Our Vanderpumpers stand solemn and still in a makeshift enchanted forest. A golden light, the kind that only falls during that magic hour right before the dusk, illuminates the blissed-out looks on their faces. For once, there is no evident contention between any of them. For once, nobody is projecting blame or backhanding someone across the face while wearing a large spiky ring. They are, each and every one of them, steadfastly focused on the present; at this moment, they have silently agreed to forget the past and to not even contemplate the certain messiness of the future, the one that will begin as soon as the bride slips out of her dress that’s apparently been constructed from dingy doilies. The floaties they went tubing in just a few days ago will have to be deflated for the long trip home. The empty cans of Coors Light will get tossed into a recycling bin. See, nothing lasts forever – not a wedding, not even an edible made from the finest cocoa, granulated sugar, and weed one can locate in all of Los Angeles proper – and even though the Bravo editors have worked overtime (and have seriously earned their paychecks) to keep us fixated on this one perfect second in time, those of us who aren’t slightly stoned and standing on top of twigs in some forest cannot help but understand that, despite the evident joy radiating off our television screens, what we are shamelessly being sold here is nothing but a comforting narrative, one that is completely unfaithful to all the interlocking tales that have come before.
Every once in a very rare and wonderful while, two people who are exactly right for one another manage to meet on this expansive and overly-populated spinning blue and green marble we call Earth and eventually they will stand together beneath an altar and get married in front of their family and their friends and everyone witnessing this spectacular union will understand that they are taking in the sight of something truly special that will last forever.
This is not one of those times.
On the surface – like, the tippy top layer of that surface – the Schwartz/Maloney wedding has everything that should make The Big Day perfect. Clear weather? Check. Dogs who refrain from shitting as they make their way down the aisle? Check. Candy already set up at the reception beside ten thousand dollars worth of flowers that almost caused the groom to have a seizure? Check. Extra dish towel invites on hand to mop up the puddles of blood just in case this is the night Kristen decides to slit Sandoval’s throat or Jax realizes who he has become and reacts by smashing his face clear into a mirror to destroy the monster staring back at him? Check. A bridal party comprised of people who hate one another and have slept with one another and have called one another fat and psychotic and whorish and stupid? Check!
I'm a huge fan of horror movies and I have been for as long as a can remember. When I was younger, it was about the testing of boundaries, of feeling briefly brave for not being the fourth grader at the slumber party having a total freak-out in the bottom of a sleeping bag. (I was the one who refused to go into a dark bathroom to call forth Bloody Mary, though. I was brave, not fucking insane.) Those sleepover nights occurred during the Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Meyers years, when the sequels climbed high into the double digits and every movie was exactly the same. I came to realize that the couple who'd just had sex during a blackout they were sure had been caused by the wind – on a calm, still night no less – would end up getting sliced in four even before the wet spot crusted over. I knew the not-so-classically-feminine girl with the unisex name like Alex or Sydney would be the one who would live because she noticed all the danger signs (minor things like the power suddenly cutting out for no reason or rivulets of plasma dripping down the walls) that the others so flagrantly ignored. I began to understand how viewer identification is formed not only through dialogue, but by which character is granted the most reaction shots and I'd congratulate myself for figuring out who the survivor would be even while everyone onscreen was still temporarily breathing.
It was during college that I took an upper-level course in Film Theory as part of my major. The professor chose a screening schedule comprised entirely of horror films and I was plunged into the dripping red world of Dario Argento. Suspiria scarred me from ever wanting to be near a ballerina, but it was Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with characters who were carved into like they were loins of pork that made the biggest impression. The setup – the action before the carnage set in – was what I liked the most. As the film that ushered the slasher genre as we now know it into the nightmares of our collective consciousness, Texas Chainsaw illustrated the stylistic and story conventions that are still employed today.
You know the deal. A group of older teenagers or post-college young adults arrive at some remote location expecting to have the time of their lives. The bland banter they share in the SUV on the way to wherever they’ll end up dying reveals their relationships and explains exactly why we will feel absolutely no sense of loss when a machete slices their spleens right out later on. Those eventual victims have no gaze, no awareness that the obvious signs of danger they're looking straight at will bring about their destruction and the viewer – fully aware of each and every danger sign – disavows a connection with them on the spot because it’s just not all that pleasant to identify with fucking idiots. The one who survives will be the girl who didn't run around naked, the one who never believed the scraping against the car hood was caused by some errant branch. She sees what we see and she says what we'd say and she screams when we'd scream. She's the only fully developed character in the entire movie while the others are so moronic that we just count down the minutes until they become carcasses.
Allow me to be clear here: I do not wish carcassdom on any Vanderpumper. For one, despite these lengthy recaps, I'm not invested in them enough to expend energy wishing that they kick it permanently. For another, who would I make terrible fun of if Jax and James and Kristen ceased to exist? (I know – I could just turn my attention to Southern Charm, a show a bunch of people have told me to recap. I've never seen it and that choice is purely a defense mechanism to protect what's left of my rotting sanity an exposure to reality television has caused.) Still, watching the tragic and terrifying buildup to Katie and Schwartz's wedding day has left me feeling like I'm shuddering my way through the first half of a horror movie where we're encountered with people we know are doomed and the fact that the entire thing will be taking place in the woods only strengthens the analogy.
Okay, I’m just going to say what nobody here wants to say: Meghan, at this early point in time – just three episodes in – I think we’re all prepared and very willing to like you. Personally, I think that you come off as intelligent and pretty and so unbelievably thin that I’d like to meet with you privately so you might rub yourself against me in the hopes that whatever parasite you have been infected with leaps directly from your ravaged digestive system into my own. I want your good standing on this show to grow and to prosper, like a beautiful cherry tree that I hope you get to plant in the front yard of a home you will never have to move from, a tree so lovely that Shannon will not be able to stop herself from pissing on it during a luncheon because of that one time when you didn’t flirt with her husband. And with that form of kindness in the forefront of my mind, I have to tell you to stop it with the fucking hashtags. I let the “hashtag coolstepmom” go by because it was your first episode and I was too busy contemplating the vast similarities between Tamra and that bile-spewing demon from The Exorcist and chanting safe words that might keep Vicki from shrieking and rifling through the latest issue of the DSM book of psychological disorders in my effort to properly diagnose Shannon as anything other than “simply out of her mind crazy,” but this week you did it again and actually allowed the words “hashtag over-it” to escape from your lips. And so, with genuine affection, I must implore you to never let such a thing happen again and I will even use vernacular you are drawn to in the hopes that I achieve a breakthrough here: hashtag stopthisfuckingnonsenserightnow.
There’s something rather devastating about watching people who are just so completely devastated. It’s a different kind of thing than looking at cruel people acting like heathens or reckless adults behaving like toddlers whose parents have negated the advice of professionals and instead decided to see what might happen if they stopped administering the Ritalin for a couple of days. No, watching pure sadness as it unfolds across the airwaves feels morose, uncomfortable – and that was before the fake funeral transpired.
Shannon and David, both in their second season on The Real Housewives of Orange County, are stuck in the muck-filled middle of attempting to recover from David’s adultery, a terribly unfortunate outcome of a marriage that has only been presented to viewers as conflicted at it’s very best and utterly barren at it’s very worst. These are two people who earned themselves an awful lot of screen time during their inaugural season and never once exhibited a union that felt anything but scarily fraught with tension. It was David who made me feel the kind of panging anxiety that caused me to want to figure out a way to unzip my skin and then wash it a few times before pulling it back on while I was locked away in some private room, far away from his glaring eyes and impenetrable demeanor – and it was Shannon who made me wonder why she was airing her anguish to the world, especially since it seemed to consume her.
