America, America
An ever-hardening stream of images coming out of America has, in recent months, taken hold of our screens and our minds, sealing the media omnipotence of Donald Trump – “a man well-versed in ballyhoo,” as J. Hoberman once put it. Faced with this coordinated assault – from television networks to social media threads, and even the cinema – a viable response feels more distant than ever. What can images still do in an era marked by the steady erosion of the public sphere? What follows is a survey of several already-iconic sequences from recent months, rounded off with a brief historical step back.
The past few weeks alone have generated a dizzying audiovisual barrage. From the abduction of Venezuela’s president Maduro to the deadly ICE raids – an unleashed emblematic agency for which “Democratic” cities resemble enemy zones to be brought to heel – there has hardly been a day when the occupant of the White House did not forcibly insert himself into the news cycle. The contrast with his predecessor, Joe Biden, is telling: a mandate synonymous with relative media calm, from which one might recall little beyond the embarrassing image of the president tipping over on his bicycle while barely in motion. That iconic feebleness has since been replaced by Trump’s audiovisual bravura, foreshadowed by the failed assassination attempt after which he reemerged, invigorated, in his now unmatched role as a producer of image-events.
The push to monopolize communication – already tested in his first term – now comes coupled with decisions that can alter the global order in reality, not just on our screens. As a metaphor: the red MAGA cap from his first term, when things could still pass for provocation or spectacle, has in the meantime turned black.
Trump the character – less a man now than a synthetic entity, part web-born octopus-avatar, part key decision-maker in a geopolitically destabilized world – continues to astonish through his brazen defiance of common sense. In October 2025, he posted an AI-generated clip in response to the “No Kings” demonstrations, depicting himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet that showers protesters with excrement. More broadly, the administration’s official accounts cultivate an aggressive style of communication, rapidly appropriating popular social media trends and weaponizing them in the service of already-familiar antisocial policies. A quick scroll through the White House’s page reveals an atmosphere of collective hysteria, coupled with dehumanizing practices that seem lifted from darker times (the posting of photographs of undocumented immigrants, easy targets for media lynching) and a monotonous glorification of militarism. In another AI-generated promotional video, supporters in a stadium and passengers aboard a private jet appear caught in the same delirious spatial continuum as the White House occupant and his wife, the sequence culminating in a cascade of fireworks.
Given the sense of endless slippage into audiovisual sludge that such images – now instruments of mass dulling – produce, the death of documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (1930–2026) takes on an almost allegorical weight. In recent years, this venerable observer of society had tuned his ear to the discordant hum of Trump-era America, anchoring his camera alternately within the Republican camp – Monrovia, Indiana (2018), one of the first non-condescending close-ups of a MAGA stronghold – and within the oases of enlightened civic liberalism that still underpin the mythology of the American Dream – Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) and City Hall (2020), portraits of institutions capable of countering the xenophobic, classist premises of the Trump administration.
Few filmmakers in cinema history have cultivated such a patient, humane way of looking – one grounded in attention rather than denunciation, in observation rather than ideological grandstanding. Step by step, through a simple combination of sustained listening and rigorous self-effacement, Wiseman built an unsensational record of what it means to be American today – of how certain social microcosms look and function, and how they keep the fragile fabric of shared life from coming apart. In these times of social fraying, his clear, steady gaze will be deeply missed.
Still Melania
“The medal is a lasting monument, created to carry great events into posterity. What it depicts and what it declares must be rendered with nobility and ingenuity.” – Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux
Even before its theatrical release, Melania (2026), the documentary directed by Brett Ratner, was almost universally ridiculed. A bombastic promotional campaign – spearheaded by the consort himself (“7 Days until the World will witness an unforgettable, behind-the-scenes, look at one of the most important events of our time,” he boasted on X) and backed by corporate heavyweights (Amazon reportedly poured $75 million into the finished product) – was met, in reality, with empty theaters and a more-than-hostile reception. Predictably so: with Melania, the Trump edifice had finally crossed into enemy territory. Cinephilia could not forgive the showbiz beast that is Trump such an affront. What’s less clear is whether simply sneering at the film – and, by extension, at the entire hagiographic apparatus around it – actually gets us anywhere. More likely, we remain trapped in the familiar binary of the “good” bubble and the “bad” bubble – the same divide that brought us to this impasse – outraged by a spectacle whose gaudiness, for all that, continues to prove devilishly effective.
But let’s take things in order. There are, admittedly, plenty of reasons to raise an eyebrow – and, once confronted with the finished product, to laugh outright. To begin with, the choice of Brett Ratner: a filmmaker with a reputation for opportunism, a run-of-the-mill studio director to whom we owe the Rush Hour franchise, compromised by scandals linked to the #MeToo wave and now returned to prime time thanks to this poisoned gift – one no self-respecting artist would have dared touch. As we know, cancel culture only seems to affect those on the left; on the other side, being “canceled” functions as a badge of honor, further proof of authenticity.
Formally, Ratner’s mise-en-scène invents nothing. It reduces film grammar to its most basic elements, turning Melania into a sexualized object who parades with studied severity in sharply tailored two-pieces and immaculate coiffures. The director’s toolbox for staging her as an object of desire comes straight out of the most basic playbook: a stilettoed foot stepping out of an SUV, while – sacrilege – “Gimme Shelter,” Moroder, or Tears for Fears play on the soundtrack. At the same time, the film must sell the image of a strong woman – see the scenes in which a retinue of designers and tailors, led by Hugo Pierre, bustle around this totemic presence towering above them – for whose glittering showcase anything can be “reclaimed,” even protest anthems, as long as the budget allows.
Melania spares us nothing. It opens with the kitsch-gilded MGM logo bearing the motto ARS GRATIA ARTIS, helpfully accompanied by its translation into “American,” just to make sure the point lands. Later, after confessing her boundless admiration for Michael Jackson, Melania struggles to hum the lyrics of “Billie Jean,” which she clearly does not know. We see her staring intently, from the vast emptiness of her living room, at television footage of the Los Angeles wildfires. We see her greeting a hostage freed from Hamas, assuring her, “I will pray for them [those still held].” We see her in quiet prayer inside a church, flanked by bodyguards, as a pastor moves in to bless her with the camera hovering inches from her face – gospel music swelling in the background, police sirens securing the perimeter outside. Guided by a reassuring voiceover, Melania tells us that she carries in her heart, “with humility and gratitude,” the memory of fallen American soldiers. She promises – almost inviting us to picture figures such as Renée Good and Alex Pretti – that she will “always use her power and influence to fight for those in need.” Finally, she reassures us that “no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.”
In a universe shaped by such aphorisms, only peace and friendship can exist – not for the Bidens, though. The lives of the ultra-rich resemble a state of endless anesthesia. America becomes a drive in an armored vehicle between the plastic sunshine of Mar-a-Lago and the VIP-only streets of New York. From the bling-laden interiors of Trump Tower, the outside world registers as an insignificant hum, history itself as a bad dream. Melania appears smiling, affable, meticulous about her attire – she was a supermodel, after all. She even expresses compassion for her husband: “No one has endured what he has endured these past years.” Only “Mrs.” Macron seems to fall into the trap, awkwardly assuring her, during a video call, of her support for Melania’s charitable initiatives. The other familiar faces belong to a different value system altogether: Bezos, Musk, Bernard Arnault clinking glasses by candlelight on the eve of the inauguration.
Shot barely a year ago, Melania already feels like a period piece. That, in itself, tells us something about Trump’s media strategy, which operates at a very different speed. And this is the real question: how does someone so adept at manipulating the flow of images end up turning to the old prestige of cinema? Or, if the initiative came from Melania herself, is this a bid for historical permanence – a way of anchoring her image in something more durable than the churn of digital media?
In any case, the film reminds us that cinema still carries a certain institutional weight – a prestige that even those who thrive in the chaos of online platforms seem reluctant to forgo. What surprises is how dated the result feels, almost ceremonial in tone, and how heavily it relies on the most elementary propaganda devices.
Melania ultimately fails to make a compelling case for its subject. Even as backstage material – despite Trump’s promise of revelations – the film is generic and stiff, lacking any real insight. What remains, then? A largely gratuitous gesture, another promotional channel ticked off the list. And yet it also reveals something telling: a tension within the Trump machinery itself, between the speed and volatility of the digital sphere it dominates and the slower, more formal constraints of cinema.
God Bless America
Unlike the Amazon-backed flop, another event unfolding almost in parallel managed to capture the attention of America – and much of the world: the Super Bowl Halftime show, headlined this year by Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny. The hyper-mediatized annual quarter-hour has, in recent years, consolidated its status as a political platform. As expected, Bad Bunny leaned into his multiethnic, transcultural heritage, turning his a priori outsider status in the U.S. into a major asset – one that framed the performance as a shared celebration.
In contrast to the minimal staging chosen last year by Kendrick Lamar – a few neon lights framing a dark stage dominated by a chrome car – Bad Bunny delivered a riot of color. The show unfolded in clearly defined chapters, each with its own tone and visual identity. It opened on a realistic sugarcane plantation set, where he sang from among the workers; moved into a staged “live” wedding; and ended in a sprawling urban fiesta built around a shared Latino identity.
(It’s worth noting the rival event, titled “Turning Point USA’s All-American Halftime Show”: a counter-concert hastily assembled by the conservative camp in what looked like a mid-2000s community hall. An all-white lineup of recycled rock acts – guitars, mohawks, even a brass knuckles-mic for the bad boys – performed under the Zoom-blessing of Secretary of State Pete Hegseth, before a thin crowd. Set against Bad Bunny’s high-energy celebration, the whole affair inspired a slightly awkward second-hand embarrassment.)
Back to the official Halftime: even the vehicle used as a prop this year – a humble work truck – stood in sharp contrast to Lamar’s Buick GNX, that emblem of ’80s block swagger with its underlying disruptive edge (not coincidentally, an improbably large number of figures kept emerging from its interior). Bad Bunny’s vibe shifted between a feel-good, easygoing atmosphere – elderly people and kids alike joining a collective dance – and overt political messaging, most visibly in his near-exclusive use of Spanish. The show concluded with a “God bless America,” followed by a roll call of North and South American nations, their flags paraded across the stage.
Much like the Paris Olympics opening ceremony – where Lady Gaga blended theatrical spectacle with pop homage, performing here a Bruno Mars cover reworked with distinctly Latino rhythms – the Halftime show alternated between pre-recorded segments and large-scale live staging, heavy on props and shifting sets. The result was expansive and legible, leaving little room for ambiguity.
More academic than Lamar’s minimalist approach, Bad Bunny’s performance appeased those hungry for explicit political claims – a sign that subtlety may no longer suffice. It did so within a tightly managed spectacle, a kind of miniature carnival where dissent is staged but carefully contained. In this sense, one must note the event’s placement under corporate patronage – and its rebranding as the “Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show.”
The interlude opened with a short thematic intro: Apple’s logo appeared against a tropical backdrop before transforming into a digital portal leading toward the exploited worker on the plantation staged inside the Santa Clara stadium. This prologue served as a reminder of the larger economic order underwriting the show.
Far be it from me to adopt the scolding tone of those who, in recent days, have dismissed Bad Bunny’s show as political theater in the pejorative sense. In today’s image-driven economy, on the contrary, the segment feels contagious – perhaps even, dare one say it, necessary. As for Apple’s opportunistic presence, rather than invalidating the event, it places it within a knot of competing forces, where corporate power and self-styled rebels temporarily intersect.
Images come in many forms, and none can claim to be „immaculate.” All are marked, to varying degrees, by compromise, caught in the same global circuits of capital – even when they claim to resist them. The symbolic standoff between Amazon and Apple – briefly appearing on opposite sides of the same cultural battle – offers a revealing glimpse into new arenas for political struggle. It also suggests that old ideological slogans, repeated by inertia, may need rethinking in light of these socio-techno-political shifts (the real issue at the heart of One Battle after Another).
Poor Donald?
The pathos with which we, as a society, are absorbing this new iconography should not ignore its deep roots. A classic of film theory has just been translated and published in France for the first time: Violent America, written in the early 1970s by art critic Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990), as an attempt to explain what was then perceived as a new wave of graphic violence taking over postwar Hollywood.
Accompanied by a vibrant program organized by Centre Pompidou – pairing a screening of The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1945) with evenings dedicated to avant-garde cinema and talks on pop icons such as Kendrick Lamar – Alloway’s book remains striking for its diagnosis of how foundational genres (film noir, the western, the war movie) drifted into unprecedented aggression, culminating in the dark, nihilistic phase of New Hollywood.
Alloway traces this shift first to the trauma experienced by many Hollywood directors and technicians who had fought in Europe or the Asia-Pacific. Their wartime experience, he suggests, drove them to remain faithful to what they had seen firsthand. But beyond biography, he argues that what mattered was less the isolated use of skepticism, popular psychoanalysis, or vernacular existentialism in individual films than the diffuse atmosphere these tendencies created together – one that transformed prewar action cinema, once athletic and exuberant, into something harsher and more pessimistic, populated by extreme situations and desperate heroes.
Alloway is far from condemning this turn (the book itself emerged from a major MoMA retrospective dedicated to the so-called “film of violence”). On the contrary, his cinephile sensibility draws him toward these pathological, excessive forms, explored above all in popular cinema – so often dismissed by elites. He sees in Fuller’s anti-sentimentality and Siegel’s dry brutality a new American quintessence. Much of his argument also addresses the era’s anxieties about the harmful social effects of violent imagery – debates that now feel historically specific.
Yet, as Hoberman notes in his preface, Alloway was writing almost simultaneously with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Valerie Solanas’s attempt on Warhol’s life – that is, at the end of a decade of social upheaval in which a restructured Hollywood had become both mirror and catalyst, symptom and exorcism, of a self-loathing the nation could no longer contain.
Around that same period – between the assassination of JFK in Dallas, the March on Washington, the release of Bonnie and Clyde, and the countercultural peak of Woodstock – painter Philip Guston (1913–1980) reached a creative high point. The Musée Picasso is currently hosting a major retrospective titled L’ironie de l’histoire, focused on how art confronts the legacy of fascism.
Concise yet illuminating, the exhibition traces the shifts in Guston’s work: his early politically engaged practice as a muralist influenced by Rivera and Picasso – exemplified by the extraordinary circular canvas Bombardment (1937), whose centrifugal composition captures the violence of an explosion during the Spanish Civil War; his turn toward Abstract Expressionism; and, finally, his return to figurative painting charged with political intent and shaped by America’s changing cultural landscape.
It is in this mature phase, I would argue, that Guston’s greatness fully emerges. One of its keystones is the Poor Richard series, in which he charts President Nixon’s rise to power through caricatural sketches printed on loose sheets, portraying him with a swollen phallus in place of a face. The speed of execution and the satirical edge make the series a powerful act of protest – all the more biting for looking almost throwaway: mischievous, near-childlike doodles concealing a deeply oppositional stance.
Moving beyond the “art for art’s sake” paradigm that had previously defined him, Guston rediscovered a new vitality, an urgency, even at the cost of technical refinement. That intensity becomes even clearer in his subsequent series of paintings featuring figures inspired by the Ku Klux Klan, rendered in a playful, comic-strip style dominated by warm pinks and reds. Controversial at the time, these works expose the tensions at the heart of modern America: a nation suspended between subtle forms of political violence and a vast pop culture often designed to mask those very disturbances.
The series is also self-critical – one “self-portrait” shows a figure with a sheet over his head, working at an easel – but it also betrays a certain glee in what Guston called “the crapola”: the cultural reservoir of vulgarity and ephemera so often dismissed as low or disposable. He embraces it here, folding it into a satirical, almost childlike visual language.
The drawings from this period create an almost toy-like world – deceptively simple, yet striking in the scope of what they suggest. They resemble something between a child’s construction set and an open political indictment, hiding their references beneath a brightly cartoonish surface. The allusions point to a normalized right-wing extremism with a softened public image; the Klan figures can even appear oddly endearing. Decades later, when the need for masks has diminished, Guston’s work feels prophetic. It breaks down the boundaries between high- and low-brow, between art and propaganda, working directly with the very visual debris he might once have rejected.
The point is not to draw easy parallels with today’s political landscape. Rather, it is to identify a set of bold critical strategies – accepting the risk of entering the world one seeks to criticize, borrowing its language and turning it against itself – that might prove useful in confronting the disfigured reality now on display.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.