The Twilight of American Culture in The Real Housewives of Orange County

Kitsch refers to tasteless art and decoration such as velvet Elvis Presley paintings, lava lamps, and tomato red Naugahyde bean-bag chairs. Often used for satirical purposes, it clutters the films of John Waters. It abounds in the Paul Thomas Anderson film Boogie Nights. It’s conspicuous in the underexposed Todd Haynes film Safe. It raises its ugly head in the Todd Solondz film Happiness. Kitsch can be used as a “character” or as an extension of a particular type of character. It speaks the language of decay and spiritual death. Therefore, when I was appalled at the kitsch as I watched The Real Housewives of Orange County, especially the episode featuring the horses with their hooves painted with glitter, the hubcaps studded with cubic zirconias and the rich real estate developer’s diamond and gold shaker, much of my gut response was the show’s vision of spiritual death. To refer to kitsch as spiritual death is not to indulge in hyperbole. To the contrary, spiritual death is the essence of kitsch. This idea is not my own. I came across the idea while reading Morris Berman’s  The Twilight of American Culture in which he traces the causes of a collapsing civilization. The first is “accelerating social and economic inequality.” The second is “declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems.” The third is “rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness. The fourth is explained as thus: “Spiritual death—that is, Spengler’s classicism: the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas—kitsch in short.”