Nothing makes me more nauseous than the thought of planning, paying for and starring in my own wedding. I bet it’s really similar to the feeling Richard Branson gets when he thinks about poor people. But I betray myself because even though I don’t want a $5,000 dress, gardenia centerpieces or a jazz band, I love to watch people who do. It’s fascinating to me what women will pay for and put up with just to create their perfect day. A perfect day that really just ends up being an amalgam of thousands of other perfect days all involving a white dress, average food and a totally wacky DJ who probably ends up sobbing into his cumber-bun when he gets home.
So when I found out that E! was combining two of the most potent emotional and financial handicaps for women – plastic surgery and weddings – I couldn’t help myself. Well, actually I think I probably forgot about it two buttery minutes into an episode of Paula’s Home Cooking. But, thankfully, what the E! channel lacks in quality, ingenuity and talent, they make up for in repeats. So, even though I missed the premiere of Bridalplasty, I still had the opportunity to see it up to four more times since it first aired.
It follows the typical reality show format of a premiere episode: show the contestants circle around like golden retrievers trying to find the cutest (pinkest) bedroom, cut away to talking heads ranging from heartwarming to you must be internally freeze-dried, and of course, a washed up almost celebrity, Shanna “my mother was deaf” Moakler.
But Bridalplasty brings quite a few extras. Self esteem issues are in such abundance they’re almost not worth talking about. It’d be like analyzing the different glasses they drank out of. Most are so convinced of their repulsiveness that they spontaneously break into tears, all are adamant that they need to be the perfect bride (in other words, someone else completely) before getting married and some are probably just there because Bret Michaels wasn’t casting for anything at the time.
I mean, it has to be a joke. It just has to. It is, in every sense, a parody of itself. And if it didn’t revolve around a dozen women voluntarily having their noses broken and nipples sewn back on, I’d insist that it was.
After they mark their beds with Curious by Britney Spears, they head into the living room. While there, they’re introduced to plastic surgeon, Dr. Dubrow, who expresses his shock that they’re all “basically good looking.” After his backhanded compliment, he is then seen drawing on the women as if he’s playing a frenetic game of Pictionary, only no one is pretending to have fun.
And just to ensure that their self image plummets to an all time low, the women have their consultation videos shown on the flat screen for all to see. Almost immediately, horror washes across their faces as they hear things like “extra fatty tissue” and “areolas pointing downward.”
After a “Fuck it, I’m getting liposuction” meal packed with alcohol and cream sauce, they launch into their first competition. It requires Ike Turner’s most eligible bachelorettes to, once again, stare at photos of their frowning stomachs and race to solve a computer generated puzzle of themselves after their plastic surgery. However, once they finish their fifteen minutes as a lab rat, it’s obvious to anyone with at least one cataract-free eye that all of the improved bodies have been whittled down to a uniform size 2. Despite this, most of the women reveal that they want to look exactly like that for their wedding.
As a reward for those who complete their puzzles, there’s an injectable party. An injectable party. Where Dr. Dubrow and his staff (boom mic operators with nothing else to do) inject things into their faces. They’re all really excited until they have to vote off one of their own emotionally crippled cohorts. They feign tears and ultimately send home one of only two non-white women, who was perceived as selfish because she pawned her engagement ring in order to make a car payment.
It ends with Shanna remarking to the eliminated contestant that, “Your wedding will still go on, it just may not be perfect.”
My thoughts exactly, ladies.
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