Who Awakened Bridezilla?

by Jen

You’ve heard the jokes and traded the horror stories. Maybe you’ve even given in to temptation and watched one of those nastyfest TV shows.

Yes, it is good shivery fun to hear about people who have so completely lost touch with reality that they are willing to treat the people closest to them like topsoil. And, as a woman who’s spent a fair amount of time in the service industry, I stand by nightmare client stories as both cherished folklore and a vital way to blow off steam.

But as I see and hear more of the Bridezilla phenomenon, I’m starting to feel a little sympathy for the lizards in white.

Bridezillas were named for their capacity to throw tantrums and destroy everything in their path, but I think the name is apt in another way that’s kind of important. I’ve seen a Godzilla movie or two in my day, and, yes, the major theme is always “Stomping on things looks very fun and satisfying.” But the other theme, the one it’s so easy to forget, is that Godzilla never asked for this. We humans awoke him with atom bombs and fouled his ocean with chemical dumps. For all we know, Monster Island was full of adorable geckos before all the radiation hit. But once we’ve created our monsters, we’ve just got to shoot them down.

And I think in a lot of cases that’s what we’re doing to the Bridezillas too. Maybe more for the vicious pleasure of the shooting at them part than anything else, and that’s where I start to get uncomfortable. Because though that pleasure is about punishing the wicked on the surface, I feel like I detect a faint whiff of misogyny underneath.

Bridezillas are by definition female. That’s mostly because grooms are often completely shut out of the wedding planning, but I think it’s also because we’re way less likely to dismiss a demanding guy as a high-maintenance bitch. And let’s talk about that planning for a minute. It’s a huge, ridiculous task. Devoting a year and a half to wedding planning is no longer uncommon.

We ask a woman who in all likelihood has a full-time job and definitely has a relationship to maintain to single-handedly deal with having to care about which fabric should be tied to the chairs at her reception and where to find a cake topper that is in a kilt in exactly the right tartan pattern, and then we line up to shame her when she flips out over the hors d’oeuvres? I’m not sure I buy it.

I have, in the name of research, watched the Bridezillas TV show this week. First of all, a serious question: What in the name of all that is good do they tell these women that the show will be when they start filming? They can’t actually tell them it’s called Bridezillas, right? If you’re the only bride around, you’re going to pick up on the fact that this show is not going to portray you in the most favorable light, right? Right? Seriously: What do they tell these women?

Anyway, as bad as the brides on the show are, the producers are coated in a thin layer of slime that must give them quite the intriguing glossy sheen in the moonlight. Some episodes of the show do feature genuinely horrible people, but you can tell that these women would be walking buttaches whether they were planning a wedding or an afternoon at the beach. The show should just be called It’s Probably a Bad Idea To Marry an Insecure Control Freak. One does feel bad for the grooms – poor, nice guys engaged to these horrible shrews, right? – until one snaps back to reality and realize that none of the grooms seem to have guns pointed at them.

Nice guys though they may seem to be, I suspect those grooms have done a wee bit of pollution dumping and atom bomb testing. Bridezillas features sneering voiceover narration to help make sure that you’ll interpret the bride’s bad actions in the absolute worst possible light. But the voiceover never calls the groom into question for staying in the relationship. If the groom is such a stand-up guy, why doesn’t he ever say “Look, hon, you can’t treat people like this, and especially not me. We’re either postponing this wedding while we go to couples counseling or we’re not having one at all.”

Nor does the show call the bride’s parents out for failing to teach her even the most rudimentary manners or allowing her to grow up thinking it’s acceptable to use that tone of voice with her loved ones. It takes a lot of work to create a monster this awful. Why is she the only one who has to stand up to the missiles?

I do, again, think that the Bridezilla stories and Bridezilla show appeal to the pleasure in seeing the badly behaved exposed and thus in a way punished, but I also think they feed a dangerous cultural myth that we really should be done with:

Boy, women who get a little power certainly do turn into awful, controlling bitches, don’t they?

Ultimately, Bridezillas is about putting brash women in their place. Which is OK, because they’re awful and they deserve it, right? I mean, these women are particularly awful – is it all right to cut down these extreme examples? Except that the bit of Bridezilla wisdom that’s right on the heels of any good story is that the pressures of wedding planning can turn any woman into a Bridezilla.

So by extrapolation, no woman can handle power or stress well. I think Monster Island may have a few slippery slopes I don’t like.

I don’t really want to defend the Bridezillas. I can’t get behind being deliberately nasty to people, no matter what the situation, and no adult gets a free pass to treat her family like particularly clumsy indentured servants.

But I don’t think I’m going to watch while they get shot back down into the ocean, either.

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