‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Recap: Happy Homemakers (Season 4, Episode 5)
Nobody did anything exciting.
If last week’s episode was an abomination where evil talk of the tabloids rained over the proceedings like the thundercloud rumbling in a Care Bear’s belly, then this week’s episode was the opposite. It was just like a watered down glass of lemonade on a moderately sunny day. It was somewhat enjoyable but only noteworthy on how it’s a little bit worse than all the others. It was sort of like the toothy blowjob of Real Housewives episodes.
I think the problem is that no one was really together. Real Housewives are sort of like magnets. When they’re alone, they’re just holding up shitty arts and crafts projects on the refrigerator. But when you put them together in clumps they’re attracting and repelling each other in all sorts of interesting configuration. They’re like little ballets of contempt and affection, and we’re eternally mesmerized.
What can I even say about any of them? Yolanda Bananas Foster’s mom and brother came to visit from Holland and they brought a suitcase full of her favorite cookies: Stroopwaffles. I thought that’s what you called it when your dog eats something bad and then drags its ass across the carpet to scratch it. “God damn it, Riley just stroopwaffled his gross butt all over my brand new Persian!” Well, I guess not. But their visit was fine and sweet and unremarkable.
Later YBF and her husband, a newt that wears reading glasses, went to some sidewalk in Hollywood where the newt lied on the warm concrete of the sidewalk and sucked all the energy of the sun up into its body, not from the sun itself, but from the star wattage of the pedestrian walkway that was nearby. Blah, it was fine. Stevie Wonder was there and it’s very exciting that Yolanda’s husband, David Foster Wallace, is making an album with him. It’s going to be very relevant. Sort of like the last novel that Norman Mailer wrote before he died that no one read and academics didn’t even bother to finish because it’s not going to make the cannon anyway.Very #relevant indeed.
Who else? OH! Carlton. We can’t forget that acrid little pack of smokes. She took her black cat Midnight to the vet. OK, first of all, Carlton isn’t so much a witch as she is some middle aged mother who dressed up as a witch for Halloween one year with all the cliche accoutrements and now refuses to take her costume off. She’s like a kindergartener who shows up in a soiled Spider-Man jumpsuit three days a week because she thinks it bestows her with magic powers or some shit.
Anyway, this cat fell off the bannister and didn’t land on it’s feet. This is a shitty witch’s black cat. I mean, Sabrina’s talked. Azreal was missing like half an ear and it still smurfily hunted Smurfs. This cat can’t even land on its feet. What kind of cat is that? It’s like having a turtle without a shell. If this creature is black and fuzzy and falls off the bannister and doesn’t land on its feet it’s not even a cat anymore, it’s like some sort of really tall ferret.
Brandi didn’t do much of anything, but what really struck me this episode were the interstitial establishing shots of like golf courses and luxury goods and whatnot. In an episode where we only saw each Housewife alone, the B-roll that introduced her was very telling. What did Brandi get? It was two female dogs (bitches, to get all dictionary-y on you) with their leashes entwined. That is Brandi’s life in one little throw-away image. It’s just her and someone else entangling and it just cuts away before it is ever resolved. It’s never resolved, is it? It’s just her circling someone else and getting them sucked into whatever leash drama she has going on. Brandi Glanville’s Native American name is Two Dogs Fighting.
Is there anything else to report? Oh, not really. Kyle and Lisa are still fighting about some lame joke she made about MMmmm cheating on Kyle that was perfectly innocent, but I’m not going to talk about that because we saw it already. Also Kyle went for crazy electro volcano facials with Fetch 2: The Revenge (that’s what I’m calling Joyce from now on because last season we had Kyle’s other friend Fetch, who was never going to happen, and here we have that all over again). I’m not going to talk about those facials either because we’ve seen it already. God, Kyle, get a new facial already. Look at Vicki Gunvalson. She’s gotten a whole new face. ZING!
Brandi and Carlton supposedly made out in the hot tub and I was going to write this whole slash fiction scene between them, but the two of them taking off their clothes, getting in a hot tub, and making out with another woman is about as exciting as getting gonorrhea from the drummer of Taking Back Sunday in the back of the tour bus, and just about as obvious. I’ll save it for next week when they make out in the pool for real.
Oh a trip! Next week the girls are going on a trip to Palm Springs and that’s just what we need. Not the full-fledged vacation, just a mini-trip to shake things up and get in a few fights, magnets plied with magnets until they rip off the side of an RV and Jessie Pinkman tells us what he knows about science, bitch.
But we can’t forget to talk about Kim. There is always time to talk about Kim. She had to attend the graduation of her daughter Kimberly (which still makes my soul dry heave every time I think about their names). Kimberly, her of the hand-tossed chicken salad prom, is graduating. This girl with the pretty face, the wavy brunette hair, and the fake eyelashes is going to UC San Diego to study communications, which is a department filled entirely with pretty brunettes with wavy hair and fake eyelashes. It’s like she’s joining the Future PR Girl Borg or something.
Kim is very proud of her Kimberly. It’s the last one. The last one of her children to move out and everyone is worried about Kim. Kyle is worried that she’s going to be bored. Brooke, her older daughter, is worried that Kim is going to be bothering her more now and she just got that new job as a bottle service waitress and she can’t have her mom calling at all hours. Kim’s sister Paris Hilton’s Mom is very worried that she won’t be able to carry the heavy flowers for much longer and that Kim is going to wear a bad outfit.
She doesn’t. Kim doesn’t. For the first time she does something entirely appropriate, entirely right. She wears something dark and demure and she goes to high school graduation and she does not cry or make a scene. She just sits there and pumps her arm in the air, still clutching her program in her fist, when Kimberly finally gets her diploma. She’s done something right. Finally, after all those misses, she has a hit. This little brown-haired bull’s eye in a laser-cut lace dress.
Later, at home, Kim doesn’t even turn out the lights and cry. She doesn’t go to her pantry and look for that bottle she might have left somewhere in one of the old Christmas tins. She doesn’t bar the doors and take a pill and try to float away until the morning comes. She just sits on the couch, with the blinds still open, and she sighs. She thinks about the ceremony and her family. She forgives the little digs Kyle and Paris Hilton’s Mom made. She thinks about the shining faces of all of those that she cares about. She never had this, any of it. She had mean Mrs. Golde, with her miles of gold bangles and reading glasses on a brass chain always around her neck trying to teach her algebra while she memorized her lines in the back of a stuffy trailer on a Disney back lot somewhere.
Kimberly had it better. She’s going to have it better, and Kim is going to make sure of it. That’s why she wouldn’t mess it up. She just sat on the couch, one arm propped up on the over-stuffed arm and she felt, physically she felt like she was going backwards, but it was just her mind, traveling from here to the past, combining and subtracting, comparing the two and finding what had come before lacking. There was only time to go forward. What was the other option? To spiral down into the pit of the present? No, not this time. She sat there either still or paralyzed, she wasn’t sure which. Finally she sighed, so heavy that the cushions settled more deeply beneath her. “What next?” she asked of no one in particular and there was no one home to answer.
