The Dreams of Muriel the Rebel

considering rebellion, self-worth, and insanity

19 May 2025 - 3,981 words

Recently I watched Muriel’s Wedding, a 1994 movie about a woman named Muriel struggling to grow, develop, and find herself as a functioning person. It’s the kind of movie that is cosmically strange, and that’s the point. You watch it like a window into another realm, one stranger, weirder, and yet somehow more beautiful than our own. You watch Muriel struggle, fail, and fuck up, again and again, and yet you never lose sympathy or compassion. You get it.

There are so many dimensions of this strange and unnerving movie. There’s the loving and healthy friendship between Muriel and her best friend, Rhonda, there’s an obvious discussion to be had on the fetishization of romance (monogamous romance in particular), and yet, after reflecting on the movie a bit more, and inspired by a small question my professor posed, I can’t help but revel in Muriel’s struggles with and pursuit of her dreams.

One of the first scenes of the film is of a family dinner with a couple of the dad’s business friends. The dad talks about his personal accomplishments― what a benevolent and altruistic man he is, giving back to the community and strengthening it everyday. He laughs with the waiter, whose brother he is helping immigrate into America, and whose restaurant he is seeking to expand. He remarks on how he almost was elected, but prefers the grassroots efforts anyway. And yet, for all his accomplishments, he makes not one remark for his family. His wife stays silent, his kids sheepishly stare off into the distance or simply watch the conversation progress, and he invites his kids only to further discuss his own accomplishments.

Of course, it quickly becomes clear why he fails to include his family in the discourse of accomplishment. Nobody but him, he says, has really ever achieved anything. In fact, he mocks Muriel for not having graduated high school, and gives a lengthy account of what a great service he did to her by putting her through Secretarial School, after which, he says, she couldn’t even type. He concludes by explaining that all of his children are worthless. They have never amounted to anything, and never will.

The Pursuit of Dreams

There’s a particular Native American belief (I believe it is particularly common to the plains region, but I could be wrong) that when a person dreams of something, it is critical the group must render that dream reality. If they dreamt themselves wearing a particular design of moccasins, they must create or be given those moccasins. Even if they dreamt of owning something of a friend’s, that friend should offer up to them that item. This belief has fascinated me since I heard about it. Something about dreams being viewed not as infantile fantasies, hopeful wishes, or false glimpses into our subconscious, but a command to reality is rather intoxicating to me.

Our dreams act like quests for us to pursue. We sometimes radically alter our entire life to chase our dreams. Sometimes, we lose friends, family, loved ones, and jobs in the pursuit. If you’ve spent much time talking to trans people, you’ve probably heard that many of us had dreams of doing gender in a different way, being seen in a different way, years before we ever even realized we were trans. One of my first memories is of myself as a child dreaming I could be like a girl character in one of my favorite movies. The moment that we wake up from those dreams is often melancholy. But the moment that we wake up and realize that our dreams are more than idle fantasies is a turning point in many of our lives.

Muriel’s dream is to be married, hence the title. In her room, plastered across the walls, are picture of wedding dresses. She dreams to be a bride. One of her favorite song is “Dancing Queen,” by ABBA. At one point in the movie, she explains to her best friend, Rhonda, that she would listen over and over and over again to ABBA songs, rotting in her bedroom as they played aloud, likely imagining herself to be a bride.

The thing is, Muriel had never even had a boyfriend. The movie starts at a friend of her’s wedding, and she catches the bouquet. They tell her she shouldn’t have it, because she will never get married. What boy would want her? Muriel is far too ugly to ever be wed, of course. She’s just a failure.

But that doesn’t stop her from dreaming. She keeps dreaming, everyday. But every day that she dreams and does not accomplish her dream, she loses hope. She moves ever farther from her dream with each passing day. And of course, with each passing day, it becomes all the more clear to herself that she is, like her father says, worthless.

Is there a way to escape the leviathan’s mouth?

Muriel’s dad connects her with Deidre, who offers her a job selling beauty cosmetics. Her parents need to give her money to buy the first kits from Deidre to sell, but they don’t know how much, so they give her a blank check. Muriel, an excessive liar who knows she is worthless, realizes that this is her only opportunity to ever go on a vacation she wanted to go on. She steals about $12,000, tells them she got it from selling the beauty cosmetics, and goes on an expensive vacation. Her parents gloat with pride at her accomplishments, saying how she’s the best of them. They’re happy and prideful. They share the lovely news with some colleagues at a dinner. They’re proud of Muriel.

There is, I think, genuine pride here. I think it would be a misread of the movie to suggest that the father doesn’t actually care about them, and just wants to hurt them. That’s not really what’s happening here. He feels such exorbitant pride for Muriel’s success. Of course, he wants to take much of the blame for the success, but he is happy. No, he is not simply an evil man purposefully abusing his children. He resents them for what he views as their own failings. (No, that is not even close to good parenting. But he is human.)

When she arrives home, her parents find out that she hasn’t made any money, and simply stole from them. So, she runs away. She runs to Sydney with her new best friend, Rhonda, she made on vacation.

But a funny thing happens when she does escape to Sydney. She finds and keeps a job, for the first time in her life. Her skin is clear and glowing, and she smiles genuinely like never before. While working at her job, a boy asks her out. She’s finally happy. Maybe, she thinks, she actually can achieve her dream.

For a long time, it seemed to Muriel and her siblings that they were simply failures. Worthless. Destined to fail again and again. Never achieving their dreams. Yet, with one terrible move, Muriel has saved her life, and found happiness. When I first watched the scene where she stole the money from her parents, I thought she was insane. Her sister, when she found out, called her “terrible” with a bit of a smirk. But I recognize, in retrospect, the incidental genius of the act.

Insanity

Today, we recognize insanity as a kind of mental ailment that restricts the “proper” functioning of the human mind. This is, in essence, a medicalization of madness. It justified the marginalization of madness to asylums, and the ignorance of the sane to the insane. In essence, I would argue that this medicalization invalidates the beliefs, thoughts, and impulses of those on the margins.

Critically, we should remember that gay and trans people were historically considered insane. To be honest, I still feel insane. My understanding of reality and existence is at such odds with the mainstream conception that it is not just my existence that lies on the margins, but the phenomenology of it. That, to me, is the essence of insanity. A marginalization of alternative realities for the purpose of control. After all, if I am insane, then there is no need to reconsider our modern conceptions of sex and gender.

Interestingly, in The Dawn of Everything, the authors discuss how many societies prior to the implementation of states tended to have radical, sudden political reorganizations in the wake of the birth of a particularly unique or “abnormal” person. It was often those we would today consider insane that tended to spark dramatic political and social experimentation. But why was this?

I believe the answer lies in dreams. You might dream of a world where you own your friend’s shoes. But I might dream of a world unbound by the rigid enforcement of gender (not the inherent presence of it, to be clear)¹. And if we are to pursue dreams, how might our society be restructured and affected by these dreams? What might the ramifications be? To me, it is no wonder that the Greeks believed madness to be not a mental abnormality, but a radical burst of knowledge.

When Muriel steals the money from her parents, there is a glint of madness in her eyes. She is not yet fully aware of the ramifications of her choice, yet she knows she must take it. And when she returns home, discovering her parents to know about her actions, she knows what she must do. She runs away. And in so doing, she completely alters her life, restructuring it from the ground up. And finally, she clears the way for the pursuit of her dream.

Muriel the Rebel

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

This quote has been repeated so often it is practically a platitude, but still I can’t stop thinking about it. When we consider Muriel’s family, we should consider how the words of her father affect them. Are those words descriptive, or prescriptive? In other words, is it that when her father calls her worthless, he is simply describing what is the case, or is he producing a certain outcome? Later in the movie, Muriel tells Rhonda that she felt worthless. That for her whole life, she could do nothing. She was incapable of growing, of changing, of following her dreams, of actually doing the things she wanted so badly to do. All she could do was rot in her room and listen to ABBA.

My professor posed an interesting question regarding what her sister calls her. At a couple points in the movie, Muriel’s sister tells her she is “terrible,” with a smirk. My professor asked, does she really mean terrible, or does she mean something else? What else could she mean? I sat and considered this for a few moments, and I realized she told it with a certain amount of envy. Her sister wants to be as terrible as she is. She wants to rebel, to fight, to free herself. She knows that Muriel’s terrible actions have freed her. She knows that by stealing from and abandoning her family, she has achieved what every single person in that house wishes they had.

Muriel is terrible. She’s sick. And her sister wishes she was too. None of them are “well-adjusted,” per se, but they follow the rules. They at least try to do what they are told. They give into the demands of their parents, and let their father utter whatever hateful and cruel things he wishes towards them.

There is a pivotal moment in the movie, after she rebelled and fled her family, when her mother convinces her to have dinner with her father, who happens to be in Sydney. She goes to a restaurant with him and his colleagues. Yet, when he berates her once again, and calls her Muriel despite her, at this point in the movie, demanding to be called Mariel, she yells at him. She tells him that is not her name, and Muriel is dead. When she finds out he left her mother for Deidre, she yells at him again.

In contrast to the first dinner scene of the movie, Muriel (or Mariel at that point)² has truly become the rebel. She is terrible. But she knows now, that if there is ever a dream she may pursue, she must rebel.

I genuinely do think that Muriel’s Wedding is an (accidental) trans allegory. But it is not just a trans allegory, it is representative of the struggles of countless minorities who struggle against the confines of their parents, families, or system. And it is representative of how we might pursue our dreams. If we are ever to pull our dreams from our subconscious into our world, it is not enough to say we want them. It is not enough to plaster pictures on the walls or even try. For many of us, maybe even all of us, we must rebel.

We must rebel not just the authority of people or systems, but the authority of the word. Muriel’s father produces and enforces failure in his family by telling them they are worthless, they are failures. And maybe they all are. But if we give into the authority of the word, no matter who is speaking it, our dreams will never be rendered real.

Recently, I had to explain to a close loved one that rebellion has never been a choice for me. That, to me, it was literally life or death. And I explained this by saying that without achieving my dream, I would see no value in life and frankly I just don’t think I would keep living. But honestly, I feel like this over-exceptionalized my case. Because I suggested that it was my dream in particular that is life or death. But I’m not so sure about that. Is Muriel’s dream less than life or death? Is she living at the start of the movie? She tells Rhonda that she’d sit in her room all day, listening to ABBA. That feels like little more than a step away from death, as someone who has, for short periods of time, been in similar positions.

I actually think that rebellion is a choice, and that it was for me. The question is not if it is a choice or not, but what are the consequences of one choice or the other? Muriel chooses the terrible path that brings her to life. What if she hadn’t made that choice? Would she ever have found life, and lived beyond her ABBA songs?

It’s hard for me to make a universalizing statement that there is no life beyond rebellion, or something of the sort. And yet I cannot resist the conception of rebellion as not merely a way of life, but a life-maker. Every history and situation produces different choices and consequences, and rebellion finds a different place in all of them. But I must say that if you ever find yourself in a position where it seems life has no care or value for you, or that your life is, as Muriel believed, worthless, rebellion is an escape route that you may have to find the courage to take.

So what keeps us from this route?

Privilege, Debt, and Self-Worth

I do want to seriously acknowledge my privilege on this matter. I am speaking as someone whose parents have never made stringent demands of worth, denied my value, or held my debt to them over my head. And part of that is their own privilege, but also their own life experience. They have both lived rather rebellious lives themselves, and much of my understanding of the world is thanks to their reckless experimentation. So before I continue, I want to make it clear that, frankly speaking, a love bound by debt is alien to me.

I believe that there is an intense theme of debt pervading throughout the movie. Muriel’s father seems to suggest that the fact that not only does she owe him for everything he has done for her, including paying $2,000 to send her to Secretarial School, but that her inability to pay it back is another failing of her’s, more proof of her lack of worth. In many ways, I believe that Muriel’s conception of herself as worthless is influenced by this branding of debt. Because if she owes her father for everything he has done for her, her value is negative until she can pay that back. And if she cannot pay that back, she is worse than worthless. The necessity of her growth is not just either selfish or altruistic, but based in a moral account of debt.

So, when she fails to finish high school, or keep a job, or get a boyfriend, she is not just failing to pursue her dreams, nor is she just failing to help herself or others. She is hurting and destroying her family.

But the debt doesn’t just enhance and reproduce her self-hate, her worthlessness. It binds her to her family inescapably. When she leaves her family, her mom calls her, saying she has to come home. “After everything we did for you!” she says. Later, after her mom’s death, Muriel’s father tells her she needs to come home, take care of the house, take care of her siblings. “You owe me.” She takes out a check for $5,000 and says, “I’ll get the rest to you later.” But he’s right. She does owe him. And that debt binds her to her toxic, unhealthy family. It restricts her from her dreams.

When considering a society that values dreams to such an extent that nothing is seen as valid to stop the pursuit of one’s dreams, I can’t help but consider it against the components of our society that restrict us from our dreams. Debt, cost, money, property, tradition, rules, law, etc.. And I wonder of a world where the conception of a debt that restricts dreams is so cruel, so alien, that it borders on insanity. And in the society where that conception is dominant, I realize that Muriel’s act of theft serves as the rebellion of a madness that demands the reverence of dreams. And in its invalidation of debt, it severs the first chain restricting Muriel’s self-worth, and binding Muriel to her family.

The question is then, how can we reconcile the conflict between our dreams and our debts? It would be easy for me to simply proclaim that no one owes anything to their parents. But the truth is, that’s not really a fair account for many people. We feel a debt of gratitude for our parents, acknowledging and struggling with every bit of suffering they ever endured for our sakes. It is not just that some of us lack the willpower to steal from our parents, to blind ourselves to our debt, but that we make the choice not to. Is that in conflict with our rebellion? Must we be as terrible as Muriel to pursue our dreams?

Muriel’s sister stays at home with her mom. She takes care of her mom, cares for her. I respect her character, even as the movie shows how it hurts her. There’s a part of her that wishes she was as terrible as Muriel, and yet she stays to repay her mom until her suicide. I want to consider her not in moral opposition to Muriel, but as a separate case study to consider. Earlier I asked, what are the consequences of the choice of rebellion? We can see the two choices represented by Muriel and her sister.

I am not so sure I am equipped to fully reckon these two paths. However, I do think we can glean some valuable insight from this arrangement regarding the choice of rebellion: conscious choice. Muriel, for much of her life, chose neither rebellion nor debt. She felt incapable of paying off the debt, and didn’t believe rebellion could save her. Eventually, she took the path of the rebel. In the wake of this choice, it seems that Muriel’s sister chose to repay her debt, and take care of her mother. When Muriel returns, they seem close. When she again returns in the wake of her mother’s suicide, her sister clearly knew more about what was going on than anyone else.

The thing is, I genuinely do think that in an ideal world we could simultaneously return the favor to our parents (perhaps not quite as burdensome as the conception of debt) while pursuing our dreams. I hope to do that myself. But for those of us whose debt and dreams are fundamentally opposed, I believe that each person must make their own choice. But they must do so consciously. And I believe that, if one seeks to return the contradictory favor, the choices must be weighed against each other, and not necessarily chosen in absolutes.

The Other’s Choice

As one final note, in a blogpost heavily infused with discussion of one’s choice, I believe it is important to note the other’s choice, as well. Because it is tempting to eclipse into solipsism and presume it is only “I” who has choice, but the reality is that those that limit us too have choice. Muriel’s father has a choice whether to mock and condemn or love unconditionally his children. Muriel’s mother has a choice to leave Muriel’s father³. And it is particularly tempting, as someone who is not a parent but is the child of parents, to view the parents not as agents but as obstacles, offering them a kind of moral freedom from their choices.

What if someone wants to pursue both their dreams and their repayment, and yet their parents disallow them from doing so? Many queer people find themselves in this situation. They want to transition and love their parents, love their partner and care for their parents, bring their loved one(s) to visit and house their parents. But not all parents allow that. It is a painfully common experience that despite the wishes of queer people, they are severed from their family. And, quite frankly, I think it is deeply unfair to suggest that is the fault of the child’s choice. It is not a queer child’s choice to be disowned and kicked out when they come out. It is not a queer adult’s choice to be left on voicemail when they call their parents to tell them they love and miss them. It is not a queer person’s choice to not have their father walk them down the aisle at their wedding.

Recently I’ve fallen in love with the phrase “it takes two to tango.” When we talk about the pursuit of dreams, that is often an individualist sentiment, focused on a single person’s actions and/or desires. But when we talk about the repayment of debt, it is a process in a relationship. When we consider the intersections between debt, dreams, and rebellion, we must recognize that it takes two to tango.