Fascists are not automatically bad at art, nor do they instinctively hate it. Gabriele D’Annunzio, a major Italian poet still studied in Italian schools, was one of the main ideologues of Mussolini’s fascism. He was joined by the Futurists and admirers such as the American poet, Ezra Pound.
Mussolini inaugurated the Venice Film Festival, where Viet Harlan’s Nazi propaganda film Jew Suss premiered in 1940. Young film critic Michelangelo Antonioni – future director of Red Desert (1964) and Blow-Up (1966) – greeted it with a review that read: “We have no hesitation in saying that if this is propaganda, then we welcome propaganda.”
Adolf Hitler enjoyed his Richard Wagner operas and funded Albert Speer’s architectural designs. Leni Riefenstahl became the Nazi regime’s favourite director, creating powerful films, such as Triumph of the Will (1935), which is seen as a masterpiece in filmmaking despite its subject and somehow even makes its way into the last minutes of Star Wars (1977).
Some have struggled with the characterisation of Donald Trump’s administration/regime with such hot-potato terms as “fascism,” but if something is on the brink of being a duck, is quasi a duck or leaning towards being a duck, maybe we could all save time and just call it a duck.
Trump’s grubby sausage fingers have also been probing non-consensually – that’s how he rolls – into the sacred places of American cultural life. He has defunded the public broadcaster PBS; pressure for TV shows to be cancelled and comedians to be fired and the John F Kennedy Center seems to have been renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center, with the added insult that we might soon not be 100% sure to which Kennedy he’s referring.
Luckily, outside of the usual loons like Kid Rock (I have no clue who this is) and Jon Voight, there’s only a vague suspicion of showbiz people who support Trump. Maybe Sydney Sweeney? Possibly Chris Pratt? Or is that taking nominative determinism too far? Evil business-brained lizard-like master-shits such as Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg do support Trump, but that’s breadheads for you.
Yet now we have the first artist who has broken ranks. The first figure who rivals Leni Riefenstahl in straddling the roles of great film director and collaborator is Brett Ratner.
Raised in Miami, Ratner first got into the film business by appearing as an extra on the TV show Miami Vice in the 1980s. He still wears designer stubble, possibly in memory of those days.
His success came via the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker buddy-buddy cop trilogy Rush Hour (1998-2007), as well as the accidental comedies Red Dragon (2002) and X-Men: Last Stand (2006). He dated celebrities, including tennis superstar Serena Williams. His rise seemingly could not be halted, even when he admitted to palling around with Roman Polanski, or quipping that “rehearsal is for fags”, a gaffe that lost him the job of producing the 2012 Oscars.
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Then a number of women stepped forward to accuse him of sexual assault. Agent Melanie Kohler wrote in a 2017 Facebook post: “Brett Ratner raped me. I’m saying his name, I’m saying it publicly. Now at least I can look at myself in the mirror and not feel like part of me is a coward or a hypocrite. I’m standing up and saying this happened to me and it was not OK. Come what may, it is the right thing to do.”
Ratner brought a libel case against Kohler, saying the allegations were false and malicious and that he would fight to prove his innocence. He dropped the case in 2018.
Meanwhile, actor Olivia Munn accused him of masturbating in front of her on a film set when she went to his trailer to deliver him a meal, and fellow actor Natasha Henstridge declared that he had forced her to perform oral sex. Ratner and business partner James Packer were also accused of sexual misconduct by British actor Charlotte Kirk, who said the director had offered “me as an inducement to his business partners.”
As #MeToo raged through Hollywood, Ratner was dropped by his agent, his publicist and by Warner Bros, with whom he and Packer had a $450 million production deal. And that appeared to be that.
Being an alleged rapist would be disqualifying for most positions, but Ratner wisely began getting close to people connected to Trump, becoming a visitor to Mar-a-Lago. He already knew former Trump treasury secretary and part-time producer Stephen Mnuchin, at one time a partner to him and Packer. He became besties with Trump ally Benjamin Netanyahu (the director is now an Israeli citizen) and renewed acquaintances with Melania’s agent and special adviser Marc Beckman, who calls the director a “massive talent” and once hired him to shoot a commercial featuring a topless Heidi Klum brandishing a riding crop.
As a result of all this, Ratner finally landed another gig behind the camera. His return to filmmaking is Melania, a behind-the-scenes look into the life of Melania Trump, first lady of the United States of America, in the 20 days before Trump’s second inauguration. The deal with Amazon, which includes a movie and three-part streaming series, was brokered by Beckman.
Now to be clear. I haven’t seen the film. I’m not a complete idiot. But I have seen the trailer. And I’ve seen the budget: $40 million with an additional $35 million earmarked (in unmarked bills) for promotion.
So that’s a $75 million budget in total. This is the most expensive documentary ever made. Shoah is ten hours long and cost a fraction of that. The next most expensive documentary is Walking with Dinosaurs, which was three hours long, chock full of expensive special effects and cost $9.9 million. I didn’t see any dinosaurs in the Melania trailer.
It has been funded by Amazon and according to one report at the time of writing, the London premiere has sold one ticket. That’s $35 million well spent. It sounds like the American Candy Store of film promotion.
Melania is reportedly going to trouser more than $35 million for her participation, but the box office is projected to be between $1 and 2 million. At the time of writing, there have been no advance press screenings, or links sent out to journalists.
The private screening to celebrate the film in the White House was attended by convicted rapist Mike Tyson and a man who has been found to have committed sexual assault by a court of law: Donald J Trump. Ratner, obviously, attended along with the usual CEOs of Apple, Zoom and Amazon execs.
Toothy lifestyle guru Tony Robbins beamed for the cameras with Erika Kirk, who is to grief what cage fighting is to chess. The screening took place in a makeshift cinema because the East Wing, which housed the White House theatre has been demolished by Melania’s husband.
Meanwhile, American citizens, would-be citizens and other human beings are having their rights stripped from them, are being violently accosted, kidnapped and actually murdered on the street by forces who take their orders and their authority from the people who ate popcorn and clapped Brett Ratner’s Melania. Should the pendulum ever swing back, this film will be evidence of the pit.
John Bleasdale’s new novel Connery, about the life of Sean Connery, is published in February by Plumeria
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