the hall of mirrors at versailles

We watched The Queen of Versailles on CNBC Prime last week and I think I will be able to sleep with the lights off in the next day or two if I am able to get the terror out of my mind.  A better name for this documentary would have been American Horror Story, but, as we know, that name was already taken.

Watching what happened in The Queen of Versailles was much more terrifying to watch than even Connie Britton eating raw brains in American Horror Story.

The documentary is about an aging billionaire timeshare owner and his much-younger trophy wife whose fortune has been whittled dramatically by the 2008 financial crisis and their difficulty in coping with their loss of liquidity.  Sure, we all had difficulty coping with what happened when the bill for all of Dubya’s wild-ass spending came due, but I guess these rich folks had more trouble than the rest of us.  The billionaire’s credit line dried up with the banks and his empire, which was reliant on the credit the banks extended to him, suffered and his wealth was not enough to cover the bills that came due.

Perhaps most terrifying was that he had to lay off thousands of his employees and had to face realities from which his money had insulated him.  Notably that he had a house full of young children whom he and his no-longer-young wife had failed to teach discipline.  His kids had let their pet lizard die because they failed to feed it or give it water.  Their dogs defecated on the living room carpet so that everyone had to step around the poop.  Perhaps the defining moment of the movie happens when he comes home from work to find the front door open and all the lights in the house on.  Just like any father might, he questions why no one closed the door or turned off any of the lights.  Just like any father, he suggested that he would not pay the electric bill, just to teach them a lesson.  Unlike any other father, however, he fails to understand that it was his failure to bring discipline to his kids that was the problem.  The electric bill never mattered when there was more than enough money to pay it.

Versailles was the name of a huge mansion he was in the process of building—the largest single family house in the United States.  Construction of Versailles had been halted due to lack of credit from the banks, so it was just a hollow shell, the size of a sports stadium.  He and his family were forced to live in a smaller mansion pending the completion of Versailles, which we learn is very much in doubt.

What added to the horror was his wife’s inability to live a throttled-back lifestyle and a shopping trip to Wal-Mart that required multiple shopping carts.  I am sure that some of this stuff had to have been staged just to make her look ridiculous, and I am sure she played along.  However, the slapstick of the antics of his once-beautiful trophy wife failed to create enough humor to offset the horror.

The horror.  The horror.

Oh, those poor rich people.

Watch this thing at your own risk.  It is just more reality TV (although it is actually a movie and probably was not made exclusively for TV) that fails to get to first base.  I say skip it unless you have nothing else to do and have a strong stomach.