Yuku free message boards

Anyone who caught the recent bar-table showdown between Bethenny and Kelly on "Real Housewives," the serial documentary about rich women, knows what I'm talking about. The scene, which was set in a Downtown Manhattan bar, belonged on Broadway: it showed the wonderfully rhythmic explosion of mounting aggression between two women, who, in spite of superficial similarities (both are pretty, sociable divorcees who live large), can't stand each other.

Bethenny, a health-food chef, started it. Ordinarily self-possessed, she became jittery several episodes earlier at the mere mention of Kelly, a lanky model. We didn't hear their history in full, but they evidently had met a few times, at least once when male attention was at stake, and Bethenny had developed an idée fixe: Kelly looked down on her. During their interactions, Bethenny's nostrils flared and she dodged eye contact. The animal flinching seemed beyond her control.

"I think Bethenny has a very serious problem with me," Kelly confided to the camera, her voice edged with fear. Finally, after bickering at an event-planning meeting, Kelly fortified herself with a hazy case against Bethenny, whom she had started to hate for the simple reason that Bethenny hated her.

Efforts at reconciliation were futile. "I've been waiting like half an hour," Bethenny said when Kelly appeared at a bar where Kelly proposed they discuss their problems. "Really?" Kelly said. "That's too bad." Crisp, cruel, gratuitous: Kelly's spite came off like a sudden surrender of the upper hand she had hoped to flaunt in the face-off. But "that's too bad" wasn't the end of Kelly's dignity nose dive. She lurched into bald hostility. "I just want to make something perfectly clear with you," Kelly said. "We're not friends."

"Correct," Bethenny said, turning lawyerly, leveling her gaze, widening her eyes and pursing her lips in what seemed to be direct rejection of Kelly's head bobbing, hair flipping and great gusts of fake laughter. These chaotic gestures, in turn, seemed part of Kelly's effort to show how lighthearted she was, and how beneath her she found Bethenny's honor-roll pose. It was a beautiful, postural expression of shared hatred. And then, as if to underscore the physical contrast, Kelly told Bethenny: "We're not the same, O.K.? This is you" - she held her left hand low, parallel to the table - "this is me" - her right hand flew up above her head.

Fighting words. It's almost impossible for a blunt assertion of social rank to win an argument in contemporary America, or perhaps any America, but the strategy had absolutely no chance against the fan favorite Bethenny, whose allergy to elitism is an ongoing theme of the show. Was Kelly throwing the fight? She had clearly dispensed with technique and was now blindly pounding on her opponent. (In a later episode, she affected amnesia - battle fatigue? - about the whole discussion.) And on she went, pulling out stock bad-faith strategies of humiliation: I feel sorry for you. You embarrass yourself. I find your behavior inappropriate.

Bethenny didn't let the charges of impropriety undo her. For her part, Kelly dashed off to a date, where she blew her chance at a healing good time by recounting the argument at length, complete with a barbed if imprecise impression of Bethenny. "She kinda gave me this look," Kelly told her date, struggling to simulate Bethenny's punctiliousness. Kelly seemed to hope that anyone who saw the look would comprehend her indignation.

But no one will ever comprehend it, just as no one will comprehend Bethenny's contempt for Kelly. Maybe hate is like love that way: you fall into it, and then it's your thing. But haters keep trying to enlist co-haters. And that is the chief feature of reality-TV hatred, and perhaps all blind hatred: those who hate can't stop talking about it and - worse - trying to add a moral dimension to what is essentially an aesthetic position.