A few days ago Paris Hilton launched her You Tube cooking show. It's a lot of things, among those potential descriptors, 'bland', 'riveting', 'mundane-surreal', and 'dissociative'. But maybe above all of these things, it felt dystopian. To the point Paris is wetting a paper towel to remedy a (nearly) comedic instant of over-seasoning from a refrigerated bottle of Evian, saying 'you don't know what's in the sewer; omg brutal'. It's difficult to gauge just exactly if she's consciously inhabiting the public Paris persona (whatever that is in 2020) or if she's possibly presenting herself with celebrity-skewed sincerity, or if the whole thing is a deliberately murky combination of the two, generating a mystique which, on paper, a mega-rich blonde-haired waif-heiress has no natural right to.
But there it is, pulling us through a laboured ten-ish minutes of Paris, lazy-eyed and mannequin stiff, walking us through the making of an apparently infamous lasagne (how a lasagne can be infamous remains an unexplored tangent), which she alleges to make often enough for friends and family; though anyone as slender as Paris is either lying about eating lasagne to 'normalise' herself with a carb-huffing public, or has access to science-magic type fitness and nutrition regimens to counteract things like ill-health and fatness (I tend to think it's the latter; I know those Illuminati med-pods exist, the ones where you climb in and zap away any known illness from a cold to leukaemia).
I can't pinpoint the appeal of Paris Hilton but it is there, perhaps less in it's own right these days and more as a nostalgia for a simpler time; seems horrendous that we're able to look back on a decade characterised by the war on terror as a 'simpler time'. But it really was. Maybe because climate change still felt like a distant threat (Al Gore be damned) and our anxieties were less scattered, could be traced back to specific events and entities. Our fears were drawn within identifiable bogies, instead of being dispersed like the fluttering rapturous ash of Thanos's utopian genocide, spread out like a mist. An ambience of cloistering dread.
And to think Paris even knows how to cook a lasagne!
It was definitely not a skill I'd think to find in her set, sitting comfortably alongside tax-evasion and weaponising sex. But as the video shows, even if she has trouble navigating the kitchen ('I don't know where anything is, I haven't cooked in this kitchen before'), Paris Hilton does in fact know how to cook a lasagne. She says she grew up watching her mother in the kitchen and that's where she gets her natural love of cooking from, but I cannot imagine anyone from the Hilton empire condescending to cook their own meals when a paid staff's at your beck and call, unless it's in the realm of 'austerity cooking' which if you don't know is where rich people try cooking meals with limited ingredients, emulating the Poor Experience. Just for the lols.
Did she have someone teach her how to cook a lasagne for the sake of the video then? As the clip ends Paris looks into the camera thanking her viewers, asking that they suggest other meals for her to cook in the comment section. Is she going to learn from scratch how to cook each meal before filming herself doing it with acted finesse? This is of course assuming she doesn't have any culinary skills going in and that she's being primed to give the appearance of knowing her way around a kitchen by a (probably lavishly paid) production team, who are making a statement towards what? Rich people are just like you?
There's a moment where Paris puts on a giant pair of sunglasses with diamanté-covered frames (lets be honest, they're probably diamonds) and turns to the camera saying this is what she wears when she's cutting onions 'to help with crying'. Bitch, as far as I can see you don't have anything to cry about. The whole thing feels like an unnecessary juxtaposing of extreme wealth inside the abject, frequently destitute experience of 'cooking for one'. Like, when you don't have plans and you're kind of relieved that you don't because you didn't really have the money to go out anyway, but you're also really hungry and you're gonna make something heavy and yum and in bulk so there's leftovers throughout the week. To me, outside Indomie noodles, lasagne and most cheap pasta dishes encapsulates the specific sadness of this kind of solo, financially constrained cooking. And I do not need Paris Fucking Hilton haunting my lonely Saturday nights while I'm dissolving pasta noodles in a pot or letting onion vapours ravage my bare cornea (because I'm sans Gucci sunnies).
GTFO.
That said I'm probably going to watch whatever meal she makes next, especially if it's fried chicken. When that happens I'll know the gates of hell are opening up.
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