Wedding Crashers

Banal or sublime, love's function is to mark the subject's binding to scenes to which s/he must always return.

—Lauren Berlant, "Love: A Queer Feeling"

The vertiginous opening scenes of David Dobkin's 2005 film Wedding Crashers follow the fortunes of John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn): divorce mediators by profession, they spend their leisure time trolling the wedding circuit, bagging bridesmaids. Although deeply skeptical about the institution of marriage, they love weddings and are very good at them. In a series of high-speed montages, we see them working with both precision and abandon. After shedding Visine tears at the ceremony, John and Jeremy move in for the kill at the reception: they pop corks, tell jokes, make balloon animals, down cake and tequila, their manic excess timed perfectly to the lyrics of "Shout!" ("You make me want to shout! Kick my heels up and shout! Throw my hands up and shout! Throw my head back and shout!"). The sequence ends with a visual joke, as a series of dips on the dance floor cuts to shots of topless women falling one after another onto hotel beds. "I do!"

These early scenes make us squirm with both pleasure and anxiety. Is this really what this movie is about? Eventually, the "frenzy of the visible" gives way to more predictable pleasures, as it turns out that John and Jeremy do want something "more" than free drinks and eager beaver. They meet and fall in love with two sisters (Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher) who turn out to be as game as they are. In the movie's final image, the two couples drive off to a wedding—but not their own. By suggesting that boys and girls just want to have fun, and that they can have it together, Wedding Crashers is deeply hopeful about the possibilities of companionate marriage.

Who is buying this? Apparently, very few online reviewers: in the weeks after the film's release, they complained bitterly about the sudden turn from buddy movie to chick flick. Indeed, the hearts of the filmmakers do not seem to be in this ending: many of the movie's key set pieces play on the misery of marriage and family life, and, visually and aurally, there is nothing to match the excitement of the early scenes of wedding crashing. It is also hard to reconcile the happy coupling at the end of the movie with its tagline: "Life's a Party. Crash It." Rather than containing the anarchic energies of the movie's opening sequences, this motto expands their scope, suggesting that it may be not only the wedding but also more general social forms that are in need of destruction. In Wedding Crashers, defecting from marital aims is a way to break other key obligations: the obligation, for instance, to "belong" to a family, to be who you say you are, or to be a productive (rather than a parasitic) member of society.

This kind of work is best done alone, or with a friend; it is hard to picture the conjugal couple ripping the social fabric apart at the seams because, at least in many accounts, it is the social fabric. Destroying civilization is a job that has generally fallen to queers, those consummate outsiders whose sexy doings accord so badly with life as we know it. With their elaborate backstories, interesting friends, and winning manners, queers are the guests who are "so much fun" at the wedding, but who are never quite part of the family. Their lives are fascinating, but incomplete: barred from marriage, they can have no happy endings themselves. (Todd, the "little gay brother" in Wedding Crashers, is cute and talented, but lonely. Though Jeremy cherishes the nude portrait Todd paints of him, he summarily rejects his erotic advances; at the end...