This week on our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things … but barely. They inspected their rooms in a giant Italian villa only to find that, behind an unassuming closet door, there was an entire chapel blessed by Pope Clement XIII, who placed mass-produced fig leaves over the wieners of all the nude statues in the Vatican. They put on Korean face masks and then put their sunglasses over them and hopped into a glass elevator like they were at Willy Wonka’s factory, except they got startled by a taxidermy polar bear and then got stuck in the glass elevator. (Ramona Singer walked so the rich women could run.) They sat in the villa’s sumptuous theater to watch an opera performance. Well, most watched. One of the women thumbed through her phone, looking for more discounted Dolce on the Real Real, and one took a little snooze, having wonderful dreams of Timotheé Chalamet saying she never has to listen to opera ever again.
But mostly they … I don’t even know. They show up in Italy and have dinner together, question mark. Not much, really. The consensus about the season is that it is boring and, yes, it is boring. But I would watch Rachel Zoe talk about her retirement plans for 42 minutes. Could you imagine? Just this tiny, bronzed body with skin that looks like Dorit’s worst Birkin roaming around the South of France, giving away the jewelry she makes for fun. The whoosh of the caftan, the cackling of 57 bangles as she slips long strands of beads over the bowed heads of the unsuspecting who kind of want her to go away. Amazing. I would watch another 42 minutes of Erika giving bitchy confessionals about what happens when Rachel and Amanda are twinning in matching Dolce dresses and talking shit about Taylor Swift. (That’s my girl. I always knew her taste in music was as good as her taste in ghostwriters.)
RHOBH has essentially become one of those YouTube videos of burning logs or train journeys, but, you know, with rich women doing things. I’m okay with that. I love spending time with all of these women, but would it kill them to do a little something now and again? I mean, there’s a woman on this trip that I don’t even know and has only piped up once to talk about how she got a happy ending at a massage. Even Kathy Hilton is like a ghost of her former self, with Jen Tilly taking the crown of doddering kook away from her. (And what about Jen’s outfit with the slinky black dress and giant feather hat, looking like Mrs. Peacock and Miss White from the Clue movie had a lesbian love child.)
Thank Saint Clare of Assisi, patron saint of reality television and a close personal friend of Clement XIII, for Dorit because she is driving every single one of the stories on this here franchise. The first is about her constant tardiness for the party-ness (ohhhhh, ohhhhh). Everyone assembles for dinner. Dorit, as usual, is the last one there. The Villa’s host, Joey Stefano (that is a joke for old gays only, do not Google it), tells Boz that her big surprise is ready, but they all have to wait for Dorit, who is up in her with some spackle and a trowel like the third act of Death Becomes Her. Erika goes up to fetch her and is like, “We are all waiting!” It’s increasingly clear that what Erika says everyone hates, which was previewed in the mid-season trailer, is her lateness. I will save my rant on how much I hate late people until that moment (but if you want a preview, it will essentially be the same as my screaming about Lisa Hochstein).
In fairness to Dorit, when she emerges in a gorgeous black dress that looks like a swirling abyss kept together with a gold medallion in the middle and matching chunky gold jewelry, she looks amazing. As a counterpoint, Sutton Brown, whose luggage was waiting in line to get into Berghain, shows up to dinner in a white shirt, a giant necklace, and an adequate face of makeup and looks just as good; she had no time or team to prepare herself, and showed up, crucially, on time. So is it worth it? Unclear.
The only thing Dorit seems to hate more than promptness is Mandy Frank, who decides, once and for all she is going to clear the air with Dorit. She asks to go talk before dinner, and Dorit turns her down. Dorit decides she does not want the air to clear. She lets out a Diet Coke and cigarette fart that is so rancid it muddies that air right up, hanging suspended as if it’s made of gel. Well, not really, but she just puts Amanda off until after dinner because she has no interest in talking to her and, as Sutton points out, absolutely zero respect for someone who mixes almond and oat milks.
Dinner starts with a brief discussion about Dorit having dinner with PK, a gel fart that has been collected from the air, sucked up into a syringe, and then used as lip filler for Saddam Hussein’s corpse. She says she hasn’t told anyone about it because she’s being more selective who she shares things with, meaning Kyle Richards, who had to read about it in Page Six with the rest of us. Then Erika asks Sutton why she wanted to share a room with Amanda. Sutton basically says she wanted to back Amanda in her disagreement with Dorit.
What ensues is quite interesting: a conversation about who is allowed to have what kind of opinions about each other. With these ladies, it’s all subtext. This is like the prestige drama of Housewives. They don’t have Angie K. and Lisa Barlow standing at the table and shouting over each other while throwing props to help prove their points. What’s going on here is much more subtle and needs some reading into.
Amanda says that if Dorit knew the whole context of her opinion on Dorit’s divorce, she would know she had nothing but the best intentions. Dorit tells her that she should have had a one-on-one conversation with her first about her opinions before sharing them with others behind her back. That is a good point, but Dorit hasn’t wanted to talk to Mandy since she showed up with her deranged smile and Lisa Frank Manifestation Folders. How was she going to accomplish this hypothetical meeting?
Kyle has Amanda’s back and says that sharing these opinions is a type of care if it can correct that person’s opinion. She’s batting for Amanda, but she’s really batting for herself at this point. Dorit counters that voicing those concerns once comes across as friendly, but telling everyone all the time and never shutting up about it comes off like gossip. Okay, Dorit. Point taken, but need anyone remind you of Pantygate?
Kathy Hilton essentially ends the conversation from the far side of the table. “I think when someone doesn’t know someone, you need to learn to read the room and know your place,” she says. She gets support for the remark in her confessional, but everyone just lets it hang there, like a gel fart, scaring Amanda. What Kathy is saying, and everyone else believes, is that Amanda is too junior to have public opinions about the cast members. In real life, this is absolutely correct. When you have new friends, you don’t talk shit about them until you get to know them a bit better. This is not real life and this opinion is the opposite of what we do here. Boz didn’t know Amanda when she challenged her ideas on what conflict should look like. Should she have stopped? No! This entire “platform,” as they love to call it, is all about judging each other, sharing opinions, and getting mad about it. Maybe what Amanda was doing was the edge this show lost? Maybe this is the attitude that has made it into (for me, at least still enjoyable) slow television.
The next day Amanda is sitting with Sutton and Kyle, and she says that she doesn’t want to get crazy in these conversations. Sutton tells her to connect with her feelings and share them. Kyle tells her that if Dorit is upset with her sharing opinions about her divorce, then Amanda should be getting upset that Dorit is sharing her opinions about Amanda being in a cult. They’re trying to coach her. They’re trying to teach her how to be a Real Housewife and Amanda is not taking the lesson. What’s craziest though is that they don’t seem to want to take their own advice. They’re trying to get Amanda to throw herself into the volcano because they’re too content sitting on the edge roasting marshmallows.
Amanda says in confessional: “A belief in this group seems to be that unless you are acting absolutely crazy, you are not expressing yourself and that is untrue. I think there’s a lot more strength in stepping back and deciding if it is a conversation worth your time and energy. If I can’t get anywhere with Dorit, I’m not going to engage because what is the point.” I understand Amanda’s sentiment here, and I do think there is something to be said, in your real life, for not having conversations that are a waste of time. Amanda is right about that. But, like usual, what she’s wrong about is everything else. She certainly hasn’t seen any real screaming or acting crazy this season, so while she is correct, it is based on past research, not on lived experience. And, again, engaging with Dorit when you disagree is the point of the show. The point is not to sell her business, not to get more followers, not to create a cult of her own; the point is looking at interpersonal dynamics, getting into conflicts, resuming those conflicts, and then sometimes doing silly things after drinking too much rosé.
The episode doesn’t end with Mandy Frank, however. Once again, we end with Rachel, who is apoplectic that her ex-husband, who puts the D in Rodger, sat her son Kaius down to talk about his girlfriend the moment that his mother left the country. Rachel says that knowing about the girlfriend makes their divorce seem more final, but I would argue that she took care of that last episode when she sat the boys down and told them that the divorce was proceeding. But the papers aren’t even signed yet, the ink isn’t dry. She told Rodgey Rodg not to talk about this with their kids without consent, and he broke that. Super fucked up, honestly. Rachel, like a bird just let out of its cage, flaps around her room, but she doesn’t know freedom, she doesnt’ know joy. She looks out the open window — out over the winding Florentine landscape, the manicured trees and the teeming vineyards, the wiggling lines of heat starting to snake up from the ground in the afternoon sun — and she can’t see anything. She can only see home, so far away, filled with comfort and torture, and, like a newly freed bird, she would fly all the way there if she could, even if it would take a week, even if it would take a year, even if it would take everything she ever had.
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Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.
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