What Sweet Magnolias Reveals About the Simplicity of Small Town Life
The moral case for making sure you choose correctly when it has big consequences.
Most people wish their lives could be simple.
They would prefer not to live with such complicated issues as what to study in school or job to get and how to make enough to live off of comfortably. It often leads to all kinds of thorny issues including whether or not you're willing to compromise in order to get what you want. Especially in a big city where so many different things are happening at once. So many options leads to so many decisions and in some cases paralysis over what to do. Which is what makes things so complicated. The small town life is by contrast seen as more simple. A life without complications.
However, what many people do is mistake simple for easier. They think that if you're left with fewer decisions to make that life becomes a lot easier to handle. But simple doesn't necessarily mean easy, in fact it can be harder. Often times because of the lack of options. If you only have so many things available to you, it can impact your life much more profoundly. When you make a decision to become something, people expect you to follow through on it. They begin to see you a certain way. This makes it so much harder to change direction if you realize that it's not the way you want to go.
Your choices define you so much more when you don't have as many. In considering your options, you better be sure they're the right ones. It creates a pressure on people. The kind of pressure that not everyone is able to handle. Especially when everyone around you knows who you are and is very much invested in your outcomes. What you do affects them and the choices they're going to make. If you make the wrong one, you could hurt those around you in profoundly difficult ways. But you still have to make the choice, because not doing so can have its own consequences.
Sweet Magnolias is fundamentally about the difficulty of decision making in a town where every decision matters. Maddie, Dana Sue and Helen, as played brilliantly by JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Brooke Elliot and Heather Headley, are faced with some incredibly difficult decisions. While their lives are solidly established in some ways, in other ways they need to choose the right path. Not only do they have to deal with the consequences of their own decisions, but also how other people's decision affect them and the choices available to them.
Thankfully, one of the benefits of living in a small town is that people are willing to pull together and help each other out. They don't leave people to twist in the wind like it can when living in a big city. Solidarity like that can be so hard to come by unless you have people you can rely on and have known you all your life. Which is ultimately what makes Sweet Magnolias so beautiful. Seeing the common purpose and hopeful atmosphere makes for a powerful way to be.
Be sure to do yourself a favour and experience the small town living of Sweet Magnolias when you can.
Check out Sweet Magnolias on Netflix.