Sunday, January 11, 2004

Just when we were getting used to pop idols with names once reserved for pets, someone called Britney embarks on a marriage that lasts no longer than the case of beer she must have consumed before bumbling down the aisle.

Britney Spears is no longer Mrs. Jason Allen Alexander. Her Las Vegas marriage was legally annulled Monday, 55 hours after it began. Not even enough time to monogram the bath towels.

Publicists issued a statement that Spears and Alexander "took a joke too far."

"That would be a fair assessment," said David Chesnoff. Hours after Spears noticed that she had, apparently as a joke, gotten married, Chesnoff, a Las Vegas lawyer, received a telephone call from the pop star and her manager.

"They just said they needed a visit with me and I went and found out what the situation was," Chesnoff said. He drove to her hotel, heard her story, and had a petition for annulment waiting at the courthouse Monday morning. In Las Vegas this was, doubtless, just another complication from a commercial wedding chapel whose promotional literature features Joan Collins (four marriages); Judy Garland (five); and Mickey Rooney (eight). Cigarette packs don't come with that much warning.

"When I was dealing with her she took the situation very seriously," Chesnoff said. Before that, it is hard to imagine Spears thought of the Little White Wedding Chapel as anything more than a rare Las Vegas amusement without a slot for quarters and a handle on the side. For all we know, she went there instead of miniature golfing because the line was shorter.

"It says something about the culture," said Tom Mulroy. It is striking that Mulroy would say this. He is a Pittsburgh divorce lawyer.

"I have about a hundred of them going at any time," Mulroy said. A man whose job is to sever the ties of husband and wife is aghast at Spears' vending-machine marriage and the culture that produced it.

On the same weekend Spears and Alexander purchased a vending-machine marriage, Fox, the network America turns to when it seeks to be a lesser place, aired promotional spots for "My Big, Fat, Obnoxious Fiance."

The show's premise is to have an attractive woman try to win a cash prize by convincing her despairing family, all the way through a wedding ceremony, that she intends to marry a man who appears to be Chris Farley reincarnated as an Ostrogoth.

The merriment is compounded when the Fox producers send in the family of the groom without telling the perjuring bride that they are hired actors. All of this is done in front of a film crew. It is called reality television, which in a perverse way is quite accurate. These sorts of shows usher in a new reality. Marriage is now a skit. Show it on TV and people will try it at home.

The annulment petition Chesnoff filed explains that, before entering into the marriage, Spears and Alexander, "did not know each other's likes and dislikes, each other's desires to have or not have children and each other's desires as to state of residency."

These things are mere subtleties. In some cultures brides and grooms meet the day of the ceremony and part company only at one or the other's cremation. What Britney Spears and Jason Alexander did not know is what most of us no longer know: our own likes and dislikes, our own desire to have or not have children, our own understanding of just what marriage is or is not.

"Marriage is like the last religion in America," Mulroy said. "People really believe in it. They believe it's the ticket to happiness for them. Then they're not happy, and therefore it must be because they didn't find the right mate."

Of course, it has less to do with finding the right mate than with mating correctly. But the rules of conjugality have changed so comprehensively as to be recognizable only as the premise for an elaborate practical joke such as "Joe Millionaire," in which a pride of beauties compete for the affections of a millionaire in front of cameras. The winner then learns that her prize is, in truth, penniless. This is probably closer to real life than any of the other current shows in which pedestrians mate in captivity. Still, it is a paradigm of the cheapening of courtship into jape.

"This is a whole new chapter," said Mulroy. "Marriage is a game. It's a game show game. Now here's Britney Spears putting the final touch on it."

Marriage has been demeaned to the point of becoming an evening's distraction for the couple and then a week's entertainment for the rest of us. It took a divorce lawyer to tell us this, and he is right.

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