BRIDESMAIDS

How come every establishing shot of Milwaukee is of the interstate? Schlemiel, schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated. From Lucy’s conveyor belt of chocolates, to Laverne and Shirl watching the endless brown bottles shuttle by, to Kristen Wiig, depressed in her far-from-any-factory kitchen, baking herself that emblematic dessert of lonesome, luscious, childish late capitalism: a cupcake. An honest-to-goodness comedienne, with righteous gams and a face better suited, it turns out, to the big screen than to broad live t.v. sketches, the more subtly to register the little tics and crumples by which she broadcasts the ever at-the-boil anxiety of the socially fragile being who is not just in her mind but in matter of fact clipped and cut at, of the sensitive alien who is in actual fact failing at everything she tries. And in the very same way, the film itself nervously titters at its own repressed but explosive class rage, held awkwardly behind the façade of advocating taking personal responsibility for the deep fucked up-ed-ness of your modern American life.

Always a bridesmaid. But Bill says Virgos naturally avoid the spotlight. I’ll say this: the other weekend, when they parked the fifty trailers on our block and for blocks around (Haddad’s—“The Can Do People”) and assembled craft service tables and union lollygaggers and half the gawking neighborhood, and when they took the whole day to set up, leaking millions all the while, hooking fire hydrants to enormous hoses, erecting massive scaffolds from which to sprinkle rain not in an illusion-producing scrim between actor and camera but, as an eager-beaver PA told us, in 3-D, because this new Spiderman is being shot in 3-D, and when finally night fell and they turned on the battery of lights to make daylight, and filled the pleasant air with downpour, and stopped traffic, and cleared the background, then I thought about the little holy spot all the long laboring had at last created, the perfect glowing grove of action where something silly and meaningless was now going to unfold, and I thought, almost sick with it, to step into that nexus is to become the bride of death, to mouth “I do” to the groom of nothingness and lift the veil of appearance and kiss annihilation on the lips. I’d rather live forever in the overflowing dark.