“Why won’t the First Lady do her job?” That’s the question posed by filmmaker Kate Imbach about Melania Trump, who famously is the first First Lady in American History to refuse outright to move to the White House. Melania says it’s because she doesn’t want to disrupt her son Barron Trump’s school year (reportedly, they’ll be spending the Summer in D.C.), but even so, it’s an unusual situation.
In an attempt to understand it, Imbach posted an analysis to Medium of what amounts to Melania’s only public record — the photographs and selfies she put on Twitter in the years leading up to the launch of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Imbach breaks down Melania’s compositional style (she tends to obscure details as much as possible), the subjects she chooses, and the fact that she tends to be significantly separated from those subjects. Her conclusion: Melania is a “fairytale prisoner by choice.”
Some highlights:
* “For someone like Melania, media-trained, controlled and cloistered, her collection of Twitter photography provides an otherwise unavailable view into the reality of her existence. Nowhere else – certainly not in interviews or public appearances – is her guard so far down.
What is that reality? She is Rapunzel with no price[sic] and no hair, locked in a tower of her own volition, and delighted with the predictability and repetition of her own captivity.”
* “If Melania sees her family from behind, she sees the rest of the world from above. She posted 74 photographs of the view from her home in Trump Tower. She stays at home a lot, or what seems like a lot for someone with a billion dollars and a private jet, anyway, enough to capture the same view, over and over again, at different times of day and weather, ad nauseam.”
* “She’s hiding. She needs to hide so badly that she doesn’t care about anything else. Not her country, not how bad she looks, not the money it costs us. She has no shame because, for her, hiding is shameless. It is safe.
She lives behind glass, in cars, in her house, on private planes and private resorts. She doesn’t even get out of the car to see landmarks or walk in the park. She is never among the public, not for a second.”
Read the whole thing here.