The Shocking Conservatism of Shrek
My God my first post is going to be a Shrek Shit Post isn't it? Damnit
If you have been in the online media criticism space for any amount of time you've probably heard the Shrek movies analyzed and over-analyzed to death. Honestly, I think it has earned it. One of the things I have always been a persistent advocate for is the abolition of the distinction of highbrow and lowbrow art, as both exude the same innate qualities.
Genuinely, Shrek has earned a place in the modern western canon and no one has articulated this quite as well as Big Joel. He’s one of the egghead YouTubers who have begun popping up in recent years, and he's a personal favorite. His thesis is basically that Shrek is a brilliant subversion of Disney tropes (unsurprising as the DreamWorks Studio was founded as a bizarre revenge fever dream against Disney), but because of Disney's role as basically the popularizer of western storytelling canon, it becomes an aggressive rebuke of storytelling tropes and social tropes in general.
Big Joel spends most of his time focused on its social commentary, a theme and focus of his channel. So if you want a more in-depth look at Shrek's subversion of storytelling the YouTuber Schaffeillas Productions shifts focus in that direction. Both are some of the best media critics on the Internet and probably the modern age.
Now, storytelling tropes and social tropes are basically the same thing and have long been. This is because society and storytelling has existed in a culturally symbiotic relationship. A meme that exists in society will get embedded into a story which will reinforce that memes roll in society, and vice versa. Think about your favorite story, how deeply did that affect you? Chances are it has and will intersect with every aspect of your life. Whether you recognize it or not, what you think of as a good protagonist will probably impact your choice in career, what you do with your time, who you fall in love with, and who you have kids with. That last one is especially important because it means that your cultural understanding of a hero becomes encoded into your children and your children’s children. Let’s say you're a young girl who is totally in love with the Harry Potter books, it’s your favorite book, and you get it into your head that Harry is what a hero looks like. Smart, courageous, and respectful. When you grow up and if you're so inclined you look for a husband. Chances are you are looking for someone who is smart, courageous, and respectful, and if that is how he turned out what do you think your kids will be like?
Basically, the nature of stories is to teach lessons that are then internalized into us in deep deep ways. Perhaps even genetically. The cycle goes on and on and frankly, that concept deserves its own post (or honestly a book which I have been working on for a long while).
They feed off each other, stories and the societies that house them, and defend each other in the warfare of evolutionary memetics, so when a story rebels against established tropes it can be shocking, strange, and while often a failure, sometimes brilliant and earth-changing.
The tension of this dynamic (often a failure but sometimes earth-changing) is something I have long been obsessed with. If you write a story that explicitly bucks convention, you are basically asserting your story's power over society, trying to establish it as the dominant in the symbiotic partnership. This is why so often stories meant to buck tradition and “do something new” often fall on their face completely, and are relegated to the island of unwanted toys denied even the dignity of being a “cult classic”. This goes double or even triple for stories whose only goal is to be “new” and “different”, which brings us to the Oger and his older siblings.
Shrek wasn’t the first movie Dreamworks produced, that distinction goes to Antz. The hatred that sparked the studio's creation was cold and corporate. The next few films you could hardly feel any hatred for Disney at all, including the Prince of Egypt which may be the best film ever made. The Disney hatred was stuck primarily in the world of the corporate, the personal hatred of Katzenberg and his desire to prove himself successful next to his former employers, but it can’t be said that the hatred filtered into how they told their stories. This made Shrek feel like a wild act of passion, angry and loud, motivated to publically and deliberately cast a hate-filled light on the legacy of Walt Disney himself, and his entire legacy of story-telling. This may sound overdramatic, but I don’t think it is. Sherk, from his start as a children’s book character, was designed to play with and make fun of fairy tales. When it was taken by Dreamworks, it was weaponized to point directly at the Disney style.
There are the obvious aesthetic ways, it wasn’t a musical, it had a butt-rock soundtrack. It had rude humor and pop culture references. (Again if you want a deep dive into the aesthetics I suggest schaffrillas production). Yet, that's all set dressing, clothes and makeup, what we are looking for is a story's DNA.
We will take Prince Charming, the traditional hero, handsome and brave, and build him into a ridiculous parody. We will make him short, cowardly, and for good measure call him a fuck-wad.
We will take the Princess, and man her up a bit with martial arts and a love of farts and make her “ugly”, just to really drive it home. While we are at it make her independence-minded but still woefully obsessed with love to the point it is a character flaw rather than a mark of nobility.
And of course the evil Oger, in any other story a secondary villain, an inconvenience on the way to the more intimidating dragon. Make him sensitive, rational, and perhaps not heroic but definitely not cowardly or dastardly.
This is the first step to attacking Disney-style storytelling. Disney is very much a Joseph Campbell-style company. It likes its archetypes. Now, I am a big fan of Joseph and his many circles, and all the archetypes he helped to explain to us. But archetypal storytelling is very easy to lampoon and attack, archetypes are so simple you can just stretch them to absurdity. Lord Farquad is still, by archetypical definition, a Prince Charming. But he’s been stretched and contorted to seem altogether wrong, a parody and an evil one at that. Then, by placing Shrek as the protagonist we watch as the story progresses to the correct archetypical ending, the Princess marries the Prince. But it's the entirely wrong ending, each puzzle piece has been contorted to the point the whole is completely destroyed.
If the story was a proper work of absurdist deconstruction in the tradition of Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries or from a different angle in the tradition of (and God forgive me for using such language) *Marcel Duchamp*, as Big Joel and other online critics have chosen to sell it as it would end that way. The deconstruction of the Disney mold was completed, the foolishness of the archetypes is made apparent on the screen, the point was won! Won in fair, honest, intellectual combat.
…
And yet. The movie keeps going, in spite of its accomplished mission. I’ve never seen the last act of the movie really broken down, and it's not hard to see why, it seems like housekeeping. Of course, Shrek and Fiona are going to end up together, of course, the bad guy is going to get his due. I mean, not the bad guy Prince Charming. Wait, what archetype are we toying with again? Wait, why of course? Why is their love so inevitable? Could it be that we never actually left the system of Disney storytelling that Shrek was built to criticize from the very beginning? To me, the final act of the story is the most telling because it is a signal that Shrek is abandoning its blood feud with Disney and inadvertently saving it to try and tell its story as well as it can.
Perhaps, the movie seems to muse, we don’t need to abandon the old archetypes but instead clarify and focus them. Maybe my title here is too aggressive, “Conservative” might be better called “progressive conservative”. The story Shrek tells was definitely trying to change the media and narrative landscape of the early 2000s, it definitely believed Disney was old and stale, but it stopped short of being the shock and awe revolutionary its fans often say it is. It tried that and when it reached the point in the story where Fiona was being carted off the be married at sunset, and every character was miserable as hell. The story, if it had ended there would have been bad, tragic in a deeply unsatisfying way. In traditional Joseph Campbell storytelling we would say that Shrek and the movie producers were probably at the phase we would call “meeting the goddess” the heroes and accomplished all of their goals. This is the deepest part of the underworld and from a metaphorical standpoint, they are dead.
Conventional Hero's Quest stories proceed to a resurrection where the heroes reevaluate their goals and realize they must return to the overworld, indeed to something that once frightened them, to truly be happy, but it’s not a requirement. The Godfather ended in the spiritual death of Michael Corleone, and it's a time-honored trick in tragedy to deny the resurrection and leave the heroes trapped in the hellish arms of an improperly chosen mistress. For Shrek this is his loneliness, for Fiona, it’s a Disney ending.
But the movie didn't want to be a tragedy, so it began to meticulously undo its carefully planned deconstruction and embarked on a process of reconstruction.
Ok, maybe we need to keep the princess thing, hell we may even need to keep true love and the wedding at sunset.
Maybe we do need a hero who bursts in dramatically and declares seemingly irrational but ultimately hyper-rational true love.
And maybe the villain needs to be eaten by a dragon.
The choice to keep all the important cliques while abandoning and reforming all the less important ones at the last second made for a much more complicated contribution to western storytelling tropes than the original pure deconstructionist image originally envisioned by many critics. Far from a rebuke and battle Disney Archetipalism, and by extension archetypalism as a storytelling theory in general and by extension the entirety of the western canon, it instead purified and clarified those archetypes in the popular imagination contributing to the canon. Burning the dead flesh from a body isn't to go to war with that body. It is to render it stronger and more beautiful.
Maybe I have overanalyzed Shrek one layer too deeply and this is the natural result of the overexposure the memes have had on my generation. On the other hand, as someone who has been trained and long obsessed with the world of media and story, and thus has been overexposed to deconstructionism as a mode of not just media criticism but also social and economic criticism, it's rare to find a work of art so dedicated to reconstruction, to the repairing of its own narrative damage.
To me the Oger is beautiful and that is in the defense and clarification of beauty, not a deconstruction.