„Excuse me? What does chives look like?”
Paris Hilton tries to convince us that she has never been to a grocery store before. And maybe she doesn’t. She wears a pink dress and a matching mask and strolls down the aisle in the direction of the lucky charms. As we start a glamorous slow-motion shot, wind in her hair, the camera slides back and reveals a production assistant who is fanning her with a board. And now she is walking around with a shopping cart next to the normalies in poor lighting. The joke, and the armor too, is that everyone knows that Paris Hilton’s personality is artificial. She is also there.
Cooking with Paris, Hilton’s new show on Netflix, debuting August 4th, is the obvious close to a January 2020 Youtube video in which she cooks a lasagna carefree. In it, she uses a pan that is too small for the meat sauce, stirs the ricotta with a spatula and heaped all the ingredients in a foil pan while her Chihuahua watches in a blinded Ron. The answers were as expected. Some followed their recipe and found that it was not very goodwhile others were thrilled to watch Hilton do what she does best: perform herself.
Hilton is the latest celebrity turning to cooking to expand its meaning. Cookbooks and cooking shows are now the place where celebrities, especially women in their late 30s and 40s, still find an audience when the supply of film and television roles begins to fade. On the other side of the career success spectrum, it can also be where celebrities expand their business empires. Gwyneth Paltrow, Trisha Yearwood and Chrissy Teigen have seamlessly developed their cooking brands into yet another fruitful branch of successful careers. Meanwhile, Kristin Cavallari, Eva Longoria and Alicia Silverstone have portrayed cooking in a low-risk way to stay in the spotlight and fuel lifestyle aspirations. Regardless of celebrity, the story is almost always the same: despite their busy life and wealth, the person loves to cook. It means something for her, didn’t you know? Does it connect them with their family or does it help them relax or let them be creative? Tabloids have long quoted that stars are just like us, and what’s more like Trisha Yearwood making a chicken tortilla casserole?
But for Paris Hilton the story – and the reputation of her fame – is different. Since becoming a Parazzi magnet in the wee hours of the morning, she has made her career by being out of touch with reality and a little unbearable for it. In the 2005 horror remake Guard house, The film was starring Hilton marketed with the slogan SEE PARIS THE. The simple life was an entire show based on the premise of Hilton and her then best friend Nicole Richie, wreaking havoc in small towns while constantly swimming around doing low-wage, worker-grunt jobs. The real surprise, however, was that Hilton and Richie could also be charming and funny, like when they … worked at Sonic and had the sign advertise 1/2 PRICE ANAL SALTY WEINER BURGERS, then wrestled in a grocery store (see, she has been in one before!) while disguised as giant sonic soda mugs.
More recently, Hilton has revealed what many of us already knew. Her goofy personality was an act, she will make you believe, complete with a fake baby voice. She acted like a superficial, stupid party girl for having success there. And of course she’s older now. At 40 she thinks about it start a family with her fiancé, the venture capitalist Carter Reum. Their image has softened, but it hasn’t gone away. She enchants her celebrity with a wink in the audience; We all know this is just to pretend, but isn’t it fun to play around sometimes?
Cooking with Paris could be a perfect vehicle for the current iteration of Paris Hilton. Your catch is that she, surprise surprise, loves cook, and she has „found whole new recipes” (which magically stick in her collaged recipe book) that she wants to cook with famous friends, all of whom are at least a little better than she and can teach her something or two. She makes frittatas with Kim Kardashian, crescent salad with Demi Lovato and steak with her mother Kathy and sister Nicky. She also goes to great lengths to make „sliving” (a portmanteau made up of „kill” and „live”) a reality, although it doesn’t have the same sound as her earlier catchphrase, „That’s hot”. The kitchen is redecorated each episode to match the theme of the menu. The drawers are full of glittering details such as rainbow bowls, a cake cutter like a high heel, and Swarovski crystal spoons and spatulas that are not in the least hygienic.
There is a lot to learn from Cooking with Paris. Their frittata makes me think that I should really use my blender to get some more fluff, their toasted salsa has a lot of char and I would absolutely eat their mac and cheese which is just a box of Kraft with extra cheese and butter you can get don’t deny that Hilton is charming and still very into jokes. She sways around the kitchen in her heels, pushes cherry tomatoes around a smoking pan or spills edible glitter. Her guests make fun of her fashion choice when she gets feathers in onion rings. She laughs at her own limits, often tells the audience what she screwed up and happily reaches for high-fat foods like fries and French toast. In any episode, there is inevitably some utensil or method or ingredient that it claims to have never heard of – stirring, tongs, zeal. Once she washes a whole turkey with bottled water.
Criticism of Paris Hilton is slippery. Though she has always been a celebrity, her start in the Territory was „famous for being famous” because of a sex te filmed when she was 20 and released without her consent. She was also open about the abuse she was exposed to in the boarding school, last in the documentation This is Paris. We are currently in a cultural moment where we are rethinking how we interact with young celebrities in the ’90s and 2000s, the era when Hilton’s fame and the hatred it sparked were contagious.
Their immense privilege made them a target of anger, but it also protected them in many other ways. She says if she does Relocation to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel When she was 18, her family gave her nothing, and she had to make it on her own and use her wits to become the Mughal she is today. It’s true that people didn’t take them seriously and money doesn’t protect you from anything, but it’s still hard to rewrite Hilton as a scrpy, started-from-below-now-we-here-upstart is dishonest too . And it’s not what people think about Paris Hilton, either.
It is evident that nobody’s life is like Paris Hilton’s. In Cooking with Paris, she feeds her dog with caviar. She loses a crystal in a recipe. While the audience might get in touch with Drew Barrymore or Teigen a bit, Paris Hilton’s whole mess puts everyone in a bind. The spoiled, touchless version of Hilton is mocking yet noisy. The down-to-earth version is incredible given the celebrity and the circumstances that led to the creation of this show. How do you balance that you are in on the joke when you are the joke? This is the question that Hilton and her fame will continue to hold on to.
Instead of an answer, we have Cooking with Pariswho, for the merit of everyone (especially Hilton), doesn’t take yourself too seriously and leads you to do the same. The show is absurd. Hilton knows it’s absurd, and she knows you are here to see her absurd, so you can laugh at her and with her at times. Everyone is at the joke I guess. Or maybe all of them is the joke. It’s 2021. Who can say more?
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