Rabbit, Run: Jax saying "I'm the #1 guy in this group" on Vanderpump Rules
Also discussed: Freud's castration anxiety, recreational cocaine use, John Updike's Rabbit, Run, doomed Vegas trips, reality TV villainy, and a key to all our mythologies
With everything going on right now, we’ve gathered here today on this Substack to discuss a very important Vanderpump Rules anniversary…
Sam: One of the most important things I’ve learned as a fan of Vanderpump Rules is that everything makes more sense once you understand the effects of cocaine on the human psyche. Revisiting the series with an assumption that this or that member of the cast is quite possibly (?) blowing down—or at least consuming copious amounts of Adderall—is like watching a whodunnit when you already know who the killer is. Kristen, cig in hand, telling her manager to “suck a dick”...Jax ripping off a knit sweater in a parking lot to fight Frank...the seemingly endless benders in Mexico involving people over the age of 30...pretty much anything DJ James Kennedy did before he got sober...all can be explained! On VPR, cocaine is, to quote Jonathan Franzen, A Key[bump] to All Mythologies.
Joe: Funnily enough, doing coke and talking about Franzen is my key to all mythologies.
Sam: One of the coke-iest moments on the show transpired during an episode in the tumultuous fourth season, which aired almost exactly five years ago to this day.
Joe: *Bows head* Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam.
Sam: Jax and Tom (Sandoval) and Tom (Schwartz) are arguing on the couch at one of the Tom’s apartments, while their girlfriends Brittany, Ariana, and Katie eavesdrop from the kitchen. At first it’s hard to even know what it’s about….
Joe: Well so Schwartz invited Stassi—then on the outs with Katie—to their engagement party, without asking Katie first (!). And for some reason, Jax is getting mad at Schwartz about this(?!), probably because he just doesn’t like Stassi—
Sam:—he’s obvi still ego-deathed from her final, unequivocal rejection of him, after he cheated on her with her best friend (Sandoval’s girlfriend), not once, but twice, on a couch, orally—
Joe: —or he just wants to look good defending Katie’s “honor”—
Sam: (Quotes are doing a lot of work there.)
Joe:—because Katie is friends with Brittany. And Jax has legitimately plucked Brittany from a farm in Kentucky and plopped her down at SUR—
Sam: —even though, it must be said, Jax has been actively pursuing Lala: a new hostess who, even by Sexy Unique Restaurant standards, comes in hot with an Instagram profile picture in which she is grabbing her own naked ass—
Joe: —and who ends up sleeping with DJ James Kennedy—
Sam: —who ends up calling Katie a “fat fuck”—
Joe: —which is another incident re: defending Katie’s honor that Schwartz fails to get riled up enough about.
Sam and Joe: *Exhale*
Sam: I feel high just explaining all that. But continue…
Joe: Schwartz being Schwartz—and having just been fired as bartender at Pump after having a panic attack over the mixing of precisely one vodka tonic—despairingly chugs from a cheap bottle of wine. Then the argument between Jax and Sandoval becomes, as so many between them do, about who’s being the better friend to Schwartz.
Sam: I love it when Jax tells Sandoval to "shut the fuck up about your fucking band"—which isn’t even in response to Sandoval talking about his band, but is still an incredible diss and generally one of the rightest things Jax has ever said. Then, as Sandoval continues to implore Jax to simply "be Schwartz's friend," rather than kick him when he's down, Schwartz gets up to leave the room and Jax delivers one of the show’s most unforgettable lines:
“Dude, stop acting like you're the number one fucking guy in this group. I'm the number one guy in this group, man."
Joe: Following this argument is like following some (also amphetamine-fueled) Freudian dream logic where every twist and turn of Jax's brain both makes absolutely no logical sense—in terms of, like, a normal conversation—but somehow still manages to hit at the absolute truth of what would hurt Sandoval the most/assert Jax’s own dominance.
My favorite part happens soon after the “band” diss, when Jax diverts attention from the gravity of Schwartz's situation by tricking Sandoval into thinking his (Jax’s) girlfriend going in for a boob job the next day is somehow equivalent or relevant here because of how difficult that boob job will be, by proxy, for Jax (who, after all, is paying for it (a fact he will be reminding Brittany of until the day she dies)).
Sam: Jax does this sort of thing constantly. Stubbing his toe—or having chest pains from “nutritional supplements”—is, for him, deserving of the same amount of pity as, like, Syrian refugees. His ego warps all sense of proportion or scale, which makes him the perfect reality TV villain. Lest you forget, this was the guy who used the fact that he was getting married sometime in the near future as carte blanche to act like an asshole for more or less an entire year, as if having a wedding were a kind of terminal illness (which, for him, spiritually, I guess it kind of was).
Joe: It’s funny you mention the “supplements” thing there. It’s like his surgery to get his septum fixed, which was assuredly not a nose job.
Sam and Joe: Coke.
Sam: Ironically, though, it’s Jax’s ego which precludes him from making the kinds of sacrifices a truly intimate relationship with one or both of the Toms would require—and which leads to this entire argument about nothing (that’s really about everything).
Joe: Like your neighborhood high school bully, he reframes his inability to bond with them as a sort of blowhard pride and the Toms’ connection as a “feminine” weakness. In a way he's the #1 guy in the group because he's the only one who would care about claiming that mantle; in another way, he's the only "guy" in the group at all, because Tom and Tom (I won't even mention Shay or Peter here) are constantly being "castrated.”
Maybe the entire—Freudian?—joke of VPR’s men is that they are not men at all: they are, as Jax says of Schwartz, "big boys" dithering under the watchful eye of Mommy Vanderpump and the (largely queer male) customers they serve at her restaurants in West Hollywood.
Sam: It is strange how Sandoval and Schwartz, over the course of the show, become almost sexless beings. I think of Katie's infamous "Let's talk about how your dick doesn't work" line, Schwartz cruelly calling Katie "gross," and Sandoval serving as designated driver while Ariana (allegedly?) eats out Lala in the backseat (wow, I love this television program!). You might say that not having sex is a central feature of many relationships; still, it feels odd in the context of a show that thrives on rumors of its cast members cheating on each other during regular trips to Vegas.
Joe: Turns out what happens in Vegas is often just…dance floor makeouts?
Sam: On the other hand, Tom and Tom's sexless-ness makes perfect sense: theirs, after all, has proven to be the show’s true and enduring romance.
Joe: Meanwhile, it’s Jax’s testosterone-filled Id which gives the show its motor and plot points. When Jax goes to Vegas, he fucks (and maybe even impregnates).
“I just can’t help it,” he cries when found out, sloughing off responsibility for his actions to some higher power. But in this case, there really is a higher power, that is, the show itself, which thrives off Jax continually fucking up and being a lying cheating asshole.
Sam: That’s why there’s such a cruel self-awareness to the admonishment from Jax about being “the number #1 guy”: It might as well have been a mandate from a producer, telling Sandoval to keep "playing his part," so Jax could go on playing his.
Joe: Television, as we’ve touched on before, is founded on repetition. Reality TV is no different, except that the repetition here amounts to a sort of self-imposed stasis on these peoples’ actual lives.
As Naomi Fry put it the Times, VPR exists in "a miasmic forever-present where not a whole lot happens and the pressures of achievement appear mostly absent.”
Sam: Right. Servers came and went, new Vanderpump restaurants opened, the cast members hooked up and broke up and threw drinks on each other, but Sandoval's band never took off, Schwartz and Kristen's modeling careers couldn't last, Scheana's pop music trajectory peaked when she sang "Good as Gold" on the bar during the pride parade (incredible), and fuck if I know what Jax actually wanted to do with his life (social media for the Detroit Red Wings?). They ended up just commodifying who they were on the show: Stassi, Lala, and Kristen—yes, even Kristen!—wrote memoir-y books; Tom and Ariana created a cocktail book; and the Toms quite literally repeated the VPR formula by opening a bar (with Lisa and Ken) in which subsequent seasons could be filmed, a move presented as progress but which really just evinces the show’s control over their lives.
Joe: Just consider for a moment the genuinely unremarkable apartments they all lived in long after they (presumably) had the financial means to upgrade. I mean for years Sandoval couldn’t use the microwave while the air conditioning was running!
These apartments were a kind of visual representation of their unchanging lives, of the notion that they hadn’t yet made it, but might someday, if they ever get off this show...The irony being, of course, that they couldn’t move on, couldn’t “make it,” because doing so would squander the very stasis upon which their success relied.
Sam: The entire cast gives a kind of backwards credence to the adage, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”
Joe: I think the tension of this stasis is exemplified by the boys’ frequent trips to Vegas: this place conceived of as an escape but which, for Jax, is really just a boomerang.
It's a quintessentially (straight white) American male illusion, this idea afforded by privilege and the expanse of our country that you can outrun or reinvent yourself if you simply keep moving. But not only can Jax not escape himself, he can’t escape the show, which is, of course, inextricable from his selfhood.
He reminds me of Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run, constantly fleeing only to find himself locked in (and destroying his fellow inhabitants):
Rabbit runs home: "You're here," he says. "What's the door locked for?"
She looks to one side of him with vague dark eyes reddened by the friction of watching. "It just locked itself."
"Just locked itself," he repeats...
Sam: Coincidentally, when Patricia Lockwood wrote (brilliantly) of Updike as a “malfunctioning sex robot” she might as well have been talking about Jax Taylor.
Joe: This is what Updike would’ve wanted! For, like Jax, especially in early seasons (when he didn't realize that apologies were "in”), Rabbit can never cop to causing a problem. When his wife Janice—depressed and drunk in light of his absence—accidentally drowns their baby in the tub, it's not his fault because, as he says, he “wasn’t even there.” Of course the fact that he wasn't there is exactly the point, the point he misses by thinking he can outrun himself.
Sam: This is "classic" LA, too, LA being the archetypal place where one goes to reinvent oneself. But with reinvention comes a fair amount of self-deception, in that it requires an unwavering belief in the narrative you’re weaving about yourself.
I haven't thought of it in quite these terms before, but is it any wonder that so many of our greatest (male) reality TV stars—Johnny Bananas, Spencer Pratt, Spencer Matthews, etc—are also prodigious liars?
Joe: It makes sense. Lying keeps them in the heat of the show, which is to say, in their own closed loop: by forcing everyone to focus all their attention on what did or didn’t happen in the past, they defer the future.
But on reality TV compulsive lying also belies a self-awareness (i.e., “I will lie to make this an entertaining reality show”) that, depending on how you look at it, is either sociopathic or enlightened. Jax’s complete inability to keep a secret is part and parcel of this psychology that it seems only he, in his complete derangement or genius, has figured out: Why keep a secret when it’s all going to come out anyway?
Sam: Yet for the best reality TV stars, the problem inevitably becomes: What happens when the role you've assumed ceases to exist? When, in Jax’s case, you get married, have a kid on the way, and see your brand of masculinity fading into obsolescence?
Joe: One glance at Sandoval’s recent GQ profile and it’s easy to see how the "alpha" male Jax represented is no longer the center of the universe, televisual or otherwise.
Sam: Which is why the latest season of VPR felt so…pathetic. As Jax rage-texts and flails around at daytime James Mae pop-ups, you watch him come to terms with the fact that the world (of the show) no longer revolves around him—that he’s no longer the #1 guy in this group.
And though he may have finally moved on from VPR, he also seems to be moving backwards, into some Pleasantville-esque dream of the postwar nuclear family where Dad mows the lawn, watches sports in his “man cave,” and works on old muscle cars.
Joe: His stasis has become a kind of contentedness. But can it last? Consider the penultimate paragraph of Rabbit, Run, as Harry weighs his return to domesticity:
I don’t know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness. It’s like when they heard you were great and put two men on you and no matter which way you turned you bumped into one of them and the only thing to do was pass. So you passed and the ball belonged to the others and your hands were empty and the men on you looked foolish because in effect there was nobody there.