A culture that once celebrated heroes now prefers sneering at them—proof that Western self-forgetfulness has turned admiration into ridicule and criticism into a spectator sport.
Winston Churchill, thinks Ed Davey, leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party, “deserves better than being replaced by a badger.” That may be the only memorable thing the Right Honorable Mr. Davey has ever said. But he is worth quoting on the subject of the national amnesia that has led to the substitution of images of wildlife for those of national heroes on the British currency, because it is a malaise now in its acute stage throughout the Western world.
America’s version has not yet reached the British degree of self-forgetfulness, which is really a kind of self-hatred, but those of us who have been around for some time see more instances every day that we are living in a country that, in the words of the old song by Irving Berlin (remember him?), “forgot to remember.”
I’m so old that I can remember glossy magazines like Life or Look, based on still photographs, mainly of people deemed to be honorable, which rarely, if ever, ventured into controversial areas. When it came to politics, they were like the “women’s magazines” of the period in feeling most at home doing photo spreads on, say, Jackie Kennedy’s redecoration of the White House.
Millions of people bought these magazines not so much for their information content but because they looked up to and admired their subjects, especially when they were national leaders and represented our country, and thus us, to the world.
Millions of people have also bought tickets to Brett Ratner’s documentary Melania, a 21st-century equivalent of an old Life photo-essay, which tracks the busy life of our First Lady from a few days before to just after last year’s inauguration. But not all of the ticket holders, I regret to say, came to see it out of admiration for Mrs. Trump.
In fact, to judge from the “User Reviews” on the International Movie Database, neither Mr. Ratner’s movie nor our most stylishly elegant First Lady since Mrs. Kennedy has any admirers.
Here, for instance, is the opinion of one anassha-12284 of what she calls this “disaster of a movie.”
This documentary about the First Lady of America feels flat and lifeless. It presents facts without soul, relying on dull narration and repetitive footage. There’s no insight or emotion, just surface-level storytelling that feels more like a rushed school project than a meaningful film, leaving the viewer bored and disconnected from the subject.
And that is one of the more favorable reviews. A Ms. mirabellaaluna, who considers the movie a “Complete Waste of Time,” writes that “Melania is not a documentary; it’s a lifeless PR exercise disguised as one. It offers zero insight, zero honesty, and absolutely no critical perspective.” And if you cast your eye further down the list of reviewers, you see nothing but headlines like “A Cinematic Void,” “Pure Junk,” or, simply, “Rubbish.”
Perhaps aware that movie reviewing in our time treats the movies mainly as a springboard for the wit, such as it is, of would-be “creative writers” or stand-up comedians, several of the IMDb reviewers seem to be auditioning for a paid gig. Mr. Sleepin_Dragon, for instance, writes that “Watching it felt like being driven to hell in a Datsun Cherry, with a single song on repeat and no way to turn it off,” while drakeking1 “would have found it more intellectually stimulating and emotionally rewarding to sit in a lukewarm bath and try to count every individual bubble in a bottle of dish soap. At least the bubbles eventually pop, providing a sense of closure and excitement that this film lacks entirely.”
Dish soap? In the bath? I think their material needs a little work—like that of fallingskyentertainment-80945, who considers Melania “the most boring trainwreck in history.” If there’s one thing that trainwrecks aren’t, it’s “boring.”
But of course, these reviews are no more meant to convey information or rational judgment than the movie itself, which the reviewers obviously came to only for hate-watching, since they clearly have no other interest in its subject. As fallingskyentertainment-80945 goes on to observe, “I didn’t learn a damn thing about this woman that everyone in America doesn’t already know.”
At any rate, we can be sure that fallingskyentertainment-80945 didn’t learn anything he didn’t already know. Or think he knew. For him, as for wbradshaw-99518, the movie was “as awful as expected.”
Back when it was first published, no one could have found Jackie’s Life photo spread on redecorating the White House “as awful as expected,” because everyone either expected it to be very much not-awful or else took no interest in her or the baubles or gewgaws she introduced into the White House. On Melania, I mostly fall into the latter category, though I’m glad to have seen it for the little bit of humanizing light it casts on the relationship of our first couple.
Nowadays, however, there is a third category of watchers whose only interest in Melania the woman or Melania the movie is the opportunity she provides them to show how much smarter and better and more virtuous they are, in all their hatred, than she is—in a bid for the applause of an imaginary audience that thinks exactly as they do.
This is criticism as cheerleading—or, rather, jeerleading—and I don’t think that even the most energetic of the haters can be altogether happy about what it has done to the popular culture over the past 65 years, since people had heroes to look up to and not just celebrities to gossip about. Maybe we’d all be better off with the badgers.
By American Greatness – https://amgreatness.com/2026/03/15/review-of-melania/
