It only took the whole season, but the women finally clocked in to get to the core of their issues with each other.
Photo: Bravo
This week on our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They went sunbathing while wearing full caftans, so the only parts of their bodies that would get golden were their big toes. They toured a town in the middle of the day and not on any of the group activities, even though they signed a contract and took the money and haven’t shown up for work since that one time when they thought one of the other rich ladies’ dead kid was a dead dog. (That’s you, Kathy.) They did naked photoshoots in the pool because everyone should take a tasteful nude or two on vacation to send to their Instagram friends on their birthdays. That is just civilized and one of the great instances of queer culture going mainstream.
This week, the rich women also did something that they haven’t done in weeks and weeks and weeks: they clocked the fuck in. Well, minus Kathy, as previously stated, and Natalie, a commercial jingle for a defunct brand that you can’t get out of your head, who is just sunbathing alone and not saying anything, as per uzh. There are two big arguments, and what’s odd about both of them is that no one is quite saying what they mean. Well, everyone except Dorit. There is no mistaking what Dorit says, whether we like it or not. (We usually don’t, but even I have to admit that this week she is totally right.)
First, let’s look at what happened with Boz and Amanda at the grape stomping party. One quick detour, which is everything Rachel said or did at the vineyard. “I don’t stomp grapes, I drink grapes,” she says in a confessional. “First of all, I hate feet. It involves taking off my heels, so I’m already uncomfortable with that.” Yes, all of it. Give us attitude. Give us reads. Give us that rappy part of “Vogue” where Madonna just lists old movie stars. That is Rachel in this scene. We see her take off her giant chunky heels, which weigh more than Giggy at his fattest, and then stand next to Boz, and the pair looks less like Lucy and Ethel than they do Shaggy and Scrappy Doo. Boz just towers over her, is confident and assured as always, and Rachel is all crumpled up and just wants to get out of there. When it’s finished, Rachel says, “That I didn’t get injured in that bucket is a genuine Tuscan miracle.” Genius. Love it. Weird older ladies who don’t really want to do anything are a boon to this show, and it seems like we need a new one every year. Right now, I love this one the most.
So, Boz and Amanda. That morning, Sutton tells Amanda about Boz and Erika pulling her up on ChatGPT. You know that by the time this technology gets to the rich women, it is cooked. It’s fully over. Divest everything. Short Nvidia. Dump Claude. Send Sam Altman both to his twink death and the Khia Asylum simultaneously. Sutton tells Amanda that they were talking about how her business is a scam and pulling up all the negative reviews. In her confessional, Amanda does the same to Boz, pulling up negative comments about how she wasn’t at her jobs long, how she was more style over substance, and how her online courses have the same type of negative reviews that Amanda’s get. This is a great defense, but Amanda is only good in confessional. In the moment, she either isn’t thinking quickly enough or doesn’t have the gall. Reads while sitting in front of a green screen barely count.
Here’s where I have a hard time with this fight. Amanda is clearly more full of shit than the Great Roman Cat Hole. She only wants to talk about her business; she won’t talk about herself, and she has no interest in engaging with the other women unless it’s to talk about manifesting. She’s basically a billboard with a bright red lip. But what Boz and the other ladies are doing to her is kind of fucked up. Amanda is clearly successful, and some people like her classes, as bullshitty as they may be. She says she has an 80 percent retention rate and only 3 percent of people ask for a refund. Boz, in a confessional, says that Amanda is insecure in herself and her life because when they attack it, she gets flustered and inarticulate. Are we watching the same person? Amanda has the facts and figures. She has her defense on lock when it comes to herself; it’s talking back to the other women where she struggles. She says she thinks her life is perfect, and she’s sad they don’t agree. Her confidence or security is not the issue.
The issue is that these women do not respect her, and they most certainly do not respect how she makes her money. Yes, it smells like quackery and snake oil, but she’s just one part of the greater woo-woo industrial complex. If Amanda’s classes help people, then great. They’re probably as effective as a sound bath, but we don’t see people getting all mad at all the spiritual advisors they trot out on this show to wash them with eagle feathers. It’s sort of like Amadna is a psychic. It might be all bullshit, but if it helps some people and they want to pay for it, who are we to tell them it’s fake? (Even though, listen, it’s fake.)
But I feel like they would respect her more if she were a psychic. What seems to suck is that they won’t say, “We don’t respect you or your business,” and instead they say she’s not opening up when, and she’s right about this, when she did open up about things, they weren’t especially responsive or sympathetic. What it boils down to is that no one likes Amanda, and no one has the nerve to just say what they’re thinking. This is the problem with recent Rich Women Doing Things in general. We get a flashback to Erika and Dorit in Hong Kong, where Erika just says straight to Dorit’s face that she doesn’t like her. Where are these broads? Can they come back from Hong Kong and be with us again?
Something similar is going on with Kyle and Dorit, who just won’t say that they can’t stand each other. This whole trip that Erika, Kyle, and Dorit take to this abandoned Italian town in the middle of the afternoon is confusing. They’re shocked when they arrive, and it’s emptier than a Rira Ora meet and greet. Of course it is. It’s probably 95 degrees and everyone is inside taking a nap. Dorit lived in Italy. She should know better. What is crazier is that Kyle and Erika say they’re taking her there to talk because they’re concerned about Dorit and her “erratic” behavior. Okay, are they really concerned? Not for a second is the conversation about checking in with Dorit, seeing what she needed, or how they could help her. From the outset, it seems like it is about Kyle getting Dorit to agree with her and Kyle getting Dorit to exonerate her from talking shit about her. It seems like it is about Kyle airing her grievances about how everyone was concerned about her, but only Dorit was being punished.
After talking about Dorit and how she’s going through a hard time, Kyle gets to her main point, which is that Boz has also expressed her concerns about what is happening with Dorit, and Dorit doesn’t get mad at Boz when she does it, but gets mad at Kyle. Dorit says, “I trust Boz. I don’t trust you.” Bingo! That’s it. She’s the only one this whole hour saying what she actually means. She does trust Boz to actually be concerned about her, whereas Kyle is more concerned with herself and how she looks on television. Kyle asks Dorit why she doesn’t trust her, but not in a sweet way like she wants to make up for it, in an accusatory way like there is no reason for Dorit not to trust her. I don’t know, how about this here gelato trip/ambush where she’s howling at Dorit.
Dorit says she wants to talk about how Kyle can’t support her, and Kyle says that Dorit never supported her during her breakup with Mauricio, A.K.A. the world’s slowest-moving divorce. If I remember correctly, Dorit did inquire more than once about what was going on with Kyle and the changes in her life, and Kyle made it very clear that she did not want it discussed. And now she’s mad at Dorit for, what, not dragging her into the boiling Italian sun to yell at her while stracciatella gelato melts down her wrist? Be for real.
Erika asks an excellent question, which is, “How do you measure support?” I think, existentially, that is a great riddle to grapple with, but this was the only constructive question asked the whole afternoon. Erika says that Dorit isn’t feeling supported by them, so she wants to know how Dorit measures it so that they can stack up. This is where Dorit veers wrong a bit. She could have seen her opening here to get them to take some action; instead, she gets mad at Erika for interjecting, sets everyone off, and then gets into their car and drives off without them. I am of two minds about this. If I were either Kyle or Erika in the situation and someone took off with my car, I would have been pissed. I would have gotten back to that villa and screamed bloody murder until the taxidermy polar bear came back to life to shut me up. (I also would have probably gone back to that adorable gelato man, become his partner, had him cycle me home on his little bicycle gelato truck, and we’d still be married to this day, where I’m in a tiny Italian village churning gelato night and day.) However, if I were Dorit, I would have been like “Screw those bitches for attacking me,” and been glad that I took the car because, well, screw those bitches.
When Erika and Kyle finally get back to the villa, they’re trying to tell all of the other women what happened and get them on their side about Dorit, but neither Boz nor Rachel is having it. Rachel even says that she has known Dorit for two months and can’t speak to her change in behavior or spending because she has no idea how it’s different. She does say Dorit being late all the time freaks her out, though, which I love.
Kyle’s attack comes up again at dinner when Dorit says she didn’t like it when Kyle talked about how all the women felt when the rest of the women weren’t there to chime in. Again, Kyle tries to draw Boz and Rachel into her argument that Dorit is a mess (which, to be honest, she kind of is), but they won’t join in Kyle’s opinion. In confessional, Dorit says that what Kyle is expressing is not concern or group consensus. She says, “What I’m hearing from Kyle is, ‘I’m talking about you with everyone!’” Yeah, she’s right. Kyle is just outing herself as a gossip and is distorting what everyone has to say to try to one-up Dorit in her own life.
Meanwhile, at the center of the table, Jen Tilly sits with another gorgeous jeweled crown on her head, and she can’t focus. As Kyle’s forehead strains against its Botox and Dorit visibly jones for a cigarette, her mind is back in the pool that morning. She’s naked, the water is swirling around her body, the cold touching the bare parts that are usually covered, waking them up, bringing them not to the attention of the camera or of the viewer, but herself. She thinks about the warmth of her hands on her cold skin, she thinks about the bees buzzing by her hairdo, she thinks about the slow eddies of the pool’s filter as her body draws everyone in, closer and closer, to her sunglasses, to her nose, to her breasts, cupped in her hands, closer and closer, to her pores, to her fake eyelashes, to the bead of sweat forming just under her hairline, closer and closer until we’re inside of her, we’re the very air she breaths, we’re the elements themselves.
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