The Last Supper. The Mona Lisa. Melania. Critics can howl but when you get right down to it, probably on all fours, the cinematic non-event opening worldwide today would be entirely at home in the Renaissance.
Not that I’ve seen it, of course: at the time of writing it was unclear how, if at all, South Africans were going to be able to gaze with twitching eyelids at Jeff Bezos’s $100m (R1.58bn) foot massage for Donald Trump, as news broke on Tuesday that the film’s local distributor had decided not to release it into cinemas in this country.
The reasons provided were unclear. According to News24, the distributor blamed “the current climate”, while the New York Times quoted them citing “recent developments”. I can only assume that both are true, and that the “current climate” is one in which businesses want to make money, while “recent developments” are local cinema chains seeing the catastrophically low ticket sales in the UK and deciding that they’d rather not sit with empty theatres for two weeks.
Well, not entirely empty: there are probably a few dozen local MAGA fans who were looking forward to going and prostrating themselves before the golden calf — and some of them took to social media this week to denounce the decision as censorship and, presumably, the work of woke lefties.
Because remember, teens: the market must always be free to decide how best to make money and if you try to control it for ideological reasons, you’re a radical leftist endorsing communism — unless, of course, your ideological Daddy is involved, in which case capitalism must be suspended at once and businesses instructed to run at a loss for political reasons. See how fun it is to have nothing inside your head? Yay!
The travesty, of course, is that this film isn’t the Mona Lisa or the statue of David or the ceiling of the Sistine chapel — and yet thanks to technology and the globalised planet, it will briefly dominate the planet’s attention in a way that none of those masterpieces ever did during the Renaissance
It’s fun to point and laugh at this film and the people who want to see it. The jokes write themselves, whether it’s Bezos pouring a billion-and-a-half rand into it even as he fires 16,000 Amazon staff or reports of just 20 tickets being sold in the whole of Scotland.
But while I’m sure that Melania is audiovisual toe-jam, I will defend it against anyone who tries to claim that this is some fresh low for the creative arts or how late-stage capitalism has enshittified the arts. Because of course, this is exactly how art in the Renaissance got commissioned and made.
From the Medici mafia family and a succession of popes to countless wealthy merchants or minor aristocrats, the rich and powerful of the 15th and 16th centuries poured money into the arts, commissioning some of the greatest artists of all time to produce paintings, frescoes, sculpture, altarpieces or entire buildings that still awe us and draw millions of tourists every year — despite their origins often being rooted in violent politics, ultra-oppressive religion, off-the-charts corruption or venality that makes Trump look like a Franciscan monk.
No, the travesty here is not that a vastly rich merchant has curried favour with a modern Medici by immortalising his wife on film the way the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo paid Da Vinci to immortalise his wife. This is a transaction as old as finance, and as human as the desire grubby little men have to surround themselves with beautiful things — or Melania Trump — in an effort to look more impressive.
The travesty, of course, is that this film isn’t the Mona Lisa or the statue of David or the ceiling of the Sistine chapel — and yet thanks to technology and the globalised planet, it will briefly dominate the planet’s attention in a way that none of those masterpieces ever did during the Renaissance.
Thank heavens, then, that Melania has far more in common with the B- and C-grade sycophantic art of that period: if it is remembered at all, it will be as a comical footnote. And as the worst money those 20 Scots ever spent.
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