The most unbelievable thing about Vanderpump Rules, which is essentially Westworld if all the hosts were made out of DNA from the herpes virus, is that Martin Scorsese is a fan. Actually, it’s not that unbelievable. What is this show if not the sweeping tragedy of our time? Just look at this reunion, we had love, redemption, fights, cried off eyelashes, whatever is going on with Ariana’s dress, and Billie Lee, the one person in the SUR-niverse that everyone can agree that they actually like.
We learn that Scorsese is a fan through Lala, who heard it from her boyfriend, Randall Emmett who produced Scorsese’s most recent movie Silence. We also learn that just about everyone has met Rand and they all seem to love him. He even plays poker with the Toms. The only person who doesn’t like him and keeps calling him a fat old man is DJ James Kennedy, and that’s because he is obviously very in love with Lala.
The whole situation with Randall and the show seems really weird. It seems like he loves the show, loves that Lala is famous, loves hanging out with the whole gang, and loves talking about his connection to it. If he’s so keen on it, why isn’t he on the show? Can’t he show his face as much as Stassi’s ex Patrick showed his manbun? Or would that ruin that spell that Lala has him under in some way.
Lala also let us know just what her man pays for. Aside from the private plane trips — which Katie enjoys even though she said she’d rather book her own plane than have someone’s man pay for it — he also pays for some of her rent and leases her car for her. But she’s on the hook for her rent “after a cap,†which seems sort of like the opposite of your health insurance deductible and just as vague and confusing. She’s also in charge of paying for the insurance on her cars, including the BMW I8, which she has to “dink around in for a few months.†I mean, this thing has doors that open like this!
While I enjoyed Lala tremendously this season and certainly on this reunion, I don’t know about her stance on feminism. Like she said, she seems less of a feminist and more into the “power of the pussy,†which is basically just using her body and her looks to get what she wants out of life. But that is her choice and she is welcome to it. If I were an attractive woman in my 20s, I would use my wiles to make all of my dreams come true too. I mean, I’m a stale twink entering middle age and there’s a lot I’d do for some free shit; it’s just that no one really wants to take me up on that offer.
What I did like this season is that Lala tried to bring all of the women together and get them to empower each other. On a show like this, which is mostly about them ripping each other apart for sleeping with each other’s boyfriends, that message of banding together to fight a group of men who can’t even use #MeToo properly is about as feminist as it’s going to get. I do love that each of the women at the reunion thinks that they’re a feminist, just in different ways. It shows that the people on the show are maybe a little bit deeper than the pond in front of Lisa’s front door where the swans swim. Well, except for Scheana. She really is that shallow.
Not only did we get to hear more about Lala’s boyfriend at the reunion, we also got some footage of James’s roommate Paul. Oh, man. Paul is a 50-year-old man who looks like an orthodontist who got lost in a True Religion store and had to buy his way out of it. He looks like someone who was probably invited to a famous gay director’s pool partiy full of twinks in Speedoes trying to make a splash in the entertainment industry. James probably met him through his gay BFF Logan, a Planter’s Punch someone drew a face on.
I shouldn’t be so mean to Paul because we only saw him for like a second, but he was definitely an older gentleman who was trying to dress like he was much younger and the camera even did a condescending swoop so that we would be sure to check out the entire outfit. He asks James if he wants to go out to dinner and says, “I probably owe you a dinner.†What would Paul owe James a dinner for? James has been crashing on his living room floor behind a Japanese screen for years. If anything James is the one that owes Paul the dinner.
That’s why I think that James might have an arrangement that’s more similar to Lala’s than he lets on. We know nothing about Paul, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where he’s giving James a significant break on rent so that he gets to see an attractive younger gentleman walk to the bathroom wearing only his baggy boxer briefs while he sits at the kitchen table drinking his morning coffee. I mean, I don’t know for a fact that Paul placed nanny cams all over the apartment, but it just seems like that might possibly be very true.
The most satisfying moment of this third of the reunion (seriously, three parts?!) was the revelation of just how Katie fell through a skylight and almost died. Turns out she was taking some photos with friends on the roof and she sat on a skylight and it broke. There was no Monopoly playing, as some people implied, or any other craziness. However, I feel like this should have been better explained when it was initially brought up. It’s not that complicated, but somehow this completely insane story confused us all.
The really complicated thing was what exactly happened with Tom and the chick he made out with when he was blackout drunk. Katie says she doesn’t mind because she went to high school with her? So, she went to high school with Katie, but is also a friend of Lala’s? I am so incredibly confused by all of this. And, yes, Katie let Tom off way too easy, but they seem to be in a really good place. Tom even says that cheating on Katie made him feel smaller than “a possum’s prick,†and for a second I was very jealous of this penis that Schwartz was talking about. I wonder what Scorsese would make of all of this in his next movie: Animal Penises.