MELANIA’s Music
German film poster for MELANIA.
MELANIA made it to Berlin but was only showing at a single early-afternoon time. Brandishing my coveted CounterPunch press card, I tried to talk my way in for free. The woman at the counter was having none of it. I told her that I guess I’d have to give the Trumps the pleasure of having sold one ticket in Berlin. She frowned, coldly informing me that the theatre was nearly full.
Journalistic, musicological duty called me, even to those cinematic, sonic depths—a subterranean screening room within a Mar-a-Lago chip shot of the bunker where Hitler killed himself as the Russians were fighting their way across Berlin in May of 1945.
Bach was rumored to be on the MELANIA soundtrack. Mozart, too. The rumors turned out to be true—barely, but brutally.
In spite of the ticket-counter setbacks, I was still sure that the German capital, once ground zero of modern propaganda, was the right place, the inevitable place, the only place to endure this film’s one-hour-and-forty-seven-minute running time.
There’s no running in it, certainly not in those MELANIA stilettos, and no mobs seen racing up the Capitol steps either. The edifice is pictured on Inauguration Day in all its Fascist calm—imposing, impregnable, inscrutable, and very white.
Instead of running, there are countless sequences of walking—into elevators and out of them; up stairs, down stairs, along corridors; into jets and mansions; out of jets and mansions; into gilded rooms with mirrors and Corinthian columns and lots of marble; and onto stages, daises, and dance floors. The camera stalks MELANIA, ever the runway model, on her catwalks, mostly filming her from behind, ogling her flowing locks and lower parts. A scene with her greedy-eyed French dressmaker and his underlings makes clear she likes her garments sleek, all the better to be shot from the rear.
Other immortals besides Mozart and Bach were drafted into the unctuous chorus of acclaim: Elvis, Aretha, Maurice (Ravel, that is—had to be his Boléro given those hats, oh so many hats), the Village People. Many are the painfully—and do I mean, painfully—obvious truths that this revue trots out. Leaving one Presidential Ball or another on January 20, 2025, James Brown reminds us, as if any reminder were necessary, that “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
Generally, though, it’s irrepressible, inadvertent admissions that pour from the sonic unconscious of this medley. The opening sequence of MELANIA finds her three weeks before the Inauguration heading from Florida to New York and Trump Tower as the Rolling Stones do “Gimme Shelter.” Presumably a bomb shelter.
Onto this scene and its music, the title card MELANIA drops, as black-and-white as her Manichean worldview and fashion sense and in the all-caps favored by her husband in his late-night Truth Social posts. These bunker-busting MELANIA letters immediately silence the saucy Stones and, with them, the possibility of any future film dissent.
There are only yes-men and yes-young-women in this utterly humorless movie. Almost all protest and backtalk have either been blacked- or whited-out. The only exception is a single unseen voice that calls out from the crowd as Jill and Joe Biden, his hard drive wiped and the light gone out of his eyes, are shown to the helicopter that will whisk them from the White House lawn for the last time. An unseen reporter asks, “Will America survive?” I was expecting that to cue Gloria Gaynor. Instead, the rhetorical question was gloated over fleetingly by the faithful before being shredded by the rotors.
In a film so completely frightened by, and repressive of, ambiguity, association, and allusion, they run rampant even as MELANIA walks. Under clear capital skies at the Inauguration, Boney M. breaks into “Sunny,” though the biggest hit of this West German band of Cold War celebrity was “Rasputin.” The ghost of the eponymous czarist spiritual adviser, a bearded and long-haired Stephen Miller, seeped into the darkened cinema and tantalized with the movie I wished I’d been watching: the Republican Rasputin, drugged and dumped not into the Neva but the frozen Potomac, refusing to die all the way down into the icy waters to the tune of Boney M.’s disco-funk elegy:
He ruled the Russian land and never mind the Tsar
But the kazachok, he danced really wunderbar
In all affairs of state, he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze… as his hunger for power
Became known to more and more people
The demands to do something about this outrageous
man became louder and louder.
The backup singers from the unconscious got louder and louder, too. In one ride to the airport, MELANIA declares her abiding love for, and sings along with, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” If her own husband is cancel-proof, then so is MJ, pardoned in and for the afterlife by the First Lady with the powers granted her by her own Constitution. Say or sing what you will, MELANIA stands by her men. I half expected Tammy Wynette appear at any moment to make her soundtrack cameo. But instead, it was Michael in duet with MELANIA: “Billie Jean is not my lover / She’s just a girl.” One could hear another ghost—that of Jeffrey Epstein—humming along from Hell.
What Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was and did for Hitler, MELANIA is and does for the Trumps, just for a lot more money. As in its infamous predecessor, this latest and worst Führer propaganda piece has bad guys and girls not just in front of the camera but behind it. The movie’s director, Ben Ratner, has successfully shed sexual harassment and rape accusations by multiple women. The film was funded to the tune of 70 million Bezos bucks. The fleshy head of the malign male Amazon flashes across the screen at some Inauguration Ball, though he doesn’t get as glorious a shot as Elon Musk. These are just two of the more notorious and camera-hungry among the leeching legions: courtiers, couturiers, caterers, and corporate cupbearers; a Jordanian queen, a First Lady of France; a pair of priests, tickled silly to find themselves in the frame with the MELANIA in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Monsignor, giggling and hot for camera time, blesses her, though respectfully resists putting his sweaty, starstruck palms on the MAGA goddess’s lacquered friseur.
Ratner clearly boned up on Leni’s work before shooting and editing this sequel. Both movies start with the star and savior of the Volk descending from the clouds in a plane. Next is the touchdown and the triumphal entry into the jubilant city. The Mercedes motorcade through the Nuremberg streets flanked by stiff-arming, Heil-Hitlering crowds is mapped onto FDR Drive on Manhattan’s East Side. But the masses don’t mass for MELANIA, at least not yet.
It’s only down in DC, when this Eva Braun of the Beltway panzers along in yet another motorcade on Inauguration Day, that we see the flags and the MAGA fists as we hear an instrumental version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears from back in the Reagan years. This is the stuff of Beer Hall Putsch Karaoke, since the tune can just as well be sung to the alternate words of Trump’s recent utterance: “Sometimes you need a dictator.” Everybody may want to rule the world, but only the Donald can and should.
The meandering vehicle that is MELANIA badly needs these boosting hits from days when America was Great. Without them, the movie won’t get to its destination—the White House with the Trumps back in power—in just under two tough hours.
In between these classics, it is the job of composer Tony Neiman, whose main credits to date are several episodes of Top Chef, to paste up sonic wallpaper that matches the Stalinist décor of Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and, soon, the White House Ballroom. Listening to Neiman’s muted, mournful strings, one expects news that the Great Leader has died. Many will, no doubt, be hoping for that news.
Neiman does pep things up when MELANIA is on the move with a musical energy bar branded as “Melania’s Waltz.” This track’s twirling keyboard riff and electro-frills sound like an AI mash-up of Michael Nyman’s overheated score for the 1993 movie The Piano, cooled down by oscillating harmonic cycles and juxtapositions lifted from Philip Glass, whose recent cancellation of his long-awaited Lincoln Symphony at the Trump Kennedy Center spurred the thin-skinned President to shut the place down last week. When Neiman isn’t waltzing with MELANIA, he’s moisturizing her monologues of empathy for the fate of the world’s kids or the Gaza hostages.
Bach comes late to the party. A few bars from the second movement of his Orchestral Suite in D Major are meant to add class to a candlelit dinner where Elon and Jeff and other well-fed opportunists feast on the camera. That this favorite of classical compilations is known popularly as Air on the G String joins the hit parade with the witlessly self-mocking and self-incriminating numbers already mentioned here. At least the filmmakers got something right, if again accidentally: Bach’s orchestral classic found itself back to where it started—as musique de table, not at a feast for princes, but at a black-tied and ball-gowned orgy of corruption.
Following quickly on from the high heels and G-string came another Bach top pick. The Prelude to the First Cello Suite dabbed at the corner of MELANIA’s perfect mouth and at stains on the damask Inaugural tablecloths. Others might have heard it dabbing at the fragile fabric of the Republic. It would be too much to give the filmmakers and first family credit for thinking that this bit of Bach was meant as a barb at Obama, the most haggard of the ex-presidents to appear on screen at the Inauguration, and the only one not seen to be putting a brave face on the business. Obama added Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of the Prelude to his election playlist when he won for a second time back in 2012.
I’ve always claimed, many times in these digital pages, that Bach’s music can withstand any assault—from banjos to bazookas. After having made it through two hours with MELANIA in that bunker, I’m not so sure.
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