Back inside the worst party ever thrown at a martini bar is where Kyle lost me again – this time for good. Crying her eye makeup off into a cloth napkin, Kyle bawls to Lisa Vanderpump, Lisa Rinna, and Eileen about what just transpired. It’s hard to fully understand what she’s saying through her heaving sobs, but I think what it comes down to is that – initially – Kyle wants to vent more about Brandi, which I think might make sense because Brandi is a painful problem, but she’s also a less dire problem. To actually deal with the Kim Stuff will take agony and effort and maybe Kyle would like to wait until she’s not in public to fully break down.
If you haven’t noticed because you’re high on whatever Kim claims she did not ingest, I’m bending over backwards to give Kyle the benefit of the doubt, and her crushing sadness makes sense given the circumstances. But, allowances aside, I can still loathe her and I realized definitively that I do when Lisa V. tried to comfort her by saying that she knows that this is how Brandi is because she also treated Lisa terribly, and that’s when Kyle blurted out a sentence that she should have tattooed somewhere on her body or embroidered on a Chanel pillow, because I believe no collection of gathered words could possibly be more indicative of who Kyle truly is: “It’s not about you!”
This is not the first time that Kyle has fired that sentence back to one of her friends. I recall her saying it about Taylor also. What her choice of reaction says to me is that Kyle has no place in her life for another person’s empathy. She only craves sympathy because she thinks that empathy pulls focus away from a current crisis that’s all her own. After she attempts to fight with Lisa by insisting that she knew what Brandi was like all along and had tried to tell Lisa but Lisa just wouldn’t listen, Lisa does the only thing one can do when you’re an intelligent person stuck in a bad situation: she hugs her hysterical friend and cuts off the vitriol that Kyle is ready to callously and needlessly spew and calmly tells her, “Stop it, I’m not going to fight with you.”
Needing more attention, Kyle then walks over to the most bored group of gay men I have ever witnessed and stands at the end of the long table they are gathered around and apologizes en masse for what transpired on the other side of the restaurant and it was so showy a moment that I thought I saw her do jazz hands at the end of her monologue. And while Lisa R and Lisa V and Eileen sat quietly at a table and spoke about the absurdity they had witnessed, Kyle felt the glances of all of “her gays” and knew that they were admiring her sequin dress and the way her hair fell in a cascading curtain around her shoulders and all was right in Kyle’s world again.
Those living in the real world – both Lisas and Eileen – know that the actual issue here is that Kim is probably still using, and it’s Lisa R who finally just puts it out there, saying what everyone with sight has probably been thinking.
“Kim is an addict, and everyone is trying to protect her,” says the wise woman who experienced probably one of the most terrifying moments of her life during the time she was trapped in a car with Kim. “If you’re an addict, you can’t take anything. Everyone is enabling an addict. Kim’s got everyone scared, and no one wants to deal with it.”
She’s right, and this season – which had been unfolding as a little bit dull – has now veered into a place that is just very sad. It’s sad when you believe an addict has no shot in hell at rehabilitation because she won’t scrape off the crud that ensconces all of the lies that help her to continue to hide the truth. It’s sad when the addict’s long-suffering sister is an annoying narcissist. It’s sad when the addict’s new best friend is the worst influence on this planet or any other planet that has yet to be discovered. And it’s terribly sad that it’s not looking good that any of these people – who are paid handsomely for being this awful version of themselves – will ever change.
Moving on from yet another party from hell – which might be the common theme of all the parties these women attend – we join Brandi at her job where she has a podcast. Just like you and I do, Brandi shows up for work wearing denim shorts so tiny that I think I caught a glimpse of her clitoris. She’s interviewing a comedian on the broadcast, but all I can allow my brain to embrace during this scene is the very real question that there are actually people who listen to Brandi’s podcast? Who are these listeners? Do they really want to tune in to hear a woman whose steadfast belief is that “it doesn’t matter what people say about you as long as they are talking about you”? Is that motto something she whispers into her sons’ ears before they drift off to sleep at night? And do those boys only have dreams about not having a mother who has been known to flash her tampon string when she’s out at night?
I say all of that knowing that my comments cannot possibly upset Brandi because, hey – at least I’m talking about her.
Brandi’s podcast was a little scary simply because someone in a Human Resources office agreed to hire her in general, but nothing was more freaky than when both Lisas and Kyle joined Eileen for the premiere of her – well, let’s call it a movie. Turns out the Burbank Film Festival takes place in a regular theater with a red carpet that’s, as Eileen herself puts it, the size of a bathmat. As Eileen is interviewed by a reporter nobody has ever heard of, the Lisas and Kyle get hotdogs and popcorn and then go into the theater to watch the… I’m sorry! I just can’t call it a movie! See, Stranger At the Pentagon is maybe the worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and to give you some context for that statement, I should reveal that I have Cinemax, I willingly watched Human Centipede, and I teach Film to students who must create their own productions, and not all of them were born with the last name Scorsese, so yeah – I’ve seen my share of awful. But Eileen’s “movie” brings awful to a new level and I kind of can’t believe that she allowed even a moment of it to be shown.
Eileen needs a waaaaay better contract for next season. She must negotiate certain clauses for herself that include but are not limited to the fact that terrible experimental films she appears in will never make their way onto mainstream television screens and that she will be requiring a protective shield with which to fight whichever woman who plans to take her on in her second season. Yeah, she had some wine thrown in her face during her inauguration season and all, but so far she has gotten off pretty easy, and if both history and marathons of this franchise have taught us anything, it’s that this calm sh*t will not last.