Sin City

Isn’t it wryly ironic that paper clips and staples are what hold some essays together? They are little pieces of twisted steel made of iron. I wonder if Joan Didion uses these mechanical devices to hold her papers together, just as she uses the same type of literary devices to set the tone in her essay Marrying Absurd.

Her use of words that set this tone, hits us right when we read the title, Marrying Absurd. What does that mean? Is it an article on a constitutional amendment to allow homosexual clones to marry each other? Does it mean trying to marry a miter joint to a dovetail joint? We don’t know yet, but we do suspect that something is very askew.

As we read on she informs us of the low requirements to get married in Las Vegas. A person only needs five dollars, a willingness to lie about their age, and the decency to let the staff at the courthouse have a lunch break every eight hours or so. What she does not do though is state these facts with an overwhelming bias against them. She does not say getting married is meant to be a life long commitment to each other and the event should not be cheapened, even if this is what she believes herself.

In the next few paragraphs she continues to question the entire affair and the expectations of the people who get married in this way. She suggests that when getting married in Los Vegas, you should expect to see large signs on the freeway telling you which chapel will best fit your needs. You should look forward to finding instant gratification, gangsters, and call girls. You should expect to be gambling all the time, and if you must get married, you can do it between games. She then goes further and implies that an efficient commercial wedding operation is a lesser type of service than you would receive at your family’s local church. Continuing her theme she then hints at the fact that the people getting married are strip club harlots with illegitimate children that are marrying mobsters. Even at there best the people getting married are either doing it to find a loop hole in a law such as some did to avoid the draft, or simply are ignorant of what getting married means. The chapel themselves she describes as little more the drive though convenience stores. The workers their no more then paid actors. Once the wedding is over and the money exchanged it is time to pay attention to their next sale. The proprietors of the chapel silently screaming “Thank you very much, have a nice day, could you please get the *$&%^ out of the way I have another wedding to perform.”

Ironically and wryly Joan presents weddings in Los Vegas as being some how twisted, distorted versions of real weddings and worthy of ridicule and sarcasm. Her last sentence says it all. “It was just as nice as I hoped it would be.” sobbed the bride. This bride has no clue. If she did she wouldn't’t be in some restaurant on the strip moments after she was married. She would be in a reception hall dancing with family and friends. Drinking as she pleased and having a merry old time. Joan paints a big sign though out the essay that says, “If you care about your marriage,” and more importantly, “if you want to be happily married,” don’t get married in sin city.

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