Arranged Marriages
Created | Updated Jun 21, 2003
Here's a review of the TV show 'Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?' for the people who missed the show. Yes, both of you.
'Hey! Wow! Yeah, Wow!'
cries a Hollywood MC as he drools at 50 attractive marriage contestants; all on sexual, stand-by, All contracepted up to the nines and ready for immediate honeymoon duty if selected.
The MC was hosting the multi-oggled 'Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?' (Finally shown last Friday on NZ television) 'History's most-watched wedding after Lady Di's!' Throughout the show the 50 nubile combatants were scythed down to the legal number of US wives - leaving 49 hors de combat, so to speak.
In return for promising to love, honour and obey her soul mate of eight minutes, the winning bride would receive a $70,000 ring and an Isuzu - henceforth referred to here as an 'Iduzu'.
Mr Multi-Mill himself skulked throughout - like a voyeuristic Captain Nemo - in a darkened capsule, leering through a Cinerama-sized keyhole at the passing parade of simpering marital aids. He eventually appeared to morale-shattering effect sporting a Clinton-like nose bulb and receding teeth.
To ensure he was not bonding with a complete stranger he was told many useful things about the half-century of pre-brides prepared to marry and 'keep house for him'. And presumably keep his cars, yachts and swimming pools for him too, in the inevitable divorce settlement.
He learned this one liked candies but not pork, this one liked kissing but disliked lima beans and this one liked travel - but only to spider-free countries. One aspirant announced - through lips swollen to collagen perfection - that she'd rather age gracefully than artificially reverse the process. Another said her life was so rich and challenging she would never want to change it. The MC was either too tactful or dumb to ask her what then she was doing on the show.
The contending brides were put through a selection quiz:
'Should you tell him how many intimate relationships you've had before him?'
The obvious answer was:
'Who says he's gonna be intimate?'
Hell, what's intimate about a guy who jacks up his next intimate relationship in front of a billion people? This guy specialises in public relationships - he's probably figuring to fix a seismograph to the honeymoon bed and sell the readings.
Eventually, the 50 lacquer-clawed contestants were rendered down to 10. There were some applicants you just knew had less than a snowball's chance of getting to the semi-finals. Ms Bonk (sic), was one, the sole African-American representative was another.
And in hindsight, we realised the brave gal who chased off a bear in the backwoods had no show either. A few days after the programme, it was revealed Mr Multi-Mill had had a non-molestation order whacked on him by a former girlfriend - so he sure as heck wasn't going to wed some feisty bear-wrestler that might fight back.
As we now know, this much-ballyhooed marriage crashed into recriminatory farce within hours. The channel that screened it quickly apologised and the chosen bride admitted she had been revolted by the idea at the very moment of quavering 'I do'.
And it was this single, shocked, split-second of realisation that validated the making, the screening, the watching and the reviewing of the year's most execrable programme so far. It was a moment of proof there is hope yet for the mental state of the USA.
For, in that memorable moment of TV reality, we saw the pupils of the neo-bride's greedily gormless eyes flare like mobilised umbrellas as she awoke - in a fever of deodorant-threatening sweat from the American Dream.
