Is keeping up getting more difficult for the Kardashians?
Kanye’s presidential ambitions and mental health problems have thrown Kim Kardashian for a loop, and now her famous family find themselves at a crossroads, writes Donal Lynch
IT was a setting as far away from the elegant and perfectly lit interiors of Keeping Up With the Kardashians as it is possible to imagine: a car park outside a Wendy’s fast food joint in rural Wyoming. Through dirty glass, Kim Kardashian’s billion-dollar face was knotted in what looked, jarringly, like very real anguish. This was, reportedly, the moment when she and Kanye West talked out his most recent tailspin.
It came just a few days after his chaotic press conference at which he discussed the details of his audacious and slightly bizarre run for US president, and a day after he had apologised on Twitter for saying, variously, that he wanted to divorce Kim, that they had considered her having an abortion and alleging she was “out of line” for meeting the rapper Meek Mill at a hotel in LA.
In the media circus that followed, Kim had issued a statement pleading for understanding. She wrote of “a brilliant and complicated person… who had had to deal with the pressure and isolation of his bipolar disorder”. She carefully and cleverly limited the damage. She walked the line between being sensitive to Kanye’s condition while distancing herself from his ramblings. She maybe, for a moment, pondered what an explosive Keeping Up With the Kardashians (KUWTK) season kazillion opener all this would make for — like Faye Dunaway in Network, she always has one eye on ratings. But the tears did not seem staged; this was not reality TV acting. There in the passenger seat of a worn-looking Prius, she was, for one endearingly unguarded moment, just one of millions of people who struggle with the fallout from a family member’s mental illness. It was a heartrending, relatable moment of vulnerability, more intimate, more revealing than the reality show which made her famous.
Beneath the anguish there was probably some annoyance as well. The Kardashians do not like when someone goes off-message and redirects the spotlight away from the sisters. The last person to hijack the family narrative was Caitlyn Jenner, and just as Kim felt blindsided by Caitlyn’s famous Vanity Fair article, it seems unlikely she signed off on Kanye’s latest wild stunt. To Kim, and to us, the male partner’s role on KUWTK is to enter the room, look slightly dazed and mumble something unintelligible while the sisters pick at expensive salads. They are, at most, to be “concern-bitched about”, such as happened to their brother Rob after he got fat. Hogging the whole show isn’t on for any guy. Calling Kris Jenner “Kris Jong-un”, as Kanye also did, certainly isn’t on.
Kim made no comment at all when Kanye’s attempt at running for the presidency was first announced, in early July, and when she posted a picture of him to Instagram last week, there was no mention of his supposed candidacy (a ‘Kandidacy’, surely, if she had her way), which has the whiff, TMZ noted, of a manic episode. “Everyone gets a million dollars for having a baby” was one of the saner policy announcements, and it is notable that West’s most prominent supporter is another erratic billionaire, Elon Musk, who will be in charge of the space programme in the event that the rapper’s candidacy isn’t just a silly-season fever dream.
The American media has been slightly mesmerised by the Forrest Gump-like wackiness of Kanye 2020 but it’s not clear if the “genius billionaire Christian”, as he calls himself, even can run. Celebrities as politicians may be all the rage, but even Donald Trump, by whom Kanye until only recently appeared to be slightly mesmerised, ran quite a few times before he made any headway. He probably learned that a little form-filling is required. Kanye does not appear to have registered his name with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for November’s election. The closest name the FEC database shows is a candidate called ‘Kanye Deez Nutz West’, who filed their papers with the Green Party in 2015 under the address ‘1977 Golddigger Avenue, Suite Yeezus’ and appears to have raised no money. Last November when he announced to a crowd at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival that he was running, there was laughter. Vanity Fair reported that Kim was “mortified” and the whole debacle will be “banned” from upcoming KUWTK scenes.
Kim’s refusal to become another clown in Kanye’s circus has also coincided with a period of relative quiet for showbiz’s most lucrative matriarchy. While other celebrities relentlessly updated their social media with news of their Covid coping over the last few months, the Kardashians immediately ceased their barrage of ads for Kylie Cosmetics, KKW Beauty, Good American and their other product tie-ins. Instead it was tastefully sparse public service announcements: Kylie, her hair in a businesslike bun, urging people to stay inside. Perhaps, for once, they weren’t sure how to pivot, although other celebrities had muscled in on the reality revelations. Either way, the franchise has seemed strangely illequipped for the new normal. The new season features edited versions of footage each of the sisters filmed on their phones. There are no fights, no being teased. Nobody, that we know of, has been clocked with a Birkin bag. It raises the question, after more than a decade in the spotlight, are the Kardashians finally struggling to keep up?
For better or for worse, a certain worthiness has been mixed in with the glossy trash. While the fanfare has been around Kanye’s politics, Kim, quietly,
has become by far the most politically active of the family. In October, Kim, whose family is of Armenian descent, urged her 62 million Twitter followers to call on Congress to recognise the Armenian genocide within the Ottoman Empire, which was centred on what is now Turkey, a century ago. A few days later, the House of Representatives, amid concerns overTurkey’s military actions in Syria, voted to do just that and to sanction Turkey. Afterwards, a political reporter tweeted: “Kim Kardashian is probably the most successful policy advocate during the Trump administration so far”.
In the topsy-turvy world of American politics in the Trump era, celebrities are the new lobbyists. In 2018 Kim famously campaigned for clemency for grandmother Alice Marie Johnson, who had been imprisoned for nearly two decades for a first-time non-violent offence. Kourtney, meanwhile, journeyed to Washington, where she partnered with the Environmental Working Group for better laws governing cosmetics in the US. “You shouldn’t have to do all of the research when it comes to making sure your family’s products are free of toxic ingredients,” Kourtney wrote on Instagram.
That same year Kim became a vocal proponent of stricter gun control laws in the US. She attended the March for our Lives in Washington — and brought
Kendall, wearing an anti Trump jacket along — and spoke of her fears about her kids growing up in a world where guns are on the streets. “In almost 20 years, our country has made very little progress in enacting laws that would help protect innocent Americans from people who should not have access to firearms,” she wrote on Instagram.
Kim has also been a vocal proponent of the abolition of the death penalty in the US. She supports Rodney Reed, who was sentenced to death 20 years ago for the 1996 rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman, although he and his lawyer say they have evidence that exonerates him.
Kim says that her lawyers and Reed’s lawyers are in touch and she’s kept abreast of proceedings because of the “attorney-client” privilege that comes with being in law school, as she is currently. Last November she wrote: ‘I had the honor of meeting #RodneyReed in person and the privilege of sitting with him when he got the news that the highest court in Texas had issued a stay of execution and remanded the case back to the trial court for further consideration. Words cannot describe the relief and hope that swept over the room in that moment.”
Feminism is one cause that Kim seems uncomfortable with. She says she’s not a feminist, and the ridiculously proportioned, consumerist vision of modern womanhood that she and her sisters present hardly seems empowering. But there can be no doubt that when they came on the scene in 2007, they did upend the idea that famous women will be chewed up and spat out by media. Not
for the Kardashians the stalking that Princess Diana endured, the hounding that Britney Spears went through or the cloying pity that was Jennifer Aniston’s lot. They had their own narratives readymade and they were the first ones to commodify gossip about themselves into endless revenue streams, cutting out the tabloid middlemen and making billions in the process. They beamed into the brains of millions of young girls an image of a family where women were in charge.
Presiding over it all was Kris Jenner, who began shopping her daughters’ catfight showreel mere weeks after the sex tape of Kim (with the singer Ray J) almost broke the internet. “There was so much media coverage swirling around Kim then, both positive and negative, that we knew we had to act fast and take advantage of the moment,” Jenner writes in her memoir.
The tape was a mere minute of footage but it sealed the Faustian pact and began the transformation of the family into a global brand. “Hey, I’m Kim Kardashian, and I get to live every girl’s dream,” Kim, a celebrity stylist at the time, intoned over footage of her posing for photographers, signing autographs and flicking through stacks of clothing. Seconds later, she was introducing her family.
“I’m going to throw raw chicken up your cooch,” her sister Kourtney shouted in the background, apropos of nothing. The reel went on to explain how Kim, Khloe and Kourtney’s dad was Robert Kardashian — OJ Simpson’s best friend — and how 16 years ago, Kris had divorced Robert and married the retired Olympian
Bruce (father of the youngest daughters Kylie and Kendall ) — now Caitlyn—Jenner. Then Kim wrapped up. Whatever the future held, she explained, “we’ll fight, scratch and bitch our way through all the drama, together as one big happy family”.
Some of that was true. They reached the top and became so influential that a simple cocaine rumour involving Kim garnered more social media engagement than Donald Trump Jr.’s screenshotted Russia emails.
But they never seemed especially happy, particularly, in latter years, as Kim and Khloe took the reins of revelation and ran with them. The two sisters fought constantly with Kourtney, who has a relatable sarcasm (She does a mean impression of Kim: “I pretty much invented this family, none of you would be anything without me”) and who, they think, doesn’t expose enough of herself in the show.
And yet, to the untrained eye, Kourtney also goes pretty far. In one typical episode Scott Disick, Kourtney’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her three children, is seen grimacing backstage as she tells the show’s viewers that their relationship was “definitely psychotic”. In another episode, he announces that he’s “dying here” as the sisters politely pretend they didn’t hear and continue eating salad from bowls the size of UFOs.
Rob Kardashian, the only boy in the family, is spoken of in tones that mix pity with vicious criticism about his weight gain and supposed lack of focus. An amateur psychologist might say that he had to have a baby with his half-sister’s boyfriend’s ex-fiancée just to get some of his mother’s attention (Kris produced this bit in a stand-alone docusoap).
Amy Schumer once said that what made the Kardashian girls most special was that each of them took the face they were born with as a “light suggestion” of what they eventually ended up with. Present-day Kylie, her lips plumped with filler, her brows as done as any drag queen, tells the camera “I feel like I can’t even remember a time before Keeping Up,” and later adds: “I missed out on being normal”. A small price to pay for being the world’s youngest billionaire.
The ultimate selling point of the Kardashians, besides their luxuriously upholstered posteriors, has always been that they combined social debate with crying in diamonds. They can be appreciated as trash TV but they can still spawn semi-regular think pieces in The New York Times. They exist on the fault lines of multiple major issues: a mixed-raced family in an era of Black Lives Matter; a transgender father at a moment when trans rights are being debated.
Kanye, even if his mental health problems are off limits, is a logical continuation of all this. Whether it’s silly or serious, his presidential run has propelled the family back into the spotlight at a moment when Covid has caused a lull in celebrity news. It may force Kim to face her own limits of what she will reveal and how far she will go to protect the family brand.
In an episode which aired last year, the entire family were shown relaxing aboard a luxury yacht, before a wave suddenly washed over the side, drenching them all and shaking the boat. It seemed as fitting a metaphor as any for the family’s decade in the spotlight, and as Kanye’s descent continues, Kim must be preparing for the next deluge.