Famous People #61: We're doing something else now
This party newsletter is facing an interesting challenge: there are no parties to go to, or at least, none that wouldn’t endanger our lives and the lives of everyone we know. But that doesn’t mean the feeling of a party is unavailable to us. We still have Bravo’s Summer House, our favorite television program about how to maintain a six-pack while drinking eight to ten espresso martinis with each meal. We’ll be recapping the entire series, which we have already seen, from the comfort of our own apartments, to no end but to establish a thorough public reminder, in the words of Kyle Cooke, spoken to his fiancé in the midst of a fight about his low-grade alcoholism: SUMMER! SHOULD! BE! FUN!
Kaitlyn: On a Tuesday night in Brooklyn, a blonde man explains the local geography to me. “Everyone’s heard of the Hamptons,” the one and only Kyle Cooke announces in voice-over. “That’s like your mom’s friend who wears pearls. My group of friends, we go to Montauk.” (There’s a quick montage of boobs and butts.) His groups of friends? They’ve been going to Montauk “every summer for years.” How many years? Nobody will ever say. These people are ageless. They may be 20-something, they may be 30-something, but you’ll never hazard a guess. The most common words out of their mouths will be “rosé all day” and the most common thing going into their mouths will be entire bottles of rosé. They are perpetually college freshmen. They are perpetually creative class white adults who can afford Summer Houses in Montauk. This is Summer House!
The first episode of Kyle’s television program is slightly disorienting, because the first several minutes are just a recap of an episode of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules that served as the show’s backdoor pilot. Fans of that show will recall that Katie, Stassi, Kristen, and Scheana went to Montauk to help Stassi recover from her breakup from Patrick, one of the worst men on Earth. They partied with the Summer House crew on the beach and delighted them by not knowing what a clam bake is. They fought a lot because Scheana did not want to do green tea shots, if I recall correctly. And because Stassi felt ugly and lonely—it was really one of the few episodes in which she was anything approaching a sympathetic character. Infamously at this group hang, Stassi and Kyle ended up drunk in an enormous indoor hot tub. He first forgot what her name was and then tried to reestablish the sexiness of the conversation by telling her that the white turtleneck bathing suit she had chosen made her look like Steve Jobs. (I have to say, and I thought this even before Stassi got fired from her job for racism, she overreacted to both things. A turtleneck bathing suit is weird, and worth commenting on. And her horrible ex-boyfriend Patrick may have remembered her name, but he also blocked her phone number whenever he went on long trips?)
Anyway, Kyle had been flirting because “Blondes are supposed to mate. Some recessive gene thing.” I wish he hadn’t said this right off the top because Kyle is actually a very decent and self-aware variety of bro who minds his own business and is generally kind to people. He is not a eugenicist as far as I can tell, and it’s a bad first impression if you’re coming in cold. He’s also hilarious, and when he apologizes to Stassi later he leads off with “Steve Jobs actually wore black, so that’s my bad.” The editors of Summer House, to establish how drunk he is, then cut to several seconds of him struggling to shove Utz potato chips into his face while lingering shirtless in the unlit foyer of his own home.
Stephen, a first-time resident of the Summer House who purports to be in a “transcontinental relationship,” explains that it’s not hard to understand how Kyle keeps his demented rock-hard bod: Most of his food ends up on the floor. Stephen has clearly practiced the talking head portion of this show for some time, and adds that when Kyle gets drunk, there is a lot of slow-motion posing and pointing, like “a Ken doll doing tai chi under water.” Haha! We are shown some of this and then cut back to Kyle, this time sitting alone at an immaculate marble counter, eating an entire bowl of watermelon in the glow of a single candle. I don’t know if we’re supposed to feel a blistering love for him, but I do. In fact, one of my most common experiences while scrolling through Instagram during quarantine was extreme tenderness toward Kyle, who seemed to be taking it all on the chin, and somehow maintaining his tan.
Eight minutes and 37 seconds into the show we meet Kyle’s foil and “boy”: Carl. Carl is taller than Kyle and has brown hair. (He’s also much sadder than Kyle, but we won’t know that for a while.) He informs us that “Sunday Funday” went really hard, but now he has to get back to the city to make money. He is currently employed as a sales rep for some kind of orthodontia company. The general unproven claim of this show is that everyone in the Summer House works hard and plays hard and earns their fun by hustling all week in the heat of the Big Apple. Some of them take the subway, others take Citi Bikes. At the moment, there is a montage of them making deals and “recommendations,” such as “capitalizing now.” One thing that really bothers me about Summer House’s conceptualization of work is that almost every cast member of Summer House works for themselves—running their own publicity firm, running their own lifestyle blog, running their own fitness app, etc.— except for Carl, who is the only one who is usually at high risk of losing his job. (I’m not sure where Stephen works, as I don’t think it ever comes up, but he does take a nap in a JP Morgan Chase beach towel in this episode, so he might be another exception.) It’s stressful.
But for now, that’s done. It’s July 4th weekend, and we are meeting Summer House residents the Wirkus twins. They are extremely tall and extremely blonde, and twins. Ashley is married and calls herself “married twin.” Lauren is single and calls herself “single twin.” She also reveals that her bra size is “32G as in giraffe.” All Ashley wants in this life is for Lauren to marry someone extremely similar to her own husband, Brad, but unfortunately Lauren rode up to the Summer House in a car with Carl, who she has diagnosed as “not only a babe, but single.” She asks him what his pick-up line is and he says “Hi, my name’s Carl.” Later, as Ashley and Lauren discuss whether he is a “player,” the editors cut to Carl’s bedroom, where he is fishing something out of his teeth with a hairbrush.
Here’s where I’ll pause to say that Carl is conventionally handsome and occasionally charming and he follows me on Instagram. I added him to my Close Friends list several months ago but he has yet to view a story. While re-watching the first episode of Summer House for this newsletter, I also paused to share all of this information with my boyfriend, who found it kind of annoying. (He later called Kyle “an unproblematic king,” and Carl “a freak.”)
Speaking of annoying, the next Summer House party animals we’re introduced to are Lindsay and Everett, who have been friends for “over two years” and dating for less than two months. Everett says he and Lindsay have a “symbiotic” relationship, like a clown fish and a sea anemone. This is an interesting metaphor to describe a relationship in which both parties are constantly screaming. Everett is as tall or taller than Carl, but his face looks like an ax blade with a beard and his essential function on this program is to tell others to “shut up” while they are trying to express their emotions.
This is getting very long, but it’s not my fault it’s exposition week. Here’s some more rapid-fire scene-setting: Lauren insists there is a tick problem around the property; Carl insists that Lauren is “a hot chick” and, if he were a tick, he too would crawl up her leg and into her underwear; Kyle reveals he was born in 1982 and does not want to be “bromenting” in his 40s. Nevertheless, he did not want to be “cuffed during the summer” either, so he broke up with his 24-year-old girlfriend Amanda shortly before arriving in Montauk. She wanted things to be serious; he wanted things to be just hookups, and he ultimately ended it rather than continue hurting her feelings. Mature, I think!
Of course, the next image we see is Amanda’s blurred-out naked butt as she joins Kyle in the hot tub. “Spy music,” reads the closed-captioning.
We are nearing the end of our first day in the Summer House, but there are several more conflicts and unspoken emotional problems to establish, which the editors choose to work through in a positively bizarre series of rapid cuts. Lindsay comes outside in a cut-off tank top that says “Lolita,” and is yelled at by her roommate Christina, who is an entertainment reporter and frequently unhappy. (Lindsay stole her sunscreen.) At lunch with the boys, Carl admits that he once booked a sky writer so he could propose to a woman, but didn’t go through with it because she was too materialistic. Then he sends a bottle of rosé over to a table of women sitting nearby—one bottle for like 11 people. He crouches near the hip of one of the women and says he would stand, but he’s too tall. Christina admits to Lindsay that her hostility comes from bottled-up resentment: all Lindsay talks about is her relationship with Everett, and she never asks Christina any questions about her life. Lindsay’s expression does not change, but she does say “I’ll do more of an effort to care.”
Night falls in Montauk. Carl burns himself with a sparkler and everyone goes to the club. Lauren is flirting with him, and he can tell, because they teach you about that on “day two of man school.” They kiss in the club, and he asks her an absolutely fascinating question. “How many guys hearts do you think you’ve shattered?”
Next week, Lizzie will recap episode two of Summer House.