Have you seen Markiplier’s new movie? This article isn’t about that. Not quite, at least.
Growing up, one of my favorite YouTubers was Markiplier. From his Five Nights at Freddy’s videos to his Let’s Play of Potatoman Seeks the Troof, as long as I’ve been online, I’ve watched Mark’s videos. So when Mark announced he was adapting David Szymanski’s indie horror game Iron Lung into a movie, I knew I had to see it. Last Saturday, I did just that. Daniel and I went to the 6:55 evening showing at the Lawrence Regal theater. I found the film both visually and narratively interesting, though the sound mixing made some parts hard to understand.
This article is not about Iron Lung (2026), though. It’s about the movie we witnessed afterwards: Melania (2026).
With a budget of over $75 million, at the time of writing, Melania hasn’t even made back a fourth#tab=box-office) of that. Inversely, Iron Lung has made back over seven times its budget. Simply walking into the screening, having already paid for a separate film that same evening, seemed perfectly ethical to both Daniel and me.The timing for our showing, which we may or may not have bought tickets for, worked out perfectly; just five minutes after the credits had finished rolling on Mark’s debut film, the greatest film of the 21st century began playing two theaters over.
When we entered the theater, my suspicions were confirmed: we were literally the only people in there. Like, there was not a single other person there. It was so empty, they didn’t even bother to turn the lights off.
As the movie started, I immediately noticed the needledrops. For example, they chose, of all songs, “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, a song about a deadbeat dad written by someone who preached racial justice, over footage of Melania emitting four tons of carbon dioxide on her private jet flight from Mar-a-Lago to Trump Tower in NYC. This style works for James Gunn’s superhero movies, but for this documentary, it doesn’t. At all. I would have to assume that licensing these clearly identifiable tracks was a sizable part of this film’s disproportionately large budget.
Daniel made a savvy observation a few minutes into the first real scene of the documentary, where Melania is talking to her fashion design team (because of course she has her own fashion design team) about her outfit(s) for Trump’s second inauguration. Whenever Melania is speaking directly to someone, their name and job title appear on screen. With only one exception – an Asian woman designer whose name, like most everyone else in the documentary besides Melania, I didn’t catch – these people were white. However, whenever ‘the help’ is speaking, they remain nameless. By my rough estimation, only half of these people were white. It makes directorial sense not to include the names and professions of every buff white bodyguard, Asian tailor, or, if they had chosen to feature any Black professionals, them. Still, once you notice how the white versus non-white people around the First Lady are framed, it’s hard not to see it everywhere.
Something harder to miss is the sheer gaudiness of the environments in which Melania exists. Everything in Trump Tower is gold-plated, made of expensive-looking stone, or looks like something out of a British Colonial Officer’s office. Even by the standards of the ludicrously and unjustly wealthy, the gilded chairs and doors, the hundred-plus square foot early Renaissance-era tapestry, and even the Voss water bottles are needlessly statused. It is as though they took the Platonic form of each thing and then dunked them into the essence of wealth. Nothing is spared from ideology.
Daniel and I pretty soon started to ask an increasingly obvious question about this whole project: Who is this for? Half an hour into the film, all we had seen was Melania getting her outfit custom-tailored by a team of about half a dozen people, Melania visiting people planning the inauguration to pick out colors for folders and types of crystal glasses, Melania getting her jarring dress custom-tailored by that same team of people, and Melania interviewing people for her femme-de-presidential team – led by someone directly implicated in the 2022 Mar-a-Lago confidential documents case. If I wasn’t laughing my ass off out of the ironic appeal of the film, I would have surely been bored out of my mind. I mean, this is some actual American Psycho shit.
The whole thing feels totally disconnected from and entirely unrelatable to the average American. Out of the hundreds of millions of people in America, at most a few hundred thousand could relate to the stresses of, to paraphrase some shit Melania actually said, the stresses of being a wife, mother, friend, and, most importantly, an important rich person. Someone in my family actually lives the life of the rich and famous, complete with a private trainer, masseuse, chef, assistant, and three multi-million dollar properties. They have made and lost more fortunes than entire bloodlines will ever see. And even by the standards of the life they live, which is totally alien to even my own privileged and advantaged life, the way Melania lives is really weird! There’s levels to this shit.
While this documentary seemingly exists to popularize and humanize Melania – and therefore the deeply unpopular and fascistic Trump administration – if anything, it does the opposite. Again, who could this possibly appeal to? My best guess is that it would be best received by two groups: 1) fellow ultra-wealthy people, and 2) conservatives who want to live vicariously through the Trumps. The former, based on what I’ve said thus far, is fairly self-explanatory; no one else could relate to this mess of a movie. The latter, though, is far more interesting; if you see yourself as a temporarily-disadvantaged billionaire who relates more to the President than you do to your fellow Black or immigrant workers, then the alien, bizarre nature of this film may actually seem appealing to you.
I would love to offer more analysis than this, but at our functionally private screening, during a scene where The Donald himself calls Melania, the audio cut out. At first, I thought it was a weird directorial decision, until the screen cut off as well. After sitting in silence for several seconds, our worst fears were confirmed: they ended the fucking screening early.
No one even came in and told us to leave. The film just abruptly cut out. To be fair, it was just the two of us, but it was still a great tragedy that we were denied the rest of the Melania experience. Someday, we may continue engaging with this media without financially benefiting the people behind it, and pirate Melania for a more proper private screening. For now, though, I have done the difficult work to make peace with our experience being cut short.
To state the obvious, Melania is bourgeois propaganda gone horribly, hilariously wrong. Rather than making the lives of the wealthy seem desirable, they come across as vapid and boring. Rather than making the Trump administration seem relatable, they come across as totally disconnected from the real world. This film is half a level away from being something straight out of The Boys; it feels like it would fit right in with Succession or Crazy Rich Asians (minus the wealthy Asians and the drama that makes the film interesting).
At best, Melania is the embodiment of the ruling class and its banal disgust with and detachment from the common person. At worst, it is softcore fascist propaganda. It is the story of some rich and powerful lady and her life which no one should pay mind to. On the other hand, at worst, Iron Lung embodies a petty-bourgeois ideal of industriousness and profit, wherein the wealthy lead actor, director, editor, and producer owns his own labor in a self-funded, highly-profitable small-business-esque operation. However, at best, Iron Lung represents a working-class ethic of producing art for its own sake and process, not caring about the metrics, nor the money, nor the expectations of a film industry responsible for producing low art and propaganda to prop up capitalist ideology, but instead about the project in its own right and the community around it. It is the story of a proletarian hero raging against the dying light, clinging to bare life in a universe that has abandoned him and punished him for his revolutionary endeavors.
Greatest double-feature since BarbenHeimer. 10/10 would do again.
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