From “Marrying Absurd,” Joan Didion’s 1967 essay about getting hitched in Las Vegas, a garish man-made oasis that shouldn’t logically exist, but does so stubbornly, spectacularly, almost mythically:
“What people who get married in Las Vegas actually do expect–what, in the largest sense, their ‘expectations’ are– strikes one as a curious and self-contradictory business. Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies’ room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets. Almost everyone notes that there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future (no Las Vegas casino, however, has taken the obliteration of the ordinary time sense quite so far as Harold’s Club in Reno, which for a while issued, at odd intervals in the day and night, mimeographed ‘bulletins’ carrying news from the world outside); neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks ‘STARDUST’ or ‘CAESAR’S PALACE.’ Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with ‘real’ life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of beholder all of which makes it an extraordinary and interesting place, but an odd one in which to want to wear a candlelight satin Priscilla of Boston wedding dress with Chantilly lace insets, tapered sleeves and a detachable modified train.” (Thanks TETW.)
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Elvis marries Priscilla, Las Vegas, 1967:
More Joan Didion posts:
- A Paris Review interview. (1978)
Tags: Joan Didion