s as though they don’t exist, the hoi polloi.
Spiegelman: Yeah. We spent so much of the film watching her design this big hat that she’s going to wear at the inauguration. And then there’s this little shot where we see ——
Dowd: It looks like the Hamburglar hat.
Spiegelman: Totally looks like the Hamburglar hat. But there’s also this little shot where we see that one of the purposes of this hat is that it can completely hide her face from cameras, from people, whenever she needs to hide. I left this film ——
Lozada: You can barely see her eyes. Yeah.
Spiegelman: Yeah, you can barely see her eyes. And I left this film feeling like: Here is someone who wants to remain The Portrait, who wants to remain purely a surface that we never get to see behind.
OK, Carlos, don’t think you’re getting off the hook. I want to know: How many stars are you giving this as a work of propaganda?
Lozada: In the sense that it’s prefabricated to appeal to half the country and be rejected by the other half, I can only give it 2.5 out of five.
Dowd: I gave it 2.5. Copycat.
Lozada: Oh, you gave it two and a half? OK. I’ll give it three. I’ll give it three because it’s so true to itself. This movie ends with an extended photo shoot with Melania, people hovering around her, getting her clothes just right. And then the last thing you see is her name flashing on the screen and then that crackling sound of the old-fashioned flashbulb. And then — boom — the name is gone, and it’s over. There’s nothing else.
Dowd: Well, it also ends with Brett Ratner being rehabilitated, thanks to Melania, and Jeff Bezos having more influence in the government, thanks to Melania. Jeff Bezos, who’s destroying The Washington Post.
Spiegelman: It’s true. That is one of the things that comes from this film. I mean, this flashbulb ending — the completely planned portrait of her — is exactly what you’ve just seen. That’s what this film is. And that’s the perfect note for us to end on, because it really is just what this sums up to: a very, very posed portrait.
Carlos, Maureen, thank you so much for being here today.
Dowd: Thank you, Nadja.
Lozada: A real pleasure. Nadja. Let’s go see more movies.
Dowd: Yeah, let’s do it again.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
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