The Brown Hotel auditorium is packed to the gills with attendees of Mitch Baylor's memorial. Before the proceedings begin, Hollie enters the room to a palpable chorus of whispers, including several people noting, "It's Hollie." Drew and Heather take their seats beside her, noticing a banner above the stage reading Mitch's trademark phrase, "If it wasn't this... it'd be something else."

The memorial begins with a montage of speeches, several from Elizabethtown citizens introduced earlier in the film, including Aunt Dora submitting another barb about Mitch moving to California; and some from new friends of Mitch, including a woman who notes with approval that "Mitch wrote letters," and "never once sent an email." Upon Bill Banyan's turn at the podium, he announces, "And I apologize, per se, for my role in that deal, per se."

Drew and Heather introduce their mother, who takes the stage greeted by another hearty wave of hushed commentary. During the seven minutes of Hollie's speech, she informs the audience that she enrolled in comedy school after Mitch's passing, makes repeated use of the word "boner," and tap dances to "Moon River." These are the exact elements required to end 27 years of bad blood between Hollie Baylor and Elizabethtown, and her speech receives a standing ovation.

Drew exits the auditorium to find Claire just entering the building. She hands him a large box containing what she describes as "a very unique map," for use on his road trip home.

Arguably the climax of whatever narrative Elizabethtown might contain, this clip contains the long-awaited showdown between Hollie Baylor and her husband's possessive hometown. As is the case with Hollywood's most epic and famous showdowns -- Terminator vs. T-1000, Ripley vs. the queen alien, Neo vs. Agent Smith -- this one was sure to end in tap dancing.

Considering what an essential part Elizabethtown itself plays in the identities of its residents, as well as its role in the fierce devotion to Mitch harbored by each and every Elizabethtownie, we find it extremely questionable that they have decided to relocate en masse to Louisville for this memorial. To be sure, Louisville has never been mentioned or demonstrated to have held any significance whatsoever to Mitch Baylor, aside from cost- and effort-saving economy of location. You see, Mitch even sacrificed the location of his own memorial to make a lazy screenwriter's job even easier -- what a guy!

While the opening speeches may seem like just another empty montage leading up to Hollie's command performance, several of them serve to address various subplots seemingly left by the film's wayside. Yes, Mitch and Hollie left a trail of heartbreak so long and wide that Mitch's jilted fiancé is still collecting the pieces of her shattered life almost 30 years later. Yes, a lot of people stubbornly insist that Mitch moved to California rather than Oregon. And perhaps most shocking of all, yes, apparently Elizabethtown contains exactly one black person.

The most revealing line comes from Bill Banyan's speech: in just 13 words (four of which are "per" or "se"), Bill apologizes for screwing Mitch over and alienating himself from the other residents of Elizabethtown. It is a surprisingly brief conclusion to the saga that inspired Hollie to roast her husband's corpse at 1000°.

Ultimately, however, the collection of speeches paints an incontrovertibly grim picture of not only Elizabethtown, but Mitch himself. The very first speaker, a woman we have not seen before, sets a pile of letters on the podium seemingly as proof that Mitch refused to use email. Though we never learn this woman's name or her role in Mitch's life, the fondness in her voice belies the boundary between "quirky, lovable resistance to new technology" and "bull-headed codgery." In reality, email has been an everyday reality for almost a decade and Mitch may have kept in better touch with his son had he sucked it up and opened a Hotmail account.

Additionally, there is the matter of Aunt Dora's passive-aggressive sneer at Hollie: "Even though he moved to California, God love him, he always came back to his roots." As if that was not inappropriate enough, the cockeyed old man from Mitch's soirake takes the podium, spits out the line, "I don't have a funny story to tell. I will tell you, it wasn't easy for Mitch to leave the military and start over again in California," and stomps away in disgust. The mean-spirited tone of these lines is all the more jarring considering the zaniness of what happens next.

Truly, Hollie's epic speech is the centerpiece of this sequence, and perhaps all of Elizabethtown. It would appear that Hollie herself is aware of this, as she pulls the microphone off the stand and strolls around the stage like a stand-up comedian who is about to get to the really good stuff. "Let me tell you a little bit about life without Mitch!" she commences. We cannot begin to confront the issues raised by Hollie's speech without beholding it in all its wretched glory, and therefore we present a transcript of its opening act:

I wanted to get to know about Mitch's car. And it actually ate me. I went to the bank, and the teller looked at me strangely and I got home and I looked at myself in the mirror and my face was still green from a facial mask that I had forgotten to take off. And I called our insurance man of years whose son Mitch had actually helped to get into West Point to tell him that Mitch was gone. He didn't call me back for two days. The car, the bank, the insurance man, the world. I mean, nobody truly cared. Not like us. I always wanted to learn to tap dance so I took tap dance lessons. And I wanted to learn -- yeah, I did. And I wanted to learn to cook organically and so I attempted that. And I fixed the toilet. Yeah. All by myself. And I wanted to learn to laugh. Why couldn't I be funnier when Mitch was alive? But you know, I figured it out. It takes time to be funny and it takes time to extract joy from life. So I enrolled in comedy school.

These words are all it takes to win over an entire town that had nothing but contempt for her five minutes ago. By this point, the crowd is hooting and hollering at the sheer hilarity of enrolling in comedy school, despite the fact that the registration process isn't inherently humorous; similarly unfunny is Hollie's schticky recap of the last four days since since her husband died, in which she essentially announces that happiness is possible for her now that Mitch is dead. (And in fairness to the insurance man, maybe he did call back but she was too busy at comedy school to answer.)

Hollie's next order of business is to tell a crass story about being comforted by Bob, her next door neighbor, and feeling his "huge" erection against her. In response, the Elizabethtownies roar with laughter as though erect penises were inherently funny. Several guests are visibly shocked, to the supposed amusement of the viewer, though the joyful screeches flooding the soundtrack confirm the majority response to Hollie's routine. (One audience member is even inspired to pump his fist like Arsenio Hall.) Interestingly, this sequence provides valuable insight into Elizabethtown's sheltered constitution, as the level of their excitement suggests this may be their first ever exposure to attempted humor.

Indeed, not only is there no actual humor in Hollie's material, there is almost no mention of Mitch at all. Hollie has taken this opportunity to stand in front of an entire town, at her beloved husband's memorial, and perform a meaningless stand-up routine about herself. The longer Hollie talks, the more unsettling it becomes that (1) none of her stories honor Mitch in the slightest, and (2) Cameron Crowe only named her neighbor "Bob" so she could call him "Boner Bob" 10 seconds later.

To drive home the "dancing on his grave" metaphor even further, Hollie embarks on a shockingly literal interpretation in which she actually tap dances, to the eternal delight of the crowd. Though we cannot fault Hollie for, in fact, being an incompetent tap dancer -- not only because the audience's thunderous acclaim is obviously unrelated to her skill level, but also because the woman has only been training for three days -- the soundtrack reveals the clicking of actual tap shoes, which Hollie did not change into and yet was not wearing when she first took the podium. On the other hand, if we give the movie the benefit of the doubt and say she was wearing tap shoes the whole time, this means Hollie was getting ready for the memorial, looked down at them and said, "No grieving wife should leave home without these!"