A Girl Can't Get Married in Flannel!

Or can she? Social expectations, marriage and making our own rules in Runaway Bride!

For the longest time I thought I’d never be a wife, never mind have a wife. But, my silence over the last few months is mostly because I’ve been absorbed with the legal, organisational and emotional whirlwind of getting married. And like the protagonist of this week’s movie, Runaway Bride, I have not just had one wedding but three, in the middle of a transatlantic move with my wife, cat, dog and everything but the kitchen sink! Unlike Maggie Carpenter all these weddings involved the same person, they were just spread across three different countries.

We had a Mayan ‘binding ceremony’ in Guatemala in April, a civil wedding with borrowed witnesses in Denmark in July and we had the big, blow-out party last Saturday Ireland. In the middle of all that we’ve been negotiating the deeply unjust migration system and settling into a new house and, for my wife at least, a new country.

So in light of all this upheaval, chaos and emotional stress, I thought I’d indulge my closeted rom-com fangirl, buried underneath many layers of pretension, to talk about one of favourite wedding movies (a close second to another Roberts’ classic My Best Friend’s Wedding) and possibly the most neurodivergent wedding movie of them all: Runaway Bride.

Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!

Runaway Bride is a 1999 rom-com directed by Gary Marshall as a sort of alternate reality sequel to Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts as Maggie, aka the Runaway Bride, and Richard Gere, as a flailing reporter on “Menz issues.” When Maggie’s third fiancé to be left at the altar bumps into Ike at a New York dive bar, the misogynistic reporter becomes determined to expose Maggie for the man-eater he believes her to be. Ike stalks Maggie to her home town and follows her around as she prepares for her fourth wedding and interrogates her friends and relatives. When resistance proves futile Maggie decides to cooperate with Ike and tell him the real story. As she opens up to the reporter love blossoms and Ike becomes Maggie’s fourth fiancé.

As someone who’s (now ex) friend once said I was a “rabid feminist, who hates men and is blinded by your own radicalism” you might think that a classic rom-com like Runaway Bride would not appeal to me in the least. And it’s true that at I’ve often hidden my enjoyment of this particular genre under other ‘loftier’ movie preferences. But let’s face it, Julia Roberts - that smile, that hair - is just irresistible.

I might have seen Runaway Bride at the cinema, though I have no particular recollection of this. But I definitely would have watched it at some sleepover or other at the home of one of my teenage gal-pals. In recent years I’m almost sure I’ve watched it more than one transatlantic flight. Prompted by the recent You Are Good episode on My Best Friend’s Wedding, I decided to revisit this and other classic 90s Julia Roberts’ like Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman. When I finally got to Runaway Bride I was surprised how much of a neurodivergent icon Maggie Carpenter is.

The real me…?

There is a lot going on with Maggie in Runaway Bride. She lost her mother in early adulthood, prompting a return home and truncating her own life plans, ambitions and personal growth. Her father is an alcoholic who relies on Maggie to keep the family business afloat and drag him back from bars when he has had one too many. She is loved by her community but has also become the town’s favourite joke. Maggie’s traumas, particularly her dead mother, are only hinted at and seem to serve as Hollywood shorthand for character depth and vulnerability. Maggie's multiple flights from her own weddings remain the focus of the movie.

As Ike, dragging Maggie along with him, begins to unpick the nature of her previous relationships it becomes increasingly clear that Maggie is performing to the world. She lets her partners project their desires and fantasies onto her. In them she finds an identity to latch onto when she seems so unsure of her own sense of self.

Every aspect of her life and relationships comes under scrutiny in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable because it is so resonant. As the town “screw-up” she becomes a figure of acceptable comment, judgement and ridicule from family and friends alike as her behaviour, choices and questionable decisions are picked apart.

At one particularly uncomfortable moment, Ike accuses Maggie of flirting with her best friend’s husband. Maggie thinks she is just being her old friendly self, but the flirting accusation is supported by bestie Peggy (the indomitable Joan Cusack) who says:

“I think sometimes you just sort of spaz-out with random excess flirtation energy and it just lands on anything male that moves.”

Leaving aside that particularly 90s flavour of ableist slurs, “flirting” is something autistic people are regularly accused of when in fact we are just being friendly or enthusiastic about a conversation or interaction, so enthusiastic we might even let our mask slip for a moment. This enthusiasm is too often misinterpreted as romantic interest and when this is directed at the wrong person it can lead to a whole world of trouble. Believe me, I’ve been there. The irony is that if ever I have been confronted with someone who is intentionally flirting with me, (on the rare occasion that I realise what is happening) I usually freeze up and find the quickest way to escape the conversation. The fact that Maggie’s supposed flirting is interpreted as something inappropriate and used as another mark against her, is one of the most striking ways the film fails its protagonist. Once again, this seems to come down to diverse communication styles, and the tendency to shame or pathologise forms of communication that we fail to understand or which make us uncomfortable.

Quirky and weird are two different things…

The same conversation between Maggie and Peggy also contains one of my favourite exchanges of cinema history. Peggy continues describing what she thinks Maggie projects to the world:

Peggy: "I'm charming and mysterious in a way that even I don't understand and something about me is crying out for protection from a big man like you." Very hard to compete with. Especially to us married women who have lost our mystery.

Maggie: But you haven't lost your mystery! You're very mysterious!

Peggy: No. I’m weird. Weird and mysterious are two different things.   

Maggie: But I’m weird.

Peggy: No. You’re quirky. Quirky and weird are two different things.

Maggie: Peggy, there’s a distinct possibility that I might be profoundly and irreversibly screwed up.

Quirky, eccentric and weird were labels I clung to from throughout childhood and teens to explain all the ways I felt I did not fit with the world around me. Those labels became an armour I wore proudly throughout adolescence, my twenties and well into my thirties, even as I worked really hard to hide that side of myself from the rest of the world. Something of my weirdness would always seep through. If I self-applied those labels it lessened the hurt when others signalled my not-quite-fitting-inness in kinder or crueler ways.

There was little shame in being considered an eccentric or quirky, and even weird felt like a statement at times. And so these labels became essential to my identity of difference even though I longed to fit it more than anything else. When I discovered I was neurodivergent, I experienced a totally unexpected identity crisis. I learned that many, if not all, of the ways I considered myself uniquely quirky or eccentric actually meant that I belonged to a relatively large community of other neurodivergent people who think and acted in similar ways.

Feeling unique, even special, had been a huge part of how I mitigated the social and emotional toll of loneliness, isolation and the belief that I was somehow, deep down, broken or “profoundly and irreversibly screwed up.” By swapping socially accepted, even embraced, labels like quirky and eccentric for stigmatised and poorly understood labels such as autistic and ADHD, felt like leap away from the comfort of quirkiness into an unknown othering.

Even as I felt joy and relief at the realisation that I finally belonged somewhere, part of me mourned the loss of my eccentric, quirky and weird identities I had clung to for so long. I finally had a space in the world and that space meant shedding my own sense of uniqueness and specialness and embracing community.

Nearly three years (!!) on from my diagnosis I can say that this aspect of my grief was fleeting. The sense of belonging and the resonances of experience with other neurodivergent people has been far more enriching than any pretensions to quirkiness, eccentricity or weirdness. I have found the community I so longed for and have been able to let go of the need to appear edgy interesting as a deflection of social isolation and incomprehension. I realised these were nothing more than an armour I could finally let go of.

Benedict!

Runaway Bride is ultimately about the process of unmasking. In this case it is not prompted by a diagnosis but the possibility of allowing yourself to love and be love for who you are. As Hollywood as this may seem, it is certainly a better message than the rash of 90s teen “makeover” movies I grew up with that spread a much more insidious message of moulding yourself into the image of your beloved (I’m thinking of you She’s All That).

The main issue I have with Runaway Bride is how the process of unmasking is not exactly voluntary. Ike sees Maggie without the mask because he forces her out of it in the most excruciating way. The fact that they end up together is the one thing I really don’t like about the movie.

Maggie’s violent unmasking forces her to confront the mystery of who she really. This mirrors the moment of diagnosis when we must begin to unpick all the layers of the persona we have created and projected to the outside world to discover who we really are. Instead of going after Ike, Maggie reconnects with herself and puts her own testes and preferences to the test. She discovers, like me, that Eggs Benedict are her favourite, while all the time she has been taking her eggs just like her partner’s. But even the seemingly trivial matter of eggs speaks to the neurodivergent trauma with food when so many of us have been forced to eat things we can’t tolerate because of taste or texture, and continue to eat these things because we have been told it is polite. Only when she feels she knows herself and what she wants to do with her life and her creativity does she return to Ike.

I know in my heart: you're the only one for me!

When Maggie and Ike finally do tie the knot, it is the wedding Maggie has always wanted for herself: alone, on horseback and with no spectators. To get there Maggie had to know herself and allow herself to let go familial, relational and social expectations of what a wedding, and maybe even a relationship, looks like. In a world where weddings are perhaps the most regimented of social rituals, Runaway Bride gives all us weirdos permission to do things are own way.

As a child of a very messy divorce and a sceptic of the nuclear family and how it supports the reproduction of a white supremacist, heteropatriachal capitalist system, I’m not really a believer in marriage. But, many people continue to believe that autistic people, disabled people and queer people should never be allowed to get married. There are many laws in place around the world to actively prevent these unions and even criminalise them. Marriage, in my case, has allowed my partner access to similar (though not equal) visa privileges that I have enjoyed in Guatemala for the last ten years. The fact that so many people believe a marriage like ours should have no right to exist, our legal union is, in part, a product of our contrarian spirit.

My partner and I have had not one, not two, but three celebrations of our decision to share our lives with each other: the spiritual, the legal and the party! This post is a celebration in honour of all the queers and crips, freaks and weirdos, who have been told that they should not or could not get married. I hope you all enjoy your own happy ever after!

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Some writing news:

• I had my first ever piece in The Guardian recently, writing about Jayro Bustamante’s new film Rita and the real-life tragedy at the Virgen de la Asunción “Safe Home” in 2017 which inspired the story. The film premiered last week in Guatemala and will be available on streaming services later this year, if you have a chance to see it please do!

• I had an essay published at Red Pepper, discussing art, politics and the musicians putting profit over Palestine.

• And last week I had a short travelogue published on The Autoethnographer, exploring extractivsm in writing, research and travelling.

• ‘Other Peoples’ Trash,’ a piece of creative nonfiction, appeared in the ‘Family’ edition of the Irish literary magazine Tower early this summer.

• Back in May I won a creative writing award at Listowel Writer’s Week and last week I also had a short story, Pension Day, featured in the ‘From the Well’ anthology published by Cork Libraries.

  All in all it has been a whirlwind of a summer for writing!

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Now that life finally promises to settle down somewhat, I hope to get back on track with this newsletter. In the meantime tell me about your favourite wedding movies (the good, the bad and the ugly). Personally I love Bridesmaids, My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Wedding Singer!