Perhaps the analogy dripped into one’s consciousness right around the time Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye started to. This notion that Donald “Orange One” Trump and his stooge, Rudy “Reanimator” Giuliani bore a certain unavoidable similarity to Madeline (Meryl Streep) and Helen (Goldie Hawn) in Death Becomes Her. Apart from using “the serum” (called wealth in real life) for so long as to look put together with spit and glue (very visible white glue to show all the cracks, mind you), Orange One and Hair Dye Drip possess the aura of hanging on by a thread to their ghoulish “youth” with the same utter lack of subtlety as the Vanity Twins that are Madeline and Helen.
The thing both humorous and wickedly cruel is that, were Donnie and Ru putting all this money into bolstering their animatronic look as women like the aforementioned duo, they would likely be given even more rivers of shit for their appearance (instead of more emphasis placed on the mush they call their minds)—scarcely “allowing” them (in their hypothetical feminine form) to be deemed as some remnant of a human being born long ago, and who sold her soul for the price of “eternal” power. That “eternity” (which has certainly felt like one to the rest of us on the outside looking in) has at last come to its overdue end. Yet, just as Madeline and Helen would never surrender to a life (or rather, afterlife) spent looking anything “less than” the leather-stretched husk of their former, more youthful selves, so, too, will likely be the case with Donnie and Ru until the bitter end. A.k.a. when they’re both walking out of Mitch McConnell’s funeral (forty or so years from now), barely able to keep their legs attached to their increasingly decrepit plastic bodies, until one of their heads falls on the floor in the midst of a garden variety spat about how the other one is tired of living an immortal existence trapped with nothing but the other for company. Though let’s not pretend that McConnell is any kind of Dr. Menville (Bruce Willis).
The thing about this sort of overt, “I’ll pay anything” “investment” into their aesthetic is that it plays into the smoke and mirrors element of their entire “grandstanding” performance. Maybe, they reason somewhere within, if you’re too busy staring in awe at their grotesque exterior form (resembling something like that moment in Beetlejuice when Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as the Maitlands pull the skin on their heads tightly back to attempt practicing their scare tactics on the Deetzes), then you can’t spend as much time noticing the extent of their incompetence. In point of fact, this actually seemed to work for Donnie and Ru for a while, in that “comfort zone” they called pre-pandemic. Their gambit—their “youthful yet plucked and stuffed” ruse of distracting by trying to “pass” as a man at least thirty years younger (from his skewed perspective)—ran its course once corona hit.
What’s more, it’s perhaps most fascinating of all to find that it is men in the arena of business and politics (businessmen-turned-politicians, if you will), as opposed to say, “pretty boy” actors, who seem to place the most emphasis on funneling some of their vast fortune into the type of upkeep that looks like it was cheaply done in South America or Mexico (probably the places these men should be going for their physical maintenance instead of whatever American plastic surgeon has been robbing them blind). That goes, of course, for Silvio Berlusconi, too.
And although we’re focusing on “men” in this Death Becomes Her analogy, it would be foolish to count out Melania from the mix when she’s so obviously taking heavy doses of the same serum. Since she’s considerably younger than the Orange One (she herself being Orange One II), the effects work with more operational efficiency than the result that shows for Donnie and Ru after far more years milking the serum for all its worth (surely, they both must have surrendered to death in the 80s in order to start pumping their veins full of the “rejuvenating” substance). Now, instead, guzzling more of it only leaves behind increasingly cartoonish facial features and physical characteristics. Nonetheless, both are just as hooked as Madeline and Helen, forever fearing they might actually run out of their supply of serum and be forced to simply let themselves break apart or melt away (the puddle that follows stemming from an excess deluge of spray tan liquid or hair dye). It makes one contemplate the idea that being “rich” (even if only in Monopoly money) and having despotic power must truly render life that much more enjoyable in order to want to prolong it with such absolutely insane fervor—and lack of regard for any remaining sense of reason or dignity.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, appears as the oldest vampire of the bunch, content in his decrepitude, yet not one to avert ironing himself out when the time comes to be dragged out of the coffin for a public appearance that assures white supremacists Kamala isn’t the one really running the show.
