40 Million Dollars is an Awful Lot to Spend on the Most Boring Movie of All Time
When he’s suffering the torments of the damned after dying and going directly to the deepest, darkest circle of hell, real-life super-villain Jeff Bezos will have much to answer for.
The Lex Luthor lookalike and act-a-like will need to justify his craven embrace of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement during one of the most perilous and important periods in our increasingly awful country’s history.
Bezos was not alone in bending the knee and kissing the ring. Mark Zuckerberg made a similarly striking right turn and decided that, actually, Trump was a total badass because he survived an assassination attempt that, to be honest, seems more than a little fishy.
These loathsome pragmatists cynically assumed that Trump would defeat Kamala Harris, with their help, of course, and consequently would be in a unique position to use his tremendous power to help or hurt them.
They understood the transactional nature of Trump’s personality. They understood that he would seize as much power as possible and use his enormous, almost unprecedented influence to reward lickspittles and sycophants and punish everyone he considers an enemy.
Bezos infamously destroyed the reputation and prestige of The Washington Post, formerly one of the most important publications in American history, by killing the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last possible minute.
The insufferable garbage monster of a human being wrote an op-ed whining, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
Bezos isn’t too humble to flat-out state that a craven attempt to curry favor with a wannabe dictator and proud hate-monger was a “principled decision” and “the right one.”
The owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, as well as a number of businesses that benefit from government contracts and a good relationship with the Trump administration might have been more convincing if it were not immediately followed by Bezos joining fellow evil oligarchs in ponying up a million dollars for a front-row seat at Trump’s administration.
Then Bezos spent FORTY MILLION DOLLARS for a documentary about Melania Trump directed by mediocre filmmaker and accused sex criminal Brett Ratner.
Those moves didn’t create a mere perception of bias; they are clear-cut instances of bias by an unspeakably wealthy, powerful businessman who wants the petulant, vengeance-crazed man baby in the White House to think of him as a friend and an ally and not an enemy to be publicly disparaged and attacked by the many slithery tentacles of his administration.
Forty million dollars is an insane amount of money to spend on a documentary about the world’s most boring woman, directed by a creep, benefiting the Great Uncancellation engendered by Trump’s reelection.
Incidentally, about a decade ago, when I stayed at Robert Evans’ home, the dry-witted butler mentioned that I would no longer be able to enjoy the screening room because Ratner accidentally burned it down when he was living there.
The only documentary I can think of that sold for tens of millions of dollars is 2009’s Michael Jackson’s This Is It.
It made sense to pay that much because Jackson was considered the world’s greatest and most popular entertainer throughout his life. Michael Jackson’s This Is It wasn’t just another concert film or documentary; it was a ghoulishly fascinating look at a man at the end of a long, strange, triumphant, and ultimately tragic life. It wasn’t just a movie: it was legitimate news. It was a pop culture event that allowed us to celebrate and mourn one of American history's greatest icons and entertainers.
Melania sometimes wears strange outfits that make her look vaguely like Michael Jackson, but that’s where the similarities end.
Everybody was fascinated by Michael Jackson and his untimely yet strangely inevitable demise. Everyone wanted to see if he still had it, or if drug addiction and mental health struggles had transformed him into a shell of his former self.
This Is It unsurprisingly made hundreds of millions at the box office, more than justifying its enormous price.
That is not true of Melania Trump. She’s cultivated an image as someone beautiful but impossibly remote and purposefully dull. Her pamphlet-sized memoir, Melania, which, at 182 pages, is less than a third as long as my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror, sold eighty-five thousand copies in its first week. By comparison, Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, sold over a million copies during its first seven days on the market.
Donald Trump didn’t even bother reading his wife’s 182-page song of self.
The only way I could see Melania justifying its price would be if it featured a graphic threesome between Melania, Bernie Sanders, and Justin Trudeau.
Melania isn’t supposed to make money. It’s what’s known in business as a “loss leader.” Bezos is willing to lose forty million dollars so that he can make hundreds of millions, or even billions, from government contracts.
Bezos wasn’t making a questionable business decision; he was cynically giving Trump a big present. Forty million dollars doesn’t mean much to Trump or Bezos, but wildly overpaying for what will undoubtedly be a glossy, revelation-free puff piece is another concrete signal that Bezos has abandoned the principles that led him to buy one of the world’s great newspapers and hopped aboard the Trump Train.
Do you think he feels buyer’s remorse now? I doubt it. He knew Trump was a fool and a coward, but also someone who could be easily manipulated through flattery and finance.
Trump is giving people lots of ways to bribe him; there are his NFTs, of course, but also his meme coin (and Melania’s meme coin) and Truth Social stock. I hear he’s also quite partial to 400 million dollar flying gold palaces. Give him one of those and you OWN him. Or at least you would have if he hadn’t been so ethical and incapable of being bribed.
Yes, 40 million dollars is an awful lot to pay for the most boring movie ever made, but there is a method to Bezos’ madness. It has everything to do with his need to be close to a man who could make his life and business much worse by pulling its sweetheart deal with the post office, and nothing to do with Melania’s strengths as a film or its commercial enterprise.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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