The Wedding List (Patreon)

Ugh. So close to done but needs a couple more paragraphs. Job hunting and preparing for my last semester of college without an associate's degree have kept me busy. Hope this will do. 

The Wedding List (demo) Xmas special The Wedding List Prince’s Trust Gala (1982)

Dedicated to Rohanne, the baddest bitch ever to write about the French New Wave. 

François Truffaut’s film La Mariée était en noir, or The Bride Wore Black, frequently juxtaposes images of marital domesticity with the unhappiness of women. Its opening sequence depicts topless photographs of a woman being mechanically laid down by a machine. She stares dispassionately  at the camera, perhaps itching to get away from a lecherous photographer. Therein begins the movie’s trend of women’s antipathy towards men who objectify them, as actress Jeanne Moreau’s character, a bride who becomes a widow when her husband is shot to death immediately after their wedding, exacts violent revenge on her husband’s killers. To do so, she often goes through degrading transactions with these men, having tedious dinner dates with bigwigs or posing for their drawn portraits. Men and women have negative relationships in The Bride Wore Black, defined as much by the absence of supportive figures as much as its surplus of exploitative ones. 

The films of the Nouvelle Vague, or the 1960s French New Wave of movies including The Bride Wore Black, are walks through the zeitgeist of 1960s France, storming through the decade’s cultural and sociopolitical changes and exploring them with fluidly montage-centric and social realist filmmaking. A staple of many New Wave movies is stories about women trapped by misogynistic social dynamics. Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie showcases the misfortunes of an abused-housewife-turned-sex-worker at upsetting length, Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 is about the terror of a woman faced with the possibility of imminent death, and François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim follows the dick-waving battle of two men over a woman. Many battles are fought in the New Wave, but few are as tumultuous as that of gender dynamics.

Of the aforementioned movies, two are directed by men. More Nouvelle Vague is male-directed than not. For all that these movies display an awareness of women’s issues, they’re largely from a masculine point of view that deprives their female characters of interiority. Women remain objects of desire who can’t function when unaccompanied by men. The Bride Wore Black is a good example of this: while Jeanne Moreau’s character is taking revenge on the male world, her motivations are pretty much exclusively “welp, I don’t have a man anymore so I’d better become a murderous vigilante.” While granting this reverse fridging is interesting (Quentin Tarantino clearly thought so, since he stole the plot of The Bride Wore Black for Kill Bill), and its gender politics are at least complex, it’s still fundamentally a narrative of how women fail to function without men in their lives. 

Kate Bush is no stranger to this idea. A good number of her classic songs are about pining for an enigmatic male figure. It’s as much a part of being a female songwriter in the Seventies as pianos, getting stalked by gross music journalists, and getting compared to other women artists with no similarities beyond their gender. Kate Bush’s men are bastions of strength, and to be fair, she has a reason to believe that. The majority of her steadiest collaborators and supporters — her partner Del Palmer, her brothers, and nearly every musician she worked with — have been men. It’s easy to adopt a positive view of masculinity with that background. As Bush has always had positive male influences in her life, masculinity to Bush is a desirable companion piece for femininity.

It’s thus understandable The Bride Wore Black inspired Bush’s song, “The Wedding List,” which dodges faithful adaptation of its source material (as Bush often does) while preserving the gist of Truffaut’s themes. As in The Bride Wore Black, the setup of “The Wedding List” is the vengeful killing spree of a woman whose husband was shot dead on her wedding day. It’s a pretty straightforward lift — while there’s no mention of the film or its characters, the premise is exactly the same. Bush trades in striking images, so copping such a vivid plot from a film was standard practice for her. Yet “The Wedding List” signals a break from the norm for Bush — unlike “Wuthering Heights,” it’s clearly written by someone who’s familiar with the source material (Bush read Wuthering Heights and understood Catherine Earnshaw’s narcissistic abusiveness, but apart from Cathy’s all-consuming desire for Heathcliff, that’s not how Bush writes her). The image of a bride widowed as her husband is struck down in the church is a striking one on aesthetic and ideological levels. Getting to write such lyrics as “you’ve made a wake of our honeymoon” is only one major reason to write about it. 

Never for Ever is pervaded by images of familial breakdown. From “Babooshka” and its adulterous façade to the bleak wartornness of “Army Dreamers” and “Breathing,” traditional concepts of domesticity and the family collapse in the face of violent modernity. Each song on the LP conveys some shattering of youthful preconceptions under the weight of adult burdens. Midwifed by the prodigy’s anxiety of Lionheart, the youthful dream of The Kick Inside has morphed into a darker vision of a strange world that, while allowing the hopes of the young to break into it, warps them beyond recognition: “maybe fate wants you dead too.” This kind of pessimism is found throughout Never for Ever and The Dreaming, and is only somewhat alleviated by Hounds of Love. It’s expressed in “The Wedding List” through the death of Bush’s husband. There is no male enigma to save the day: Bush is well and truly alone, left to defend for herself. 

In this way, Bush kills her positive vision of masculinity and replaces it with a bloodier one. She essentially takes the role of the vigilante which is usually played by men. When men stop playing a part in this story, women take their roles. It’s a kind of reverse fridging, the moment fridging stops being a misogynistic trope and becomes kind of good and queer. This is a traditionally male role being occupied by one of the most popular young singers in England. The queer fanbase can be sniffed out from here. This break with gender norms is exemplified by Bush’s Christmas special performance of the song, where she dons a wedding dress while shooting her husband’s assassin to death. It’s terribly fun and extra, but it gets to a key truth about wedding stories: they usually don’t have a lot of women protagonists with guns. To be fair, this is a problem a lot of kinds of stories have even now, but in Truffaut and Bush it’s a nice departure from the cultural norms of the 60s and 70s.

Yet for all the fun subversion Kate Bush as a shooter in a wedding dress entails, it still brings us back to the fundamental problem of The Bride Wore Black. This is still a story of a woman failing to function as a member of society because there’s no longer a man in her life. It’s a compellingly told one that understands the trauma of these women, but neither The Bride Wore Black nor “The Wedding List” seeks to be empowering. While telling unempowering stories isn’t a problem in its own rite (these days I find myself leaning harder into nihilism than ever before), this still has Bush copying a narrative from a filmmaker who’s kinda sexist, even if Truffaut is more willing to explore a woman’s side of the story than some of his contemporaries. Bush’s spin on the story offers three choices to its protagonist: husband, violence, or death. She chooses the latter.

This is where Bush diverges from Truffaut, who ends his movie with Jeanne Moreau in prison but having killed all of her husband’s murderers. At the end of “The Wedding List,” Bush gets vengeance on her groom’s killer and commits suicide. “I’m coming, Rudy,” she howls desperately. It gets worse from there: her autopsy uncovers that she “had a little one inside/it must have been Rudy’s child.” This is a song where a pregnant woman commits suicide. And it’s not even the first time that’s happened in a Kate Bush song! It’s utterly bleak, perhaps moreso in our historical moment where shooters are ubiquitous in the US (although vastly less so in the UK).

[Will wrap this out with some discussion about the interesting thematic dissonance between subversive feminist politics and the conservative fantasy of Bush’s vision. Also about that fucking concert performance.]