True Love

This is the tale of two weddings. One held in a small brick church in the San Fernando Valley. One at a country club near the Getty Center.

I view the weddings in my apartment kitchen stacked with video editing equipment. The Valley Wedding is finished, pressed into a DVD case. The Getty Wedding is wound up in five miniature videocassettes next to my computer. Raw, and ready to be edited.

I once told a friend to shoot me if I ever became a wedding videographer. But this, I tell myself, is not videography, it’s editing, a “one-time thing” because I need the cash after the art films I made became popular but didn’t pay the rent.

The friend who hired me gave me the packaged Valley Wedding as a template to use while editing the Getty Wedding. I study it closely. The edit is a no-brainer: five music montages, including “Big Day,” “Come What May” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a muddle of post-reception footage and shots of the couple dashing through a hail of birdseed.

It’s been years since I’ve been to a wedding, so I examined the footage as a social anthropologist: the elaborate ritual dress, the symbolic violation of the female as the male reaches up her dress, slips off her garter and tosses it to his friends.

I look closer. The barely legal bride beams, twirls in her ivory dress, rhinestones swirling around her bodice. Is it the extreme slo-mo, or is she really that ecstatic, effervescent? I conclude that she is. She is unaware, yet aware, of everything. She applies frosted pink lipstick before a wall mirror in a restroom--flanked by bridesmaids in white satin gowns with fat black stripes, slit to the thigh. She trembles during her vows.

In the too-big church basement, she does the twist with a gaggle of 5-year-olds. The groom waltzes with his mother in his poly-blend white tux, then polkas with old women who put hands to beehive hair as they tilt to the beat. The couple’s innocence entrances me. I doubt that they’re aware of complications that might lie ahead. I give them a 70% chance of making it to year seven. After the conga line, the couple swap bites of cake. He smears her cheek with frosting, earning him a solid punch to the chest. I bump the odds to 80%.

there are no children at the getty wedding save for the flower girl and ring bearer who, after their adorable appearances, disappear. A corner of the country club is ablaze with roses fronting the Santa Monica Mountains. It is a chilly, sunny day.

The bride floats in a pearlescent gown that defies gravity, flowing upward like cream to her strapless bodice, crossing it in a promise. The handsome groom towers in a tailored light-wool tux. The footage is burned out in spots--the cameraman had his aperture open too wide. I add filters to tone it down. It looks better, but it has turned a strange gray tint.

The groom keeps looking into the video camera like he’s flirting with some future audience. Sitting here in my Los Feliz flat, it feels as if he’s flirting with me. During photography sessions, his bride sits on his knee, playfully cupping her hand over his mouth. Slowing the footage down to 5%, I scrutinize the liminal subtext: His brow painfully knits as he wafts her a vile look that lasts a full 10 seconds. An eternity of revulsion. She tries to patch it over with kisses. He keeps looking at the camera, a still one now, with that same spooky look.

During their first and only dance, his hands barely touch her as he awkwardly shuffles. Her hands flutter over him. She presses her head to his wide chest and whispers into his ear. She’s desperately trying to warm him, but he actually backs away, making her gently tug at him to stay close. It’s horrifying to watch, a pain I share with members of the wedding party, who barely conceal their astonished looks. The groom shoots them quick panicked glances and then some into the camera, at me.

Maybe he can’t dance, I think, but something doesn’t smell right. Fifteen minutes later I watch him effortlessly glide across the floor with his mother.

The whole wedding bugs me. Everyone there seems to belong in an Ayn Rand novel. I sit in my pajamas at my kitchen desk, sipping coffee, eating chocolates. I lean back, look into the groom’s eyes as they lock onto mine through the lens. I’m giving you a 20% chance to make it.Through the first year.

I begin manipulating the footage--dumping on dissolves, soft edges, some sepia tints, extra chroma and gamma, glows, mattes and gaussian blurs. I delete the first bouquet toss that lands too short, and the garter snap that hits a waitress. I edit the horror out of the couple’s first dance. The wedding video is all her now--her expansive greeting, her nestling head, the way she cradles his hand. As their dance ends, he leans over and lightly pats and kisses the top of her head, as if she were a 5-year-old. I leave this in, although it reveals far too much. I want her to see the gesture in some distant year.

The Getty Wedding now is a packaged memory underscored by that staple of all wedding videos--”At Last,” by Etta James. The couple will believe that’s how it really was, and in one sense, they are right. So much of life is edited out of our memories or reassembled in novel, necessary ways.

the morning i write this essay i receive an e-mail from my niece, Chelsie Mae. Attached are a dozen photos of her civil ceremony wedding in a St. Paul, Minn., courthouse. She is 27 and has never been married. Suddenly this becomes a tale of three weddings.

She wears a purple mid-calf dress with a satin sash around her waist and a dark gray wool sweater. There is no bouquet. She and her new husband, Scott, pose in a doorway under a wood Courtroom 3A sign. Scott wears a dark suit, the sleeves a bit long, and a white shirt and patterned tie. A cloth winter coat is draped over Chelsie’s arm. There are photos of witnesses signing their names on appropriate forms.

The judge is heavyset, friendly looking. The couple hold hands, beaming at each other as he marries them. The courtroom’s wood-paneled walls turn the room warm and golden.

These images do not move. They are still, silent. They convey sparse, purely legal information that I cannot modify. I love them for all that is left out, and for all that is left to fill in.