How a millionaire property show became a pandemic hit
Tanya Gold asks why, in a time of recession, LA’S ‘Selling Sunset’ is a phenomenon among the chattering classes
Ionce took part in a culinary press tour of Beverly Hills and it was as if I had never seen consumption before. Los Angeles – the wealthy part anyway – exists on a higher plane of covetousness from the rest of the world. The cars, the clothes and the restaurants are golden and awful. It was a spurious competition to have the most: perfectionism at its most deranged and fascinating.
If this interests you, you should watch Netflix’s Selling Sunset about the Oppenheim Group, which sells luxury houses in the Hollywood Hills. It’s now in its third season and has segued from show to phenomenon – it is Netflix’s highestrated show here and across the Atlantic.
Although it is now world famous, I have watched it with horror and ecstasy since the start.
“I just sold a $40million house!” is a typical exclamation, after which a bell in the (surprisingly shabby) office is rung, to celebrate the $400,000 profit. The Oppenheim office could be on a drag in Tooting. I find this charming: Jason Oppenheim, the owner, is the Wizard of Oz. He is a very tiny man who only employs very tall women. In this, Selling Sunset is also Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs in reverse with an improbable focus on the hovel in the woods.
What are we really looking at as we watch this show? The houses in
Selling Sunset are toy boxes, ideally on mountainsides, ideally overlooking smaller houses: compare and despair. These homes may not look like medieval castles, but they are situated like them – a new and ghastly Feudalism. A note to the architects of southern California: these houses all look the same. The days when a Los Angeles street was a Legoland walk through history or the Las Vegas Strip – medieval, Tuscan, Egyptian, Disney, all jammed together queasily like a swiftly excavated archaeological dig – have gone. Aeroplane lounge chic has won, and it is a bitter, and very flat, victory. When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept because… it all looked like a Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse?
The female agents “selling sunset” are its hostesses; painted dolls for whom Botox is a religious experience, allowing them to look like – yes, again, yes, always – sexualised children. There are many theories as to why this ridiculous show is now so famous. I have even heard the ludicrous idea that Selling Sunset is feminist because the women earn their own money. So why, then, do they look like they can’t climb stairs due to walking on sticks disguised as shoes? (Many women in Los Angeles can’t climb stairs. The PR on my press trip – an evil, painted doll like Chucky – fell over in the Beverly Hills Hotel and was so embarrassed that she self-isolated for 24 hours.)
Stair-climbing is a basic skill, but these women, educated and lovely though they are, can’t do it. Or, and this is worse: they choose not to. Christine Quinn, who is apparently the
Selling Sunset villain, but I believe is really a nerd hiding in a sex robot to conform to the norms around her, can’t climb stairs.
On one house view she was clinging to the banister like a Cirque du Soleil performer with a broken ankle. She may be incandescently beautiful – she has a 4ft-long platinum ponytail and a body like a bottle of perfume – but if you can’t climb stairs what are you left with?
Ultimately, Selling Sunset is what it says it is: advertorial for luxury goods, and that is the first part of its appeal. It is mere gawping and it is pleasing to see Cottagecore (the recent trend for baking and making) – which I never believed in anyway – swept away. There are endless shots of supercars and the boutiques of Rodeo Drive, where Julia Roberts came to grief, and then redemption, in Pretty
Woman, which is surely the foundation myth of Selling
Sunset: personal absolution through the application of shopping.
We watch as Christine not only sells these modernist castles, but chooses two couture gowns for her forthcoming wedding, at which she arranges for snow to fall on her guests in the LA heat. She hires swans as well, which her fellow estate agents
– I have to keep reminding myself they are estate agents – consider eating, even though they don’t seem to actually eat: what a metaphor. I could watch this stuff all day. A convincing dreamworld is a very powerful anaesthetic and so the misery of pandemic makes Selling
Sunset more, not less, appealing. But one can only watch so many identical houses without screaming: why is that one more expensive than that one when they are exactly the same? What is the point of Barbie’s Dream House without Barbie to inhabit it? So, the added joy is in watching the characters interact, which they do on the orders of the producers. That this reality show is scripted seems obvious to me, although this seems to annoy people. Botoxed brows attempt to furrow, attempting to remember the lines. Those that cannot really walk also cannot really speak: we have reached a plateau of self-infantilisation.
So there is Christine the villain – though I think it is also entirely possible that Professor Terry Eagleton is her pen name. On the other side you find Mary the kind one and Chrishell the other kind one, whose slightly famous husband, who I will not name out of spite, broke up with her by text. They are in coalition with Maya the normal one – the only one in it to actually sell houses – and Amanza, who is a single mother of two and, therefore, the daylight upon the magic. She is the Cinderella amid castles – the loveliest single parent in the history of Los Angeles real estate – but, as of season three, she has failed to sell a house: no supercar for her, then, and possibly no food either. In Selling
Sunset the agents subsist on commission alone. There is no middle ground and there is no middle class. You have everything, or you have nothing. It is a disaster film with luxury goods, then; the game show of our future terrors.
When the agents are not selling identical houses to people who look just like them, they socialise together. This involves constant microaggressions, which really means that people are punished for telling the truth. The drama in Selling Sunset is all derived from the characters’ desire to hide their own savagery.
Consumption on this scale is all about savagery – what I have must be denied to others, or I will not have it – and the characters collude to hide it. If, like Davina, you mock Mary’s fiancé for not buying her a diamond ring, you are punished by not being invited to the wedding.
If, like Mary, you wonder whether there was “overlap” between Christian’s last affair before Christine and Christine herself, you will be punished by Christine’s very singular wrath. You have told the truth signified by the tolling bell: this is all about money.
The other punishment is sheer denial: the truth-teller will be called “fake”. I think of Charlie Brooker’s
Black Mirror episode Nosedive, in which points (or “ratings”) are given for pseudo-niceness in a world just like this one; for compliance under the system.
So, why has this become our obsession now – what pleasure are viewers taking in watching people spend $45million on a house when many of them are losing their jobs? Maybe this is a hit show because it exposes not only our anxieties but our deepest desires. As we face political turmoil and the recession of our lifetimes, the answer to the success of Selling Sunset is surely simple. We want to be rich – and thoughtless.
It is a disaster film with luxury goods; a game show of our future terrors