I have several essays in the works, but I thought I might take the opportunity to discuss something much more important than my typical subjects: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t until a number of days ago, Marcel the Shell is a character who originally appeared in a number of online stop-motion shorts beginning over a decade ago. As his name suggests, Marcell is a shell, but, as he himself reminds us, he also has shoes and a face (and many other good qualities); that is, he has an eye and a mouth, which he uses to articulate childlike but often remarkably profound commentary and description of his simple but meaningful life.
At some point, Marcel’s fame as a short-film personality caught the interest of a studio and led to the release of a full-length film about Marcel: how he gets about the house, his means of acquiring food, his relationship with his grandmother, and the tragic history that resulted in the majority of his family being separated from him, as well as his efforts to locate them.
The movie is excellent, and its most important element is Marcel himself. The concept is surreal, even bizarre, the plot is rather simple, and yet Marcel stands out as such a brilliant and edifying character that one cannot help but be enchanted. For Marcel possesses a deep wisdom and beauty of outlook found only in the truly innocent, the truly childlike in the purest sense of the word. His relentless optimism, ingenuity, care for others, and sensitivity strike a chord that seems to echo in the deeper recesses of the self where a spark of that original innocence remains, the well wherein God speaks one’s being into reality and the truth of what one and the world are meant to be.
Marcel’s experience is diminutive and limited, yet he is able to see beauty in the home and property that constitute his entire world. He is unconstrained by artificiality, by the systems that so frequently disrupt the tranquility of direct existence; he lives in simplicity, in love. When asked how long since he had seen his family, for instance, he responds, “Well, I don’t do the clock the way that you guys do the clock, but, I think, I’m watching the changes in the trees and the flowers that have bloomed and the blossoms that have fallen and the buds that have come and bloomed again. So, I couldn’t tell ya, but the space in my heart grows bigger and louder every day.”
He is sensitive and often afraid, but there is no deceit, no cruelty or malice in his suffering. He is able to face his suffering with purity, with unfeigned dignity. He does not tear or rant or fill himself with bile and resentment; he merely needs encouragement, a push to overcome an obstacle.
There is undoubtedly something to be learned from Marcel, indeed, many things. For myself, however, the primary lesson is a reminder of the value and correctness of primordial moral intuition, so frequently observed in children and so often buried under sophistry and cynicism in the adult. In the pristine clarity of childhood can be seen the reflection of God. If the incarnation teaches us anything, after all, it teaches us that the state of childhood, even infancy, with all its weakness, humility, and innocence, is not only compatible with the divine, but is one of its truest expressions. Marcel comforts and compels us because he maintains his original goodness, the original, inherent capacity to shine forth the Good that stands at the base of all things, a capacity so often lost as the years progress, sanding us down.
It does not matter what beliefs we profess—most of us tend to view the world through a twisted web, unable to see the simple truths that shine out before us all the time. We miss the beauty of ordinary things; we perceive others as vile, hostile, unworthy of care or recognition. Reality becomes a domain of competition, exploitation, anger, pain. Yet it need not be so.
It is Marcel’s direct and uncorrupted perception of the world and love for others that ultimately leads to his wisdom. He is not learned; he knows little (very little) of the world at large. He is not powerful (he’s an inch-tall shell). He is not rich; indeed, he seems to have no concept of money whatever, and his notions of private property appear relatively loose. But he speaks truth from the depths of his being and brings out the best in others. The goodness of the world is available to him because he himself is good. It is no surprise, then, that his statements can bear a remarkable affinity to those made by the most profound of poets and philosophers. This is especially the case for the last words of the movie. As Marcel sits by an open window looking out into a softly lit yard where hangs swaying laundry, a breeze resonates with his shell, causing a small tone to sound. “It connected me, I felt like, to everything,” he remarks, “because if I wasn’t there, the sound never would exist. And I felt like everything was in pieces, then I stood there and suddenly we were one large instrument. I like to go there a lot because it reminds me that I’m not just one separate piece rattling around in this place, but that I’m part of a whole. And I truly enjoy the sound of myself connected to everything.”
And so for ourselves: Will we find, in the final counting, that truth will be attained by acquiring layers of information, material property, or power, or by erecting barriers between ourselves and others? Or will we find that it is found in the simplicity of open-heartedness and connection, in the regaining of a child’s wisdom, of the wonder that, as Plato says, is the source of all philosophy? These questions suggest truisms, certainly, and yet it often takes a character as profoundly simple and innocent as Marcel to reveal to us the depth of this truth. The wind blows through us; do we have hearts to hear it sound? Or are they buried, waiting to be recovered and whole?
And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? —Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp"