Tensions between the two reached a boiling point. Kris wanted to ship his boxes out to Kim’s house in Los Angeles. Kim said that his stuff wouldn’t fit in her house, because she has lots of clothes or something. Kourtney offered some unwelcome marital advice: “You’re such a bitch, Kim.” At that point, Kim ran down the hotel hall to what appeared to be the backstage makeup room from All About Eve, and she began the Breakdown. Here’s what she said:
“I feel bad for him. I feel sad. I feel bad for the guy. I changed his whole life. You don’t think I feel bad that I invited all these people to this huge wedding. I wasted everyone’s time. I wasted everyone’s money. I wasted everyone’s everything. I’m 30 years old. I thought I’d be married with kids. I’m not.”
Now, to people who believe in Theory No. 1, this all probably just looked like an extended crocodile-tears fake monologue. But I would argue that that theory doesn’t really make any sense: We can all agree that Kim Kardashian is not a good actress, so there’s no way those tears weren’t real. Partisans of Theory No. 2 would argue that we’re being totally cynical, and Kim is just a girl who wanted a fairy-tale marriage and didn’t realize that actual fairy tales — as opposed to the cleaned-up Disney brand of fairy tale — are horrifying stories that always end up teaching people sad lessons about the madness of existence.
I think, though, that Kim wasn’t crying because her marriage was ending. She was crying because, for one brief moment, she suddenly realized the very basic truth that the rest of us figured out months ago: Her marriage could never last because she is on television. For some bizarre reason, she decided to take her new husband straight from the honeymoon into the least livable living situation imaginable: Sharing an apartment with an insane person (Kourtney), the spawn of Satan (Scott), a child who seems destined to always have a Band-Aid on his face (Mason), and a flock of camerapeople desperate to capture the new couple at their absolute worst.
How could anyone think that a healthy relationship could flourish in that situation? Kim did — or at least she convinced herself she did, probably with some help from her cruel overseers at E! and her Machiavellian mother. As the episode came to a close, Kim took the unusual step of breaking the fourth wall: “I film everything. I’m so open with the public. There comes a time when you have to handle your issues privately. I need to go back home in LA. We just need to figure this out privately.”
Which is, in context, an utterly ludicrous thing to say. Every other aspect of their relationship was captured by the cameras. (You have to figure that, if Kris Jenner had been in the loop, she would have insisted that Kim confront her husband with divorce papers on camera.) But that was how Kourtney and Kim Take New York ended: After a season of teasing the Kris-Kim divorce, the episode concluded with the pair technically still together.
They couldn’t look each other in the eye as they were driven out to the airport. They looked like a couple high schoolers already regretting going all the way at the prom. They looked like Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross at the end of The Graduate. They looked, in short, like two people who badly wished that there wasn’t a camera staring straight at them. For a brief, fascinating moment, Kourtney and Kim Take New York was a reality show about people trying to escape from being on a reality show.
Follow Darren on Twitter: @EWDarrenFranich
