The Kardashians Explain Everything (Because They Are Everything)
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Told a certain way, the life of Kimberly Noel Kardashian maps neatly onto the entire history of media in the new millennium. In her teen-age years, Kim’s family was part of the biggest televised spectacle to date, as her father, Robert Kardashian, successfully defended O. J. Simpson in his murder trial. In her twenties, Kim worked as a personal stylist for Paris Hilton and showed up as a bit character in Hilton’s reality series “The Simple Life.” That show prompted grumblings that Hilton and her ilk were famous only for being famous, a mantle that Kim soon took up. In 2007, a sex tape starring her with the singer Ray J became an early case study in virality in the streaming era. (Ray J has since claimed that the tape was leaked by Kim and her mother, Kris Jenner, an allegation that they both deny.) The same year saw the début of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” which would, of course, become one of the most successful reality franchises ever and transform the Kardashian clan into both television celebrities and online protagonists of innumerable memes derived from choice snippets.
TV made the Kardashian clan, but the internet clinched and multiplied their fame—they are “new media” celebrities, perhaps the biggest examples thereof, as the writer and psychotherapist M. J. Corey documents in her book “Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto.” Kim and her siblings, particularly her half sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, built up millions of followers in the early days of social media, becoming ur-stars of Twitter and Instagram. (One of Kim’s memorably random tweets from 2010: “Nicole Richie reminds me of my jeep.”) Kim’s climb from there to the glam heights of Hollywood inspired a mobile game in 2014, the goal of which was to rise from the E-list to the A-list of celebrity. Her buxom re-creation of a Grace Jones photograph for the cover of Paper was designed to “break the internet,” as the magazine itself trumpeted. In 2015, her voluminous selfies were collected in a glossy book published by Rizzoli, titled “Selfish,” which helped to legitimatize a genre once derided for its narcissism as a modern mode of self-expression. Her marriage to Kanye West cemented a new kind of multi-platform fame, as the couple became omnipresent cultural forces in music, fashion, television, beauty, and even religion, when they launched a “Sunday Service” series of spiritual events, complete with streetwear. Propelled by our algorithmic feeds onto every small screen, in every conceivable format, Kim Kardashian became less an individual mega-celebrity than a scalable digital spectacle, attaining the kind of iconicity that the entire family seems to crave; they have even been known to turn Robert, their late patriarch, into a hologram to dispense fatherly wisdom.
Corey has long operated as a kind of meta-Kardashian influencer online, building up hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube by sharing conversational videos (“why fans feel betrayed”) and Kardashian memes remixed with quotes from critical theory (Kris Jenner x Chris Kraus) under the name Kardashian Kolloquium. (Corey is a pseudonym; she studied creative nonfiction and counselling psychology at Columbia and has contributed pieces of Kimlinology to The New Yorker.) The book, an extension of this œuvre, deploys a litany of canonical media theorists and philosophers—Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Bourdieu, Thorstein Veblen—to argue that the Kardashians are “an intentional amalgamation,” “a composite of historical touch points, media tropes, and shifting identities.” They are ciphers that consciously assume whatever shapes are most likely to gain them the most exposure—in other words, they are flesh-and-blood memes.
Corey charts the many different pop-cultural archetypes that the Kardashians, and Kim in particular, have played with through the years, often by playing dress-up: the all-American romantic doom of Marilyn Monroe, the ethnically ambiguous curvaceousness of Disney’s Princess Jasmine, the wifely devotion of Jacqueline Kennedy, the girl-group antics of the Spice Girls (when Kim dressed up as Posh in high school). Kim excels at metabolizing the idols of past eras—“performing the particular thrill of borrowed glamour,” Corey writes—but she is also a bellwether of the present. Extravagantly mutable and well maintained, the Kardashians’ very bodies have morphed to take on trends. Their self-transformations include Kylie’s filler-stuffed lips, Kim’s rumored Brazilian butt lift, and Kris’s recently publicized facelift, all of which helped inject such cosmetic procedures into the mainstream. “Kim’s ass . . . seemed to expand in tandem with all the growing interest in her body,” Corey writes. The more ass, the more attention—at least until that particular semiotic bubble popped, and the Kardashians appeared to deflate their rear ends, around 2022. Swapping paramours, hobbies, and physical features, the Kardashians shape—and epitomize—the Zeitgeist.
Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their vast audience. They are aspirational American consumers, flaunting their luxury-brand logos, in addition to being models of the American dream, as billionaire entrepreneurs. (The Kar-Jenner sisters have benefitted from collabs between their respective companies, such as a KKW x Kylie “lip set,” and from posing for Kim’s Kardashian-silhouette-inspired shapewear brand, Skims.) They are relatable mothers, daughters, sisters, and stepsiblings, as a blended family whose tumultuous relationships are documented on reality TV. The book is studded with amusing pieces of Kardashian lore that might be familiar only to devotees. Do you remember Kimoji, a $1.99 mobile app that provided two hundred and fifty Kim-themed emoji? The family once used prosthetic costumes to blend into the normie crowd on a Hollywood bus tour, only to make a run for it to escape photo-takers. Kimye’s 2022 divorce saga was effectively styled by Balenciaga, incepting the label into the public consciousness, one paparazzi photo at a time. Corey pithily sums up Kim’s pattern “of accommodating the public’s appetite for private affairs, and of making reality out of make-believe.”
Yet “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” is also a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative. It can read like social-media commentary, with disjointed riffing on one subject after another, and familiar critical ideas trotted out repeatedly. Corey references McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message” in the book’s preface, then repeats it three times in the first chapter, then once more, for good measure, in the sixth. In a final “Archives” section, she writes, “Now is a good time to bring in good old Marshall McLuhan.” (The McLuhan is the message.) The book seems designed for an online follower of Corey’s, who already knows the details of the Kardashian story and craves exegesis. The lay reader would benefit from a more sustained, linear biography of Kardashianism, but even in the latter half of the book, which proceeds roughly chronologically, the text darts among subjects and eras, often in the span of the same paragraph. A passage about varieties of self-concealment skips from ninjas to Odysseus to Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.” Ironically, the Kardashians themselves, usually so expert at capturing attention, get lost in the mix.
Corey is generous in quoting the works of other writers (myself among them) and includes many Kardashian-fandom social posts as a kind of vox populi, but an overabundance of references disrupts the flow of larger ideas. The book is more dekonstruction and less manifesto; its credo may be contained in the line “To me, the Kardashians are no different from other enduring national institutions such as Las Vegas, Disney, and the WWE,” which is not a particularly controversial statement about a family that has long been accepted as American royalty. One of the book’s more sustained, intriguing scenes comes, several hundred pages in, when Corey describes how she came to start posting videos about the Kardashians. She was staying at her mother’s home in Arizona during the pandemic and began filming herself in the carport, after getting advice from a Gen Z friend that “pop culture-tok” could be a good home for cultural commentary that she had begun to do on Instagram. She went from having fifteen thousand followers on Instagram to more than a hundred and eighty thousand on TikTok. “If I’d learned anything from the Kardashians, it was that diversifying mediums is a wise move,” Corey writes. The Kardashian scholar had become a Kardashian-style content creator.
If you hitch your fortunes to the Kardashians for long enough, you’re bound to get ensnared in one drama or another. Late in the book, Corey describes the harassment she faced when she declined to weigh in on a Balenciaga controversy that some observers felt implicated Kim and Kanye by association. “It was my job, as a volunteer cultural critic, to deconstruct and then moralize about such a revelation, as everyone else on the platform was doing,” Corey writes in an apt summary of a writer’s current role on the internet. Other accounts then tried to rage-bait their followers into attacking Corey’s “silence.” Attention online—which is to say, the modern entertainment industry at large—can look a bit like a pyramid scheme, with each lower layer trying to siphon a segment of audience away from the more famous one above. It is that ruthless practice of eliciting engagement at any cost that may be the Kardashians’ true innovation, and the life style is not for everyone. As Corey writes, “I just wanted to post my wannabe Barthes takes in peace.” ♦