The Inner Monologue

America has perfected a strange civic ritual: buying things we do not want in order to prove we care about something we barely engage with. We begin learning this ritual as children, and by adulthood we are fluent in it. We even confuse it for virtue.

The lesson starts small. A child comes home from school clutching a glossy order form. Cookies. Wrapping paper. Coupon books. The child is told to “sell,” but everyone involved knows this is a polite fiction. The parent is the real customer. The parent buys most of the inventory, offloads a few items on coworkers, and quietly absorbs the rest. The fundraiser succeeds. The kid feels supported. The institution gets its number.

No one asks whether anyone actually wanted the cookies.

This is not a failure of the system. It is the system.

Fast forward a few decades and you will see the same ritual playing out at the box office for politically adjacent films—most transparently in the case of the Melania movie centered on . The numbers are trumpeted. Headlines are written. “Strong opening weekend.” “Grassroots enthusiasm.” “Audience demand.”

Then you look at the theaters.

Half-empty rooms. Sparse matinees. Whole rows untouched. The applause exists almost entirely on spreadsheets.

This is not an accident. It is fundraiser-cookie economics scaled up and dressed in cultural seriousness.

A significant share of tickets are bought in bulk. Not to be used, but to be counted. Donors buy blocks. Organizations buy screenings. Supporters buy ten, twenty, fifty tickets at once. A few are given away. Most are never scanned. The goal is not attendance. The goal is arithmetic.

The movie is the cookie. The box office is the quota. The buyer is the parent telling themselves, I’ve done my part.

And just like the school fundraiser, everyone involved quietly understands what is happening.

The difference is that school fundraisers are honest about the fiction. No one pretends cookie sales measure culinary excellence or genuine market demand. The cookies are an excuse. The money is the point. The adults smile, the paperwork clears, and the system moves on without pretense.

The Melania movie—and others like it—pretend the number means something deeper. Box office figures are treated as proof of cultural relevance, of popular hunger, of a movement finding its voice. Empty seats are reinterpreted as silent majorities. Bulk purchases become evidence of passion rather than coordination.

This is where the lie becomes corrosive.

Buying a ticket is not the same as watching a movie. Watching a movie is not the same as being persuaded. And being persuaded is not the same as caring. But in modern American culture, we collapse all of these distinctions into a single act: checkout.

The buyer does not want to sit in a theater. They want the result of having sat there. They want the moral receipt. They want to be able to say—truthfully, in the narrowest possible sense—that they supported the film. Whether they ever encounter its ideas, its narrative, or its quality is irrelevant.

This is not fandom. It is transactional allegiance.

And we have trained ourselves to accept it because we learned early that buying our own cookies was easier than knocking on doors. It spared us embarrassment. It spared us rejection. It spared us the risk that no one might actually want what we were offering.

Bulk-buying tickets for a political film serves the same emotional function. No persuasion required. No uncertainty. No exposure to indifference. Just a number that goes up and a comforting sense of having participated.

This is why so much of American culture feels hollow. We live in a nation of “successful” products no one uses, “popular” ideas no one discusses, and “movements” sustained largely by people buying their own inventory.

The Melania movie is not unique in this respect. It is merely obvious. It exposes the mechanics because the gap between reported success and visible reality is too wide to ignore. When a film is supposedly thriving but theaters are empty, the illusion slips.

And yet we keep pretending not to notice.

Media outlets report the numbers without context. Campaigns cite them as validation. Supporters repeat them as proof. At no point does anyone seriously ask the most basic question: Did anyone actually show up?

This is what happens when metrics replace observation. When dashboards matter more than rooms. When counting is mistaken for convincing.

We are a culture that believes spreadsheets over senses. If the number exists, the enthusiasm must exist too. If the chart points upward, something meaningful must be happening—even if no human being can point to where that meaning is actually being lived.

Eventually, reality calls the bluff. Empty theaters remain empty. The supposed audience never materializes when persuasion is required rather than purchase. The movement that looked formidable on paper struggles to exist in public.

And everyone involved acts surprised.

They shouldn’t be. We rehearsed this behavior as children, standing at kitchen tables while parents wrote checks and said, “That should take care of it.”

It did take care of it—just not in the way we pretended.

Until Americans relearn the difference between support and simulation, between attendance and accounting, between belief and bulk checkout, we will keep mistaking receipts for reality.

The cookies will stay uneaten.
The theaters will stay half empty.
And the numbers will keep lying beautifully.