The lives of Bill and Tom Kaulitz are teeming with mice. Every loved one, brother, bandmate or best friend is greeted lovingly with “Hey mouse”. This means that the Tokio Hotel stars are fully in line with the “Hot Rodent Man” trend of recent weeks, which compares sexy men with sexy rodents. But to say that the Kaulitz brothers are following a trend would be to misunderstand them at the root. The Kaulitzes are not following any trend, they create it themselves or step over it.
Anyone who only remembers Bill and Tom Kaulitz as an eccentric, skinny boy with black eye makeup and another in hip-hop clothes and dreadlocks who sang “Durch den Monsun” into the microphone before their voices broke has missed a lot in recent years. The band Tokio Hotel still exists and is consistently successful with more electro-pop sounds.
The twin brothers fled to Los Angeles years ago to escape fame and stalking fans, but are still making a name for themselves in Germany with TV appearances and their podcast “Kaulitz Hills”. They always start the podcast with a drink to get their already loose tongues rolling even better. Their conversations are a fast-paced, sometimes tumbling, sometimes saying the same thing at the same time, chatter that ends in laughter every few moments. This mixture of colorful, cheerful fearlessness is so easy to market that every reality TV producer has probably been licking their fingers for the brothers for a long time. But broadcasters like RTL and ProSieben, who would be stupid not to try, have to admit defeat to Netflix. The documentary series “Kaulitz Hills” will be released here from June 25th.
However, both the term “reality TV”, as Netflix calls the series, and “documentary series”, as it is often called in the reports, miss the point. It is not trashy, as one would expect from reality TV formats such as “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”, in which rich Hollywood mothers pull on their hair extensions after staged arguments on yachts. Documentary series, on the other hand, sounds as if a voice-over is about to report on the meaning of scarabs on ancient Egyptian wall paintings. The Kaulitzes are somewhere between extensions and scarabs.
On the one hand, it’s about the effects that fame and the music industry have on such young people. For example, Bill was pressured by the record label for a long time to hide his homosexuality. On the other hand, Netflix has developed two storylines for the spice and cliffhanger material: Bill Kaulitz is looking for his great love – and lives as a single and partying a lot, the opposite of his brother’s bourgeois LA marriage. Tom, as everyone knows, is happily married to Heidi Kaulitz, formerly Klum, and yes, there are guest appearances. However, the different life plans are alienating the two, say the twins.
But despite the argument in front of the camera, not much of this alleged disharmony is shown. In one scene, both are invited to dinner by a couple they are friends with. While Tom is lounging around on the sofa, Bill, standing upright like a meerkat with blond hair and a soft, wine-soaked look, gets worked up about how Tom simply can’t stand it when Bill changes in a relationship because then he would no longer be able to concentrate on his career. Tom replies that he could quit the whole band tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter to him. It’s the stuff that makes good trailers. But threats don’t seem threatening in the Kaulitzes’ world, they are warm and soft like the Californian evening sun. Every argument is a squabble, every heartache is laughed away with cocktails.
At the same time, the series is nothing like “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”. The normal guys as sidekicks make sure of that. There are these two buddies who invite you to meatball night, don’t wash their hands after petting the dog and before rolling the minced meat, and blather on about tomato sauce. You know who they are, you know these guys. The same concept was used by the two band members in the back row of Tokio Hotel, Georg and Gustav, who were nothing Cosmopolitan and everything potato soup.
The result is a beautiful, superbly edited world in which truth and performed truth become indistinguishable. It doesn’t matter whether the brothers make music or films and how good the quality of everything is – they are simply born entertainers.
“Kaulitz
