Before Season 3 gets fully underway, James and Teal take a detour for a special episode on a film that demanded attention: the Amazon documentary Melania, directed by Brett Ratner and released in early 2025 to considerable fanfare — and a reported $70 million in combined acquisition and post-production costs. The episode is less a conventional film analysis than a guided autopsy. James and Teal have watched it so you don’t have to, and they’re here to report on what they found: a feature-length piece of political propaganda so inept, so bloated, and so self-defeating that it ends up revealing far more about the current administration than it intends to.
The film purports to document the 20-day period leading up to and including Donald Trump’s second inauguration, with Melania Trump narrating her own story in a fly-on-the-wall style. What it actually delivers is an unbroken parade of motorcades, place settings, hat fittings, and vapid conference calls — all shot in the glossy, relentlessly kinetic style of a luxury perfume commercial, complete with drone footage, 2.35:1 widescreen, and a soundtrack that James and Teal find genuinely bewildering. The music choices — Gimme Shelter, Billie Jean, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, the Midnight Express theme, Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie (made famous in A Clockwork Orange), the Goodfellas Copacabana cue — land either as profound obliviousness or as someone’s private joke buried in the edit. Whether the filmmakers understood what they were doing or not, the effect is the same: the music keeps gesturing at criminality, violence, and predation in ways that are impossible to ignore.
What gives the episode its analytical weight is the lens James and Teal bring to the film’s propagandist ambitions — and its propagandist failures. Unlike classical propaganda, which requires some degree of formal discipline and ideological coherence, Melania can’t decide what it’s selling or to whom. It wants to humanize its subject, but every attempt at humanization backfires: her grief over Jimmy Carter’s death immediately pivots to her own mother, her charity work amounts to a single vapid phone call, her immigrant story sits in suffocating irony against an administration defined by the brutalization of immigrants. Trump himself appears for barely 20 minutes and consistently looks diminished, slurring his words, fixated on whether the NFL scheduled a game to spite him. The film is ostensibly a victory lap, but it reads as a document of a regime that can’t stop exposing itself. What it captures most honestly is the transactional hollowness at the center of everything: a marriage that functions as pageantry, a White House staff that looks terrified, a first lady whose deepest recorded concern is whether her Bolero hat is sitting correctly.
James and Teal connect the film to the broader project of the show — noting that Paxton’s “mobilizing passions” framework and the logic of radicalization toward war and internal cleansing are legible in the administration’s recent actions even when the documentary itself carefully avoids engaging with any of it. The contrast with actual propaganda filmmaking is stark and, in its own way, telling: Leni Riefenstahl, whatever else she was, could compose a shot. Melania can’t. James’s parting prediction: a clean sweep at the Razzies. Teal’s: that this film will be studied for decades as a document of a moment — not for what it meant to say, but for what it couldn’t help revealing.
