Kim Kardashian began the first season of the E! reality series "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" wanting to set the record straight. Her sex tape with her former boyfriend, the R&B singer Ray J, had leaked, and Kim and her momager, Kris, felt the logical way to address it was to appear on Tyra Banks' talk show.
Dressed in a high-necked, ruffled, wine-colored blouse that smacked positively Victorian, Kim pleaded her case: "I have little sisters who I had to explain myself to. I need to try and teach them what not to do."
To which Banks deadpanned, "Not to have sex and tape it?"
Or maybe not to go on TV and talk about it. Or not feature yourself in a reality show when your very loose fame derives largely from starring in a widely discussed sex tape.
In tonight's season finale (at 10:30), which follows a marathon of the first season, Kim hasn't progressed far. Instead, she's on the morning radio show of Ryan Seacrest (an executive producer of this series) to set the record straight about her love life.
Really, with so much misinformation out in the world, shouldn't there be a premium on good ol' information?
Maybe not. After all, Kim Kardashian is made of the stuff of legend, of image, of collective fantasy. "The great face, the hair, the booty" -- so sayeth no less an expert on image-making than Hugh Hefner, in the episode in which Kim sticks to her values and doesn't strip down for her Playboy cover pictorial -- "People are gonna say, 'Oh, all she's good for is taking her clothes off. Can she do anything else?' " -- and then, you know, gives in.
And Kim is much more an icon for our times than her longtime frenemy Paris Hilton, notable by her complete absence from this series, even as no fewer than five stars of other reality programs about Southern California's young and beautiful -- Brittny Gastineau ("Gastineau Girls"), Brody Jenner ("The Princes of Malibu," "The Hills" and Kim's stepbrother), Frankie Delgado ("Twentyfourseven," "The Hills"), and Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson ("The Girls Next Door") -- make cameos. Paris comes from money and lineage; by comparison, Kim is a bootstrapper. Twenty-four months ago, she hardly registered a blip on the social radar; now, she is ubiquitous. And though the circumstances of her rise to notoriety are perhaps not the most desirable, or the most forgiving, she seems determined to turn them to her advantage, blowback be damned.
