matrimonimania

Music: And Also the Trees: Further From the Truth Although for over a week and a half the bug-eyed mug of Jennifer Wilbanks was inescapable, the major networks uniformly dropped coverage of her disappearance and return the day after her public statement. Indeed, there was little coverage of the statement, so I was led to wonder why the story was dropped so suddenly. When it's just "another" hysterical woman, there's no "story there." I beg to differ.

Wilbanks, a 32 year old woman betrothed to John Mason, staged an abduction and caught a bus to Las Vegas a week before she was to be married. Having grown up the son of a wedding photographer in the very county Wilbanks lived, I can attest that when the media reported hers was a "big wedding," big should be translated as ridiculously huge. Although the enormity of a typical, "southern" wedding in Gwinnett County Georgia didn't escape mention, the overblown symbolic gesture of these kinds of events was rarely if ever discussed. Last week in class I forged an analogy between the fear of being a drone animated by a machine (e.g., as in The Matrix films or in terms of Star Trek's "The Borg") and what it must be like to be a bride or groom days before a typical, "southern" wedding in Gwinnett County Georgia: large weddings serve to remind the bride and groom that this event is not their event, but an event that has captured them, that runs them, that reminds them that the so-called "choice" they have made is socially scripted. That's the rub about this story of the "runaway bride": it's a cultural fantasy that belies another, a cynical excitement that tacitly critiques the Disney-esque fantasy of soul-deep love at the very same time as it is blind to its own seductive construction: Runaway Bride is a film about how a man meets a woman, the woman runs away, that man recaptures the woman, and then gives the ring back. Mr. Mason is reported to have offered the ring back to Ms. Wilbanks first they saw each other after she returned from her Magic Bus Ride (as Peter McKnight argued, "love is blind, after all, and Mason demonstrates it is also deaf and dumb").

The older I get and the more I watch (I see), the more Jean Baudrillard seems less hyperbolic.

The scenario does seem like conspicuous fantasy all the way down to the last turtle (I say "conspicuous" because I'm not about to claim, a la Baudrillard, we have assassinated the real; all we got are turtles). We can start, first, with the racial rape fantasy: After planting a wad of hair and making all the preparations weeks in advance, and after realizing life away from the Symbolic is impossible, Wilbanks claimed that she was abducted by a Hispanic man and a "white woman" with a handgun and then sexually assaulted in a blue van driving West. Of course, the man could have also been an African American, but there had to be a woman, and this woman had to be white like her. Why do I say this? Because the rape fantasy reflects a textbook case of the psychical structure of hysteria, and because the story Wilbanks told is classically hysteric.

Hysteria is, indeed, the structure that articulates Wilbank's apparent "mental illness," her fantasies, and more importantly, the media coverage of the three. From a psychoanalytic standpoint hysteria concerns a subject who attempts to become the object of the desire of the Other. There are two others here, of course, but each of them is merely a surrogate for the same Other: John Mason, the fiancé and symbolic other, and the imaginary Hispanic man (both of whom will "give it to her"). Typically, the hysterical subject attempts to become the a desired object by identifying with someone (or something) that she is not. There is always a "triangle" between the hysterical subject (a), another subject (b), and the Other, whose desire the subject (a) wants but seeks to achieve it by identifying with another (b). The racial and sexual elements of the abduction narrative (well, aside from formally resembling the triangulations common in alien abduction stories) are thus explained: The Hispanic man represents the "evil" fiancé, the threat the Other always poses, and his "exoticization," at least to Wilbanks, represents that love which is always elusive; the woman with a gun represents a strong willed woman, the object of the Hispanic man's desire, and perhaps the strength Wilbanks seems to lack. Well, you can read the abduction fantasy in a number of ways, but at the level of form, the hallmarks of hysteria— triangulation and self-displacement—is so obvious it's almost laughable. What's terribly unfortunate about this well known cultural fantasy of the racialized man as a phobogenic object is that is kills people.

We should not be surprised, then, to find the issue of "control" at the center of Wilbank's "public statement":

At this time, I cannot explain fully what happened to me last week. I had a host of compelling issues, which seemed out of control — issues for which I was unable to address or confine. Please, may I assure you that my running away had nothing to do with “cold feet,” nor was it ever about leaving John. Those who know me know how excited I’ve been, and how excited I was about the spectacular wedding we planned, and how I could not wait to be Mrs. John Mason.

Oh please! Of course it was all about leaving John, it was about "Dear John," the John who represents simultaneously an object of love and hate. It was about the John that had to be left and who had to suffer! John is not her lover, he is her disciplinarian and teacher, her father, her priest. Mr. Mason is the patriarch who, however ironically, is even more strongly rehabilitated despite the fact the "runaway" is an unquestionable critique. Aside from the scripted hysteria fantasies of Wilbanks, the mass media coverage of the story similarly characterizes Mr. Mason as the strong but loving man with the power to forgive and forget. Clearly, any bride leaving her husband to be is not so sure about her man—-heck, no one is but one simply makes a leap of faith; but the unreasonable pressure to be certain at the level of one's soul apparently backfires in twenty percent of planned marriages. Nevertheless, any trek across the country to "escape" the institution of marriage is a commentary on the institution as well as the figure of the husband. One by one the patriarchs were trotted out on screen: the Reverend Tom Smiley testified to Wilbank's sincere regret and Mason gave face to his amazing powers of forgiveness.

The media portrayal of the "strong men" shepparding this weak (and forcedly passive) woman to her right mind reminded me of a discussion Tracy and I had regarding women in the workplace. Tracy and Doug are working on starting a family (sounds like fun to me), and she noted she was feeling some anxiety about getting pregnant in the academy. She cited some studies that noted women who get pregnant before tenure are discriminated against by their colleagues and institutions, however, men are seen as heroic. We see, of course, the same framing at work in the Wilbanks case: the situation is so overdetermined that her only option at this point is to SUBMIT! Evidence enough of her return from whoredom (clearly cued by the sexual assault fantasy) is her current packaging as a troubled woman with "compelling issues," a woman of purity and abject subservience to the Other: Like mother Theresa and the Virgin Mary, for $16, 000 you can own the visage of the runaway bride on a piece of Wonderbread toast by bidding on ebay.

Like returning to a cult, the closing remarks of Wilbank's statement is passive move and a return to the Law of the Father, the injunction that thou shall never not stand by your man: "As John said on countless occasions recently, may we follow the teaching of Scripture, in being kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving, just as God in Christ forgives us. Thank you." Pathology is sin; only the fiancé/Jesus and his phallic power can forgive. So Mote It Be