Muriel\'s Wedding vs. Brazil

Muriel's Wedding vs. Brazil

Religion and creating an attainable myth of self and cultural reinvention: "Muriel's Wedding" versus "Brazil" in Film

Both the Australian films "Muriel's Wedding" and the 1980's film directed by former Monty Python cartoonist Terry Gilliam entitled "Brazil" makes use of fantastic tropes and mythical tribulations to weave different myths about the truth of human existence. Both films have used the epistemology of magic to articulate the psychological longings of, in one case, a lonely young woman, and in the case of "Brazil," a lonely aboriginal society that exists as a mirror of even a lonelier consumerist contemporary world.

At first, "Muriel's Wedding" seems the more realistic of the two films, beginning with a portrait of an overweight Australian teenage girl named Muriel who uses shoplifting and her father's pilfered credit cards to try to buy herself happiness, as well as trying on bridal gowns in shops for free, in the absence of a groom or even a boyfriend. But the cartoon-like style of both films temporarily sublimates the fact that both will eventually make use of the fool's journey of self and societal exploration not only as a parody of Western culture's false expectations and ideals, but as a way of creating an epistemology of a larger and deeper sense of self for the protagonists of the tale. Both use as well as parody magical concepts to demonstrate the human psychological self's ability to reinvent the soul in a fantastic yet attainable fashion. Thus, the films are religious and mythical in nature, despite their broad use of humor.

Brazil" is set in a jungle where a Coca-Cola bottle becomes an object of veneration by a tribe.

In "Brazil," the central character must travel away from his society. Like Muriel's departure from her backwater home, his is also fool's journey of self-exploration, as well as a journey to gain another bottle after the sacred Coca-Cola bottle (dropped accidentally from the sky, by a traveling plane) has been broken. In "Muriel's Wedding," the central character discards her fantasies of the perfect wedding after entering into a paid marriage of convenience with a swimming pro. At the end of the film the camera sees her leaving with her dearest friend, a woman, rather than a groom, as both go into the wild blue yonder, they are filled with the understanding that friendship rather than glorified picture book romance or sexuality is more important than the culturally reified myth of the wedding, or in the case of Muriel's friend, of heightened sexual beauty and desirability.

Thus both films show, as these two plot descriptions indicate, that modern, consumerist fantasies of consumption, and of defining one's self primarily through the conspicuous consumption of brand name objects, whether by Coca-Cola in "Brazil" or by the pristine, virginal white of the perfectly dressed and catered wedding as for the titular heroine of "Muriel's Wedding" are false. Both the talismans of the bottle and of the white wedding dress are totems of society connected to ideals of buying one's happiness and one's identity. Rather than real gods representative of larger truths, these gods are false. The protagonists must find the real gods of friendship and humanity not connected to plastic things.