Muriel's Wedding
Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Wed, 29 Sep 1999 07:10:34 -0700 (PDT)
>From: LvlyRita42@aol.com
>why did seymour marry muriel? i mean, there is no "right" answer, but what
>do
>all of you think?
>
>linny
“Because” was the first answer I came up with (*). I would not be my
talkative self, however, if such a short answer were to be my total one:
We have all met Muriel. I meet her constantly. (Yesterday I even met her mom
in the notorious upper class part of downtown Stockholm, talking to the
clerk in such a nasal and upper class stupid way that made my skin crawl and
myself running out in the street, leaving my camera buying friend alone in
the store.) Some of us have had sex with her, have looked down at her
superficial ways, been ashamed for her at parties and proud by walking next
to her in the streets. Others – or maybe the same ones – have seen some
other side of her. Seen the way she is searching, maybe even without
consciously knowing it, to get out of her prison. The prison of “the way you
do things”, the “right crowd”, the shallow esthetics culturally mixed into
her very cells.
We know almost nothing of Muriel. We do not know of her dreams, why she
chose to live with a boy like Seymour, to marry him. Seymour gives us very
few leads to why he loves Muriel. And the ones he’s giving us are the ones
his own esthetics supplies. He says nothing of the way she holds him, the
way her hand searches for his underneath the table at dinners; says very
little of how she surprises him during lectures, sitting in the back, the
reflections she’s asking him afterwards so very unlike those of his
students. Did you know Seymour paints the most beautiful paintings? And that
Muriel the first time she saw one of them pointed at the very center of
meaning in it, to a small window at the upper left corner, behind where you
could see a beach and a boy playing? A part no one else, no one of his
brothers and sisters and friends had noticed, although that had been the
very reason for him painting it? Did you know of Muriels dreams of buying a
vineyard far away from the city and open up a pensione, taking care of the
guests and making her own wine?
Why do we marry? I mean, as far as romanticizing marriage goes (safety and
security and company and reproduction reasons beside)? If I am to make sense
out of Seymour marrying Muriel, I have to look at it in the above sense, by
taking parts of the semi-Muriels I have taken interest in, the parts that
fit with the pieces present before me, and make me a picture of my own.
Maybe there is a more laconic way for this, involving words like
anti-intellectual-treasurism, but that wouldn’t be my answer, it wouldn’t
tell the tale I would like to listen to.
/TLM
(*) Remembering the old story/legend about the third year of college
psychology test, the only question put before the students being “why?”, the
accepted answers being “Why not?” and (with honors) “Because”.
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