On the Reactions to "Melania"

One, but hardly the only, response

Curmie, once a not infrequent guest columnist on Jack Marshall’s Ethics Alarms page, hasn’t posted as much as a comment there in over a year.  He does drop by occasionally to see if it has reverted to its titular ethics orientation instead of its more recent manifestation as a right-wing propaganda outlet.  It has not, alas.  To be sure, even when Curmie was a frequent contributor, his views on gun control (quite similar to those of Ronald Reagan, by the way) were described as “un-American,” and his position on abortion (pretty much that of every Protestant or Jewish denomination prior to the ‘80s) “unethical.”  This is standard partisan blather, and Curmie freely admits to indulging in the same tactics from time to time.  (He doesn’t pretend to be an ethicist, however.)

Anyway, Curmie once found it fairly easy just to disengage from that stuff, mostly because it represented only a smallish fraction of what Jack posted.  But when the “Democrats hate America” bullshit started to become the subject of the overwhelming majority of the output, and when excuses for inexcusable conduct by Dear Leader and his minions became a significant part of the mix, Curmie just couldn’t take it anymore.  The cadre of sycophantic commenters, most of whom hadn’t ever said anything positive about anyone to the left of Louis XIV, just made things worse.  Curmie bailed, thereby making what had already become an echo chamber into even more of one.  If any EA readers find their way to this page, he apologizes for that part.

Anyway, as noted above, Curmie does drop by EA occasionally, especially if, as was the case in the suppression of that high school production of The Crucible last spring, it’s a topic about which Jack’s perspective would be at least interesting if not indeed enlightening.  There was no such specific impulse a couple of days ago, but Curmie did find a piece about the very different Rotten Tomatoes rankings of “Melania,” the documentary about FLOTUS’s preparations for the second inaugural.  The screengrab Jack posted showed a 6% “tomatometer” ranking, but a 98% “popcornmeter” rating.  The former is the percentage of professional critics who gave the film a 3.5 out of 5 or better; the latter is from the general public.  As of this writing, there’s even more distance between the two scores: 5% vs. 99%.  Here’s that link, Gentle Reader; of course those numbers may have changed again between Curmie’s writing and your visiting the site. 

Imdb.com, in case you’re wondering, has the film at 1.3 out of 10, a level of negativity surpassed, as far as Curmie can remember, only by the 1.2 for the “Queen Cleopatra” series on Netflix that Curmie wrote about in the spring of 2023.

OK, that’s a tremendous spread.  Curmie can’t comment about the film itself, as he has not seen it, nor does he have any intention of ever doing so.  Curmie’s interest in watching a documentary is largely determined by his interest in the subject.  If his interest level is 10 out of 10, he’ll probably watch even if the film gets bad reviews; if it’s below 5, it’s going to take someone whose opinion Curmie really trusts saying, “No, really, this movie is really good” to even consider it.  Perhaps now would be a good time to say that it’s doubtful that Curmie will watch a different FLOTUS’s film, Michele Obama’s “Becoming,” either.  It’s been out since 2020 and is currently on Netflix, meaning it’s de facto free for Curmie and Beloved Spouse to watch should we be of a mind to do so.  And it’s got significantly better ratings from the critics (93%); the 78% “popcornmeter” rating looks pretty comparable to the 7.1 on imdb.  But it’s still pretty unlikely that we’ll watch.

Note that whereas the general public who voted on Rotten Tomatoes and those who voted on imdb pretty much agree on “Becoming,” they couldn’t be much further apart on “Melania.”  There’s not a whole lot above a 99% on the former or below a 1.2 on the latter.  Does this mean that the Woke Folk head to imdb and the MAGAs to Rotten Tomatoes?  Probably, at least to some degree.  Is it possible that one group or the other (or both) bombarded one of those sites with votes from people who hadn’t seen the film, or even from bots programmed to skew the results?  Of course.

But let’s look at Jack Marshall’s comments.  He notes that the opening weekend attracted a larger audience than expected (or at least than was expected after early predictions were revised downwards); it was indeed one of the biggest opening weekends for any documentary in a long time.  He doesn’t mention the $35 million marketing budget, which… erm… might well have been a factor.  He does admit that “There is always a chance that the popular reviews were rigged by MAGA zealots,” and that “The divide does not mean that the critics are wrong.”  He then proceeds to declare that “movie critics tend to be members of the progressive bubble, and are probably incapable of watching anything connected to President Trump objectively,” and that “the split also shows incompetent and irresponsible critics.”  Wait… what?

Curmie used to do some theatre criticism and even reviewed a couple of films.  It was never his job to predict what the reader would like or dislike, but to state as clearly as possible what he thought worked… or didn’t.  If a film is bad, it’s bad, and it’s the critic’s job to say so.  Ooh… but you shouldn’t do that if you’re a liberal and the movie you’re reviewing is both politically conservative and crap.  Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein both made excellent films, even if they were exercises in propaganda.  It appears that Brett Ratner doesn’t belong in their company.  Of course, it’s unlikely that Curmie will even know for sure.

More to the point: who is going to any opening weekend?  Professional critics… and fans.  Curmie admits that he’d never heard of Cinemascore prior to doing a little research for this post.  Those folks gave “Melania” an “A.” But then you look at their methodology, which seems to rely exclusively on interviews with the opening night audience.  It’s human nature to like things you agree with.  You’re a lot more likely to say this movie was really good if you’re a fan of FLOTUS (or her hubby) than if you think she’s a dim-witted, vulgar, bimbo.  Curmie remembers when, back in the days Netflix had customers rate movies on a scale of 1 to 5, he gave a 4 to a documentary on Václav Havel, not because it was a good film (it deserved a 2 as a film), but because he was a huge fan of Havel and hoped Netflix would suggest more movies about him or similar topics.  That kind of response is completely understandable.

The people who went to see “Melania” on the opening weekend wanted to see that film because of its topic.  It’s difficult to say much more than that.  Imdb has a note that their “rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.”  Ya think?  The rating distribution is pretty much an inverse bell curve, or rather it would be if the 10s were anywhere near as plentiful as the 1s.  Virtually no one gives the film a 4 or 5, and damned few opt for 2-3 or 6-9.  Concluding that most moviegoers responded more politically than aesthetically seems pretty reasonable.  It’s not completely out of line to suggest that at least some critics did the same, but it’s a lot less certain.

What hasn’t been mentioned is what all this ought to be telling us.  Curmie doubts that there has ever been a film about which what critics or voters on one of those websites say means less than this one.  No critic is going to dissuade a faithful MAGA from going; no outpouring of positive sentiment is going to convince a leftie of the film’s qualities.  The reaction to this film, like “life” in one of the most famous speeches in Macbeth, is “but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.  It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”