The fun begins at 0:43, but the video's short enough you might as well watch the piped-in music, the chit-chatting, and the photographer up in everyone's business.
You know, there's something extremely ridiculous about Korean TV commercials for wedding halls and advertisements for white wedding gowns. Women fawning over something they don't understand, simply because they saw it in a movie or on TV, awash in the glow of their own smug self-satisfaction, and looking about as natural as a pug on Halloween (yes, that sentence is a texbook case of structural ambiguity). About the same degree of ridiculousness associated with Korean "pizza" or other poorly-done imports. Well, nowadays the trend for Western-ish trappings at weddings is so entrenched that people are just keeping up with the Kims. The Western-ish ceremony is just for show, anyway, not only a display of wealth but also an opportunity to reenact the stereotypes associated with Westerners and their exotic rituals (ceremony, photographs, and sex). The white gown is just part of an elaborate costume party marketed as the height of sophistication. Just goes to show that you can't buy class, as if those familiar with Korea's nouveau-riche needed another reminder.
Even the white-trashiest of my relatives never had dancing girls perform at the ceremony. Perhaps that's where things went wrong.
So the usual suspects don't attack me for blindly hating Korea, I might as well add that the wedding business back home is a nightmare, too, an opportunity for women to spend lots of money on themselves before getting divorced in 28 months. Because
1 comment:
I think the problems foreigners have with Korean weddings arise when we judge them within the context of our own wedding traditions. It looks like a western style wedding, but it's not. Pizza is a good example too.
Thing is, we (North Americans, Australians and Brits) didn't invent these either, and there are plenty of snotty-assed Europeans that have been saying the same things about our weddings and pizza for a couple hundred years. It goes on...Greeks looked down on Romans, Romans looked down on Gaelic culture etc.
Say what you will about Korean weddings, but everybody comes. Everyone the Dad works with, all the Mom's friends, their friends they've had since elementary, junior and high school. They're all packed in there on the big day. And, they're all there when their kids turn 100 days, and they're there at the hospital when their parents die, and those who are left will be there at the hospital when they die.
There's plenty to be envious about here. Sure, the roads they take to get their are often f*cked up in the most sadistic, selfish ways, BUT, Koreans often have a point to what they do. Often enough, these points are things that we in the west have utterly forgotten and cannot get back.
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