This essay is a part of a special Vanderpump Rules Avidly cluster, guest co-edited by Olivia Stowell and Jay Shelat.
The year was 2023. The summer of #scandoval—a word that acquired social meaning with alchemical speed as more people helplessly immersed themselves in the dark dramas unfolding in Lisa Vanderpump’s line of restaurants. In its wake, like many contributors and readers of this cluster, I too binge-watched what felt like hundreds of hours of Jax flirting with every living creature in West Hollywood, James throwing a mean drunken fit each “See You Next Tuesday” with clockwork precision, and Katie, Stassi, Scheana, and Lala (and others) discovering new ways of perpetuating their cycle of cliquish violence on fresh recruits and potential paramours. As I was making my way through the 10 gravity-defying seasons, one day I chanced upon a familiar ghostly image retweeted on my (then) Twitter timeline—the quiet, dark, dingy defiantly purple back alley of SUR (fig. 1), VPR’s room where it happens. T-shirts, tweets, and fan merch celebrate it as ground zero of the SUR’s never-ending unholy chaos, with custom mugs on Etsy proclaiming “Mentally I am in the back alley of SUR.” While I had unconsciously noted the undeniable power of this semi-private enclave of Bravo’s immensely successful upstairs-downstairs drama to draw out everyone’s darkest and most undigestible revelations, its quiet and self-possessed isolation in a photograph disrupted—even rewrote—my assumptions about figure and ground.
Simply put, if the Back Alley of SUR is a special space, then how do we begin to understand its precise power? What were the moments of shock, delight, self-display, reconciliation, transformation, and heartbreak that gave it a quasi-magical force? Because spaces are not so different from characters: as Michel Foucault reminds us, they evolve and grow with time. Spaces accrue more substance and significance, experience a deepening of their being, and even undergo irreversible ruptures. Before fully developing the concept of heterotopia, Foucault’s essay traces the journey of spatiality from the absolute division between the sacred and the profane in the Middle Ages to the eventual arrival of a “desanctified” heterogeneous space—a new kind of location for the enactment of a new post-enlightenment reality. And then he defines the term as (and pay very close attention, dear reader, because this is all about Vanderpump Rules):
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society— which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. — Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1984)
Tucked away in a parking lot and awash with cigarettes, pilfered alcohol, and drama, the Back Alley of SUR is a heterotopia if there ever was one, shaping the realities of the lives of its visitants while remaining at a safe remove from their actual crimes and peccadilloes. Yet, we are likely to ask what are the disparate, conflicting, even directly antagonistic realities that the Back Alley holds within itself? What phantasms of class and race, labor and glamor, having and having-not and having-too-much collide in that sliver of broken pavement—where the waitstaff and bartenders and convene to discuss their joys and sorrows in the shadow of the metonymic presence of Lisa Vanderpump’s hot pink $90 million empire?
Of course, the gracefully ageing doyenne of SUR living in her at-once regal yet deeply tacky Barbie palace is not only a representation of the magical unrealities of life among the Beverly Hills and Hollywood 1% but a product of the illusory landscape of the city of Los Angeles, which Aaron Betsky described in 1994 as symptomatic of artificiality, America’s ultimate all-place and no-place, at once heaven and the edge of the world. “It is the end of the great road of the West,” Betsky writes, “the place where our manifest destiny meets the ocean and is washed back up onto the funky beach shacks of Venice” (98). Crucial for our discussion, it looks like the “master images” that Betsky traces to explain the utopic Los Angeles—“a city where you can pluck an orange off your kitchen window” (99) or “a kind of mirage, floating on seas of black gold and financial resources from elsewhere” (103)—needs to rub up against the reality-effects of grime and dirt and shabbiness in order to fully acquire three-dimensionality. The floating sea-city of the gods draws power from the beach shacks of Venice. Lisa Vanderpump depends on the Back Alley just as much as the Back Alley depends on her, and not just in a financial sense.
As judicious fans have noted on Reddit, “Something about that alley just gets everyone riled the f up” (fig. 2). But even stranger things occur when the two sides of the unspoken divide intersect, and Lisa Vanderpump enters the Back Alley herself. In keeping with the metaphor of magic, I’d like to imagine that such meetings appear to rend the fabric of time and set the show upon a collision course that unfolds over seasons and years. One such rare moment occurs in S04E09, when Peter, Jax, Tom and Tom are returning from their sudden trip to Vegas (the ultimate heterotopia perhaps) and their drunk dilly-dallying make them late for work. Annoyed, Lisa barks at Peter on the phone, “Are you clean and ready for work?”—signaling that the grime must be left where it belongs. When they arrive, the sight of Lisa standing in the doorway does indeed impress upon the viewer the extent of their infraction: she almost came down there to check.
But then, something quite incredible happens, the significance of which is only fully legible at least five years after the fact—through the #scandoval revelations. Tom and Tom show her their matching tattoos of their beloved’s names (Schwartz has “Bubba” and Sandoval a sort of satanic “A” carved on his butt cheek). The moment reads as a typical scene of clownish buddy comedy combined with early intimations of relationships maturing into adult love despite disagreement and conflict—despite his vagabondism Tom Schwartz will finally find a job and propose to Katie, and Kristen’s constant stalking and cheating allegations won’t ultimately damage Sandoval and Ariana’s charming bond. And most importantly Tom and Tom’s silly brotherhood will be the salvation of their otherwise irresponsible and egotistical selves.
And yet, we must not forget the magic of location. The Back Alley of SUR is a landscape of eternal promise and eternal destruction. It giveth and it taketh away. All those things did happen, and in the worst possible way, with the worst possible consequences. The Back Alley certainly had the last laugh.