May the best story win
Justice Kardashian-style rooted in ego and spectacle
LOS ANGELES — Kim Kardashian West’s vision of justice is, to her, common sense.
The star has undergone an extensive rebrand — announcing, in a Vogue cover story last year, that she was working toward becoming a lawyer, after successfully petitioning U.S. President Donald Trump for clemency in the case of Alice Johnson, a nonviolent offender sentenced to life in prison. This coming into consciousness is now the subject of the feature-length documentary Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project (available in Canada on April 10 on the streaming service Hayu).
“I knew nothing about the system at all except for just that I know what feels fair in my heart and what doesn’t,” Kardashian West says. “I just saw something that seemed really unfair to me, and I thought that I had a voice.”
She does indeed have a voice — one that tends less to cut through cultural noise than to create it. This documentary converts into unpleasant spectacle what was always implicit in the star’s legal project: That, for her, reform of a system that causes chaos in the lives of so many, particularly of black Americans, comes in the package of the beneficent gift of individual attention to telegenic and unthreatening cases, rather than ... reform.
Leaving aside that in any other historical moment, Kardashian West would not have the president’s ear, it’s obviously not sustainable to alleviate the mass crowding of America’s prisons solely by appealing for clemency for specific prisoners.
And this documentary isn’t really suggesting that or about much more than the need to pivot a brand.
Inasmuch as there’s a structure here, it’s focused on Kardashian West’s continuing education, procured through the efforts of the incarcerated.
Her path to her J.D. does not include law school — an unorthodox method that has the practical effect of making those for whom she advocates her teachers. One young woman in prison appears visibly uncomfortable as she narrates to Kardashian West, and to us, a personal history involving rape and neglect; “Alexis is another story that just breaks my heart,” Kardashian West tells the camera.
Kardashian West is among a team of advocates working on cases like Alexis’, but the star’s tendency to prioritize speaking about cases in emotional terms makes one wonder what she thinks would be fair for people whose stories don’t break her heart, or that scare her a bit. That it is on Alexis to heighten Kardashian West’s emotions in order to get her attention suggests the star’s ideal future for the criminal justice reform movement functions something like GoFundMe does for the health-care industry: A patch whereby the best story wins.
Kardashian West’s intentions may matter less than her results, which — in the life of
Alice Johnson, at least — have been real. But there’s something garish and gross about a star personalizing an important cause by asking vulnerable people to open a vein on-camera and then never bothering to get back to the cause itself. The idea of decarceration, here, is an opportunity to listen, and to be shown listening.
Kardashian West has every right to make money through various endeavours while keeping her volunteer work going in the backbeat of her life, but there’s something grim and too obvious by half about shots of her calling Alice Johnson, to tell her that Trump has granted clemency, in full glam on the set of a photo shoot.
An always-on personality who, when not in aspiring-lawyer mode, tends to explicitly acknowledge the thuddingly Warholian nature of the existence she’s chosen, Kardashian West metabolizes everything in her line of sight as content. The documentary ends with its subject — her, of course, not the cause — reading a dictionary definition of “justice.” One doesn’t sense she’s edged any closer to really getting it.