Each year, the White House issues a video of Melania Trump wandering around it revealing the Christmas decorations. The decorations are beautiful, cold and slightly weird, and in combination with her lonely routine the result has the unsettling charmlessness of a Stanley Kubrick movie.
I added the Eyes Wide Shut theme in the embedded video here to highlight that suggestion; here Bobby Fingers takes a remarks on the semiotics of Melania’s xmas.
Imagine that life for a second. It’s not prison—that’s an offensive comparison, and Melania has shown she’s unlikely to have any idea what that sort of misery is actually like. But it certainly isn’t the kind of freedom with which most of us are familiar, and it’s not a life we’d even want. It’s a life inside the margins, being watched but not worried about or cared for.
Here’s 2017, 2018 and 2019, the originals:
