[If this were a serious academic paper, the serious subheader would be, "That Wedding Dance Video: Private Events as Public Performances in the YouTube Age."]
By now, you’ve almost definitely seen the video of a decidedly-nontraditional wedding processional, danced to the tune of Chris Brown’s Forever, which caught fire on YouTube and spread to the mainstream media, getting the wedding party a measure of fame and appearances on the morning talk show circuit).
Shockingly, it apparently wasn’t a viral marketing stunt, even though we did learn that the featured song was essentially the extended version of a chewing gum jingle, in a stealthy new kind of advertising campaign / music crossover.
Now, lots of social media types are making hay about this because instead of pulling the video, the record company left it up, took its cut of the ad revenue, and also saw a spike in song sales directly attributable to the video. But I’ve got a more curmudgeonly point to make.
Up until this point, weddings have always been a about spectacle, but in a private kind of way: As with most ceremonies, they’re done for the benefit of others (not the least of which are the members of the wedding-industrial complex), though for people who aren’t royalty, celebrity, or extravagantly wealthy, those “others” were just the small circle of people who knew the families involved and were actually present. (There was an outside chance your wedding performance would be seen on America’s Funniest Home Videos, but only if something disastrously wacky happened.)
If anything, it was the proposal that had the most potential for getting people microfamous (which I loosely define as having a little measure of fame among a lot of people, or a lot of fame among a few people — say, your immediate social network, and maybe a degree or two beyond online). Stunt proposals have always been performances for public consumption, and they’ve even been co-opted by staged proposal rejections at NBA game halftimes and especially-cruel interoffice pranks in Yankee Stadium.
Until now, a performance wedding involved something like skydiving, scuba, or most recently, zero gravity, which if lucky, would get picked up by the “wacky news” beat reporter of your local TV station. (The anti-wedding staged for a Washington Post feature also counts. Incidentally, the featured anti-bride was Jaqi Ross, a government 2.0 evangelist whom I met at a conference. Small world.)
I wouldn’t say it’s a trend yet, but I see a disturbing potential, given our craving for — even expectation of — microfame and microcelebrity in our socially-connected world, that these kinds of formerly-private events morph into explicitly public events, choreographed and set up explicitly for external consumption and distribution.
Reality TV has led the way with various bridezilla / groomzilla shows, and we’ve seen a little bit more “reality” sneak in with the latest trend/fad in bridal photography — “Reality Brides,” where viewers get a look under the gown (sometimes literally) as we seek to obsessively document, save and share every bit of the wedding experience.
(Another illustration of the wedding as public performance, this one in quite a literal sense, was Improv Everywhere’s Surprise Wedding Reception, though I guess it’s kind of a one-off.)
Anyway, I’m not sure why this (possible) trend disturbs me so much. It’s not like I have one to worry about for the foreseeable future. I think it just has to do with continuing, creeping expectations of microfame and microcelebrity, until one day, every aspect of our lives becomes overproduced and designated for public consumption.
I dunno, I haven’t really thought about this more than trying to articulate this feeling of rising dread I have. Do you think we’re going to see more wedding processional performance knockoffs, and more public-private hybrids, folded, spindled, mutilated, sent and shared online? How would you feel about that? Leave a comment (you can pretend it’s a performance wedding guestbook if you like.)
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