When I lived in the bay area, my dream was to get married at San Francisco City Hall. I wasn’t affiliated with any church but I craved that sort of grand architecture. I thought of getting married in Muir Woods; dense tall forests like that are of course the original cathedrals, but I had no sense of who might officiate such a thing. I wasn’t constantly hiking anyway. I had the feeling that of all these options, City Hall seemed most integrated with my own life. My life was oriented around the city, and City Hall was the center of that. The building is so magnificent and, situated right in the heart of Civic Center, it felt powerful, romantic, pulsing with the rhythm of collective life. I imagined getting dressed in a little vintage white number (nothing too long or dramatic, something you could easily get away with wearing on public transport, but still elegant enough for a wedding), and riding the Bart to Civic Center, where I would meet my groom on the steps and we would hurry in for our appointment. The small civil ceremony would be followed by champagne at a diner or something. In the massive tableau of city life, this vision would be one tender corner. 

When you’re the granddaughter of an oil baron I’m sure wedding dreams spin themselves up quite a bit differently. I assume that for such a person there is a very real-life expectation of grandeur which I wouldn’t usually engage beyond fantasy. Ivy Getty said she didn’t look at Pinterest for inspiration; she has always been surrounded by many of the world's most prolific creative forces, who she knew would spin the magic for her. This lack of vision dully shines through in every photo of her Vogue story. She wore a dress made of broken mirrors, her bridesmaids looked like Grecian vestals, her flower girls wore butterfly wings, and the entire rotunda of City Hall was covered in persian rugs. Why, then, was it so boring to look at? For all the masses of wealth on display, the whole project appears profoundly uninteresting. 

This blandness stems of course from Ivy herself. She is not the creative mind, or even really the muse behind the whole production. Every bit of real inspiration seems to have come from her grandmother Ann Getty. Are all heirs of great fortunes only leeches, living off the life blood of their clear-sighted ancestors?

It is common practice in The Wedding Industrial Complex to frame the bride as the star of the day, with her groom taking a secondary role. This tradition has found an eerie extremity in the wedding photos and interviews of Ivy Getty and her new husband... What’s his name again? Ivy stands in a fantastical, if absurd ensemble: a dress of broken mirrors, the longest, most detailed wedding veil I’ve seen, and an enormous crown of broken glass objects. Across from this strange theatrical character stands a man in a black tux. How did this unsuspecting everyman find his way into the center of a high fashion fantasy scene? 

In his best moments, the groom looks like a love-struck Timothée Chalamet. He does not, to his great misfortune, look like Himself. While Ivy poses, strong and cool, he appears always a bit dazed and disheveled. Not quite fully emerged out of adolescence, he doesn’t know quite what to do. His hair appears still wind swept from being literally thrown into the photo. Next to Ivy, he always appears as a prop. With the fantasy images of flower girls in fairy wings, and Ivy herself looking a bit like a fairy queen, it’s easy to imagine the groom as Nick Bottom of Midsummer Night’s Dream, who finds himself suddenly swept up in the dramas of a magical other world. With the head of an ass, he is only an elaborate joke being played upon the Fairy Queen Hipolita. 

I know it can be hard to come out well in a photograph. And it’s probably harder still to be compared to a model. On the other hand, an American Heiress is the closest thing we have to a modern princess. One expects the suitor of such a figure to be a man of substance and power. I think of the image of Mick Jagger and Biance Jagger on their wedding day. They appear equally iconic, neither outshines the other but instead they are perfect compliments to their individual manifestations of a creative power so strong that it seems to flow over and exudes out of their every pore: this is something we used to call dynamism. 

Oh, what an uninspired couple this is. Ivy Getty is a model and her husband is a photographer. The Vogue story also calls Ivy an artist, but after some searching through her instagram I have found no evidence that she creates anything other than modeling photos. If Ivy Getty is meant to be understood as the fairy queen of this wedding story, she reigns over a disenchanted wasteland. With her crown of broken glass she asserts herself as queen of dystopia. 

Even the engagement ring turns out to be uninspired. It’s modeled exactly after Princess Diana’s engagement ring. You know, the enormous sapphire rock Kate Middleton flashes. Ivy’s is haloed with diamonds from a necklace given to her by Ann Getty. In the Vogue story, Ivy describes it as “the most unique piece of jewelry” and I am again struck by the heights of unoriginality the heiress has managed to muster. There is much to be said of course for sentimentality, influence, reference, and family jewels. Much to be said, when it adds up to something new, when it feeds into new beauty. But I doubt very much that Ivy Getty’s wedding crown is destined for anything by the junk yard from whence it apparently came. 

It is interesting that Ivy’s wedding party is so steeped in nostalgia. The first party was 60s themed, everyone dressed in cool vintage retro looks. The vogue story mentions that Ivy is particularly inspired by a 60s vibe. Aren’t we all? It seems worthy of note though that it was in 1966 that the Guiness Book of World Records named J. Paul Getty the world’s richest private citizen. This is arguably the height of Getty’s power. And this is the time Ivy is nostalgic for. 

In their interviews with Vogue, it appears that the couple express nothing emotionally significant about their meeting or engagement; the most they can say is that they have a beautiful engagement photograph. Arguably everyone is entitled to some privacy in their romantic life and I could give them that if it weren’t for the fact that these people have submitted to having their wedding documented down to the most minute detail with significant media coverage. In spite of all this attention and energy surrounding their union, they find nothing particularly interesting to say about their marriage. This wedding embodies the state of marriage in our culture in general: it is hollow, it hardly exists. The groom is a wisp, a nothing; the bride is a caricature of glamour, all good looks and gaudy costuming with nothing behind the eyes. 

Ultimately, Ivy Getty’s wedding represents the failure of my own dream. With all the riches in the world, she could not make a San Francisco City Hall wedding feel magical. (I will not even bother with elaborating on the perversity of having Nancy Pelosi officiate. I would begin to paint images of hell itself.) It is right of course to want to get married at the center of life, the fountain, the root from which the life source springs. This is a desire to get closer to what is beautiful and sacred, to put the ceremony as close to the divine as possible. I thought that because I was getting so much inspiration from experiences in the Opera House, the Asian Art Museum, the Conservatory of Music, even the performers in the Civic Center bart stop, that City Hall represented a natural centralizing point for all that creative power. It’s where everyone else gets married, and with its huge white arches it perhaps made a nice blank canvas for the site of my ideal. But it was a canvas only. Ivy had little creative force of her own, had to look to outside powers, and outside powers fell short. What’s a modern girl to do? In a place where the great halls of churches ring hollow and the ancient forest feel alien, where do we locate the life source we crave? I eagerly absorbed every hollow pixel of Ivy Getty’s wedding, soaking in the revelation that this dream fulfilled turned out so utterly soulless; it is in fact a nightmare made manifest. This revelation demands a new dream, a better understanding of where the divine lies and where the animating force is located in the self. Further, we require a new understanding of What Weddings Are. What does marriage mean in the modern age? We require a better articulation of what the union of polarities is about and for. Until then, the most glorious bride of them all is, at best, only the reigning Queen of Dystopia, wedded to a Timothée Chalamet cardboard cut-out, by a corrupt politician.