The Queen of Versailles brought together several themes I've been interested in for a lifetime; the curdling of The American Dream, and the seamy ugly underbelly of a mythical beast we helped to create. What do you do when you finally wake up from that artificially pink, fluffy, Disneyland princess fantasy with a huge credit card bill and a hangover? This movie tells you exactly what happens. Consider it the antidote to the toxic poison you've been swilling for decades.
It starts off on a high roll, like the best night in Vegas you've ever had, before the collections department comes to repo your leased Benz for missed payments. We see the old head of a company married to a typical trophy wife, consuming and spending like a glutton who thinks the Thanksgiving feast will never end. She fits the marketing version of beauty that we've come to expect nowadays: tall, thin, with long, flat-ironed, dyed-blond hair, a former model (a divorced Mrs. Florida from 1993) with an obvious boob job who tans excessively, shops to excess, then brags about it, and loses herself in the process.
He sees himself as The King to her throne, and in turn labels himself a kingmaker for his huge campaign contributions to then-President George W. Bush Jr., claiming credit for securing his presidency, though he is loathe to disclose details that he hints may be "illegal". They're a horrible couple blinded by greed, with cartoonishly bad taste in just about anything and everything you can think of: food, art, design, pets, clothing, furnishings, and houses. On a serious money high, they embark on building the largest private residence in the world that they dub "Versailles", through bank credits and mortgages.
Because his fortunes are based on selling Florida timeshares to the working poor through pyramid schemes and high pressure sales tactics, like fly-by-night con-men selling uninhabitable swampland as a vacation paradise, he can't actually afford what you see in the film. It's almost all on credit, living just like the vulnerable people he directs his pitchmen to target and attack. When the market flips on them in 2008, you see how little resources the couple actually have to draw upon, and the depths to their superficiality that exist on every level. There's no emotional support between them, because their marriage isn't built on that. There's no financial support, because bankers turn cruel when your money dries up.
When they start going downhill, no one around them can stop the landslide. Their nannies struggle to clean up after them, because the wife is too incompetent to run a large household. The staff is also awash in debt. In an ironic Capitalist twist, one of their nannies is in foreclosure for her modest home at the same time their Versailles goes into foreclosure, a horrid symmetry when the supposed "rich" and "poor" are exactly alike. The other nanny raises their eight children, seven of them and a family niece, because the wife got hooked on having babies when she found out she wouldn't have to raise them. In another heart-breaking reveal, we find out that her nanny, broken down and in tears, hasn't seen her own son, who lives in the Philippines, for years, because she saves every penny she can to send home to her family who depend upon her.
It is cruel and bleak and savagely funny because it's obvious to us that they are steeped in dysfunction and compulsion. He proclaims himself the victim of a money-lending system that got him "hooked" on cheap available cash, which we feel very little sympathy for. The banks stop the joy ride when he doesn't deliver on empty promises built upon the backs of people too crippled to bail themselves out, let alone their rich master. His third wife is snared in all the usual traps that women like her fall into: shopping sprees with unlimited spending and expensive cosmetic procedures, because her prince of a husband has already charmingly joked about trading her in for younger models. Isn't that funny? No? I wanted to cry, too - how little value they have as humans, because they've become zombified through addictions that have become deeply entrenched in the American lifestyle.
When I was on my way to the library to return the DVD, I ran into a new friend who was coming out as I was walking in. We discussed our DVD selections. I talked about the documentary I just saw and my ideas for this piece. He confessed to being a salesmen for timeshares while living in Florida years prior; a man on welfare, living in a tiny room in a dilapidated building that has one shared run-down bathroom on the second floor, piecing together part-time work through a series of small jobs, going to community college in the hopes of a better life, battling drug addiction and mental illness. He admitted to me that psychological tactics were an important part of the job, and that he himself bought a timeshare back then, too. Of course he did.
