All over America this week, parents faced a very modern problem: how to explain the Kim Kardashian divorce to their children.
How could it be otherwise? America’s latest approximation of a royal wedding is still playing on TV, over and over and over again, even though it’s been more than a week since the professional reality TV starlet told the tabloids that she had filed for divorce from Kris Humphries, a basketball player for the New Jersey Nets. Yet the kids come home from school and there it is on the tube, in high definition: America’s fairy-tale wedding.
The cognitive dissonance was smothering. For a while this week, it seemed that the Kardashians were all that America was talking about, Greek debt be damned.
Not only has the end of Ms. Kardashian’s 72-day marriage been a headline on the TV morning shows for three days running, it’s also been the subject of ferocious online debates, endless water-cooler chatter and a limerick from the writer Salman Rushdie, published as a series of Twitter messages. It has even become a rallying point for gay marriage activists who ask why brief male-female marriages are not considered damaging to the institution of marriage but gay unions are.
But the question that hovers over all the debates and attention is a simple one: Why do we care? Why does anyone?
Thomas de Zengotita, author of “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It,” contends that the fascination with Ms. Kardashian and other reality stars is not evidence of the decline of Western culture, as tempting as that thought might be. Instead, he says, the growing sophistication of viewers allows them to watch reality television on several different levels.
“Why reality TV shows have gone so far is that, in the broadest possible sense, it is about us,” Mr. de Zengotita said.
First, he said, there is the simple identification with the interactions between Ms. Kardashian; her sisters; their manager/mother, Kris Jenner; and their beleaguered stepfather, Bruce Jenner, who used to be known as America’s greatest decathlete.
That sense was very much in evidence on Thursday at Dash, the Manhattan boutique owned by the Kardashian sisters, where there is sometimes a line to get in (but, for the record, no 72-day return policy).
“They remind me of my own family,” said Melissa Porter, 26, of Scherer, Ind., who said she sometimes teased her mother the same way the Kardashian sisters tease their mother.
Before posing for a photo outside Dash, her friend Tyne Pierce, 25, of Clearwater, Fla., had another explanation for the fame of the runaway newlywed, one that some E! executives have privately echoed this week. “You can get wrapped up in wedding hype,” she said, standing next to her husband, who just smiled silently.
There is another level of viewing, Mr. de Zengotita said: envy for the lives of the rich and famous. Running concurrently with envy is the urge to mock the wealth and spectacle of the Kardashian lives as the sisters move from party to party, product placement to product placement.
(Ms. Kardashian reportedly netted $18 million through the wedding, though the family has said that figure is inflated.)
It was this level that inspired wits like Mr. Rushdie to render his take on the wedding mess in limerick:
The marriage of poor kim #kardashian
was krushed like a kar in a krashian
her kris kried, not fair!
why kan’t I keep my share?
But kardashian fell klean outa fashian.
And it prompted the Toronto political writer Andrew Coyne to dust off the Edwardian form the clerihew:
Kim Kardashian
Was a slave to her passion
She married for l’amour
Or perhaps for an hour.
For Ms. Kardashian’s television home, the E! network, the explosion of interest is further proof of the triumph of reality television, which began as an inexpensive gimmick but has now conquered the airwaves and beyond.
How could it be otherwise? America’s latest approximation of a royal wedding is still playing on TV, over and over and over again, even though it’s been more than a week since the professional reality TV starlet told the tabloids that she had filed for divorce from Kris Humphries, a basketball player for the New Jersey Nets. Yet the kids come home from school and there it is on the tube, in high definition: America’s fairy-tale wedding.
The cognitive dissonance was smothering. For a while this week, it seemed that the Kardashians were all that America was talking about, Greek debt be damned.
Not only has the end of Ms. Kardashian’s 72-day marriage been a headline on the TV morning shows for three days running, it’s also been the subject of ferocious online debates, endless water-cooler chatter and a limerick from the writer Salman Rushdie, published as a series of Twitter messages. It has even become a rallying point for gay marriage activists who ask why brief male-female marriages are not considered damaging to the institution of marriage but gay unions are.
But the question that hovers over all the debates and attention is a simple one: Why do we care? Why does anyone?
Thomas de Zengotita, author of “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It,” contends that the fascination with Ms. Kardashian and other reality stars is not evidence of the decline of Western culture, as tempting as that thought might be. Instead, he says, the growing sophistication of viewers allows them to watch reality television on several different levels.
“Why reality TV shows have gone so far is that, in the broadest possible sense, it is about us,” Mr. de Zengotita said.
First, he said, there is the simple identification with the interactions between Ms. Kardashian; her sisters; their manager/mother, Kris Jenner; and their beleaguered stepfather, Bruce Jenner, who used to be known as America’s greatest decathlete.
That sense was very much in evidence on Thursday at Dash, the Manhattan boutique owned by the Kardashian sisters, where there is sometimes a line to get in (but, for the record, no 72-day return policy).
“They remind me of my own family,” said Melissa Porter, 26, of Scherer, Ind., who said she sometimes teased her mother the same way the Kardashian sisters tease their mother.
Before posing for a photo outside Dash, her friend Tyne Pierce, 25, of Clearwater, Fla., had another explanation for the fame of the runaway newlywed, one that some E! executives have privately echoed this week. “You can get wrapped up in wedding hype,” she said, standing next to her husband, who just smiled silently.
There is another level of viewing, Mr. de Zengotita said: envy for the lives of the rich and famous. Running concurrently with envy is the urge to mock the wealth and spectacle of the Kardashian lives as the sisters move from party to party, product placement to product placement.
(Ms. Kardashian reportedly netted $18 million through the wedding, though the family has said that figure is inflated.)
It was this level that inspired wits like Mr. Rushdie to render his take on the wedding mess in limerick:
The marriage of poor kim #kardashian
was krushed like a kar in a krashian
her kris kried, not fair!
why kan’t I keep my share?
But kardashian fell klean outa fashian.
And it prompted the Toronto political writer Andrew Coyne to dust off the Edwardian form the clerihew:
Kim Kardashian
Was a slave to her passion
She married for l’amour
Or perhaps for an hour.
For Ms. Kardashian’s television home, the E! network, the explosion of interest is further proof of the triumph of reality television, which began as an inexpensive gimmick but has now conquered the airwaves and beyond.
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