I suspect Kim Kardashian of being a Nietzschean – and not just in the crude sense of an individual unswerving in their will-to-power. No, I think Kim Kardashian, somewhere in the weirdly-echoing chambers of her plastic heart, harbours a deep and compelling amor fati: a love of her own fate so strong, that she willingly submits to repeating it, again and again, abetted by
her Munchausen’s-by-proxy mom, Kris, and an array of K-siblings: Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall, Kylie and Ketamine… All right, I admit it, I made the last one up, but once you start paying too much attention to these surgically mutated show ponies it does feel as if you might’ve necked some horse tranquiliser.
For those who haven’t got a Disney+ subscription, choosing instead to spend their money on some frippery or other – such as an electricity bill, or, um… food – let me bring you up to speed on the supersonic lifestyle of these
whinnying ninnies. First off: since the last season there’s been a significant semiotic shift on planet Kardashian (a world weirdly similar to our own, and yet grotesquely different – a bit like the contrast between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in Star Trek); the name of the show has changed!
Try not to get overexcited – the way they do in Kalifornia – but it’s no longer Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the title that adorned the extended family’s televised antics for 20 seasons aired over 14 years, but… wait for it… The Kardashians, tout court. This major transformation does indeed signify something: there is no longer any way an ordinary mortal can even aspire to the lifestyle enjoyed by these kompulsive konsumers, who’ve had the marble-counter-top-cold genius to parlay their own empty-headed narcissism into opulent homes surrounded by immaculate lawns, and equipped with walk-in closets bigger than… my home.
What possible justification can there be in any possible world in any conceivable multiverse for the hot-pink Balenciaga tracksuit dress that Kim sports at the end of episode three, as she exalts in her triumph presenting the yet longer-running show, Saturday Night Live? I suppose that it at least had the temerity to replace the yet more grotesque hot-pink velvet Balenciaga catsuit she was sporting as she read from an autocue in front of the “live” audience whose hilarity was so mechanical it sounded post-synched. Note, please, how my prose is imploding under the pressure of having to convey this stuff to you, dear reader – and I note, mon semblable, mon frère, the obvious objection to the above: such a koncerted kritique of these kreeps risks koming across as misogynistic, given, as yet, no penised-individuals have been put in the frame.
Enter Kanye West, King of the Ks and Kim’s kuondam husband. The poor man looks painfully out of place in this koven of the talentless; but it’s worth considering: is it worse to prostitute yourself like this if you have no real
kreativity, or if you do? (And if you want more even-handedness, nothing the K-sisters have had done to themselves gets anywhere close to the uglification that’s Travis Barker, drummer with senescent juveniles Blink-182, who is kurrently konsorting with Kourtney). Anyway, manifesting in Kim’s Manhattan hotel suite – where the whole crew are recuperating from the aforementioned cue-card reading – Kanye’s wearing a hoodie tied so tightly
hardly any of his face is visible. He’s also carrying a cardboard box roomy enough to house a myriad McGuffins and all the sharks they’ve ever jumped over.
All of which is by way of saying the box contains – allegedly – the computer hard drive that in turn allegedly contains the alleged “unseen” footage of Kim’s notoriously filmed fornication with the Canadian R&B singer, Ray J.
Now, unless you’ve been living in a bathysphere at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the past 14 years, you know this much: without that sex tape there’d never ever have been anything like
Keeping Up with the Kardashians, let alone The Kardashians.
Kim may hot-pinkly protest that the recurrence of rumours about the tape embarrasses her at a cosmic level, given she’s a mother of four – but she doth hotly-pink protest too much: she loves the way the tape rumour mill
fatiloquently revolves, with each hand-crank further elevating her fortune.
All of which makes it impossible to spoil the plot of The Kardashians, since whatever goes around does indeed come around again. Yet what’s most shocking about the sex tape is quite how beautiful Kim was before she started having kosmetic surgery.
