Abstract

So here’s the thing about Shrek. Shrek pretends to deconstruct myth by poking fun at it, showing that it can be remoulded to fit ‘The Ogre Within’ - the image of man as beast. However, by reaffirming the knight-myth of old, Shrek argues that the myths embody something essential and eternal, such that the ogre has to fit himself into their image. It is the motivational power of true love that forces Shrek to engage with the knight-myth and to reproduce it, establishing through true love’s kiss an eternal form of Order. This is problematic because it confines ‘The Ogre Within’ to the realm of the personal, treating our social norms and the myths which propagate them as instantiations of an eternal form of Reason. It tells us that the only way to find meaning in the world is through love, and that the only way to find love is to reenact the myths of old, which uphold the established order. This, for me, is problematic, if only because all the time kids are watching Shrek, they’re not watching other films that encourage them to think in new, more ogre-appropriate ways, which would almost necessarily involve a critique of the current social institutions which organise them.

The Ogre Within

The character of Shrek represents man’s animal nature. I know that’s a strong claim to start with, but just go with me. Shrek lives in the state of nature: when we meet him, he is having the time of his life, showering in (and gargling) mud, scaring peasants, and generally being a bit of a menace. Throughout the course of the film, he is encouraged to fit himself into the image of the knight, as laid out in the fairytales of old, despite his scepticism towards them. This correlates with an important trend in human thought that has dominated the last couple of centuries. The Darwinian Revolution forced us to admit that we were animals. Having spent a long time building society under the assumption that we were perfect humans carved from the image of god, this came as a bit of a shock. Foucault notes in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ that this prevents us from imagining ourselves as the perfect humans we thought we were: ‘We wished to awaken the feeling of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth’, he notes, but ‘this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance.’

Since the Darwinian Revolution, then, we have been trying to find meaning in a world where the essential rationality of man has been called into question. In this spirit, Shrek depicts a world in which myths have been revealed as fictions: it starts with Lord Farquaad reading through a book of fairytales, before getting bored, ripping out a page and throwing it into the fire. Throughout the film,Shrek tries to get us to recognise that fairytales don’t fit us perfectly, but to stop short of abandoning their values altogether. Shrek is a fairytale about a fairytale. It uses postmodern tools to tell us that fairytales, despite having been revealed to be ‘just stories’, capture something eternal and unchanging about human nature.

The Treatment of the Knight-Myth in Shrek

Shrek demonstrates early on its awareness that we are living in a post-mythological age. However, whilst paying homage to this new-found awareness of self, Shrek tacitly uses this mockery to argue for the enduring truth of myths, despite their apparent inappropriateness for the modern age. No clearer is this seen than in the treatment of the knight-myth. Shrek represents the barbarising of the knight-myth, the knight and his steed reduced to a donkey-ogre duo that is then expected to perform the mythical role. Shrek represents an aspirational ideal for the man who, recognising himself as an animal at base, seeks to restore peace to his ‘swamp’ by playing correctly the role prescribed to him by society through the myth of the knight. The problem of Shrek, therefore, is that it uses an awareness of our ill-suitedness to the knight-myth to reaffirm the knight-myth, rather than as an opportunity to create a new mythology appropriate to more ‘ogreish’ ways of life. This is demonstrated by the way in which Shrek employs humour to ease the protagonist’s transition into the image of the Knight, rather than as a tool to properly undermine the knight and the society organised around his image. When Shrek arrives to rescue Fiona, she prepares herself for him, pretending to be asleep and awaiting True Love’s Kiss. However, Shrek bundles her out of the tower, and firmly rejects any romantic aspirations Fiona might’ve had. ‘How will you kiss me?’ she asks. ‘That wasn’t in the job description’, replies Shrek. ‘No’, says Fiona, ‘its destiny. You must know how it goes’. Fiona assumes that Shrek is her true love precisely because ‘you’re my rescuer’. When she sees the creature under the armour - the ogre trying to fill the role of the knight - she realises her expectations were misguided. ‘Oh no, this is all wrong,’ she says. ‘You’re not supposed to be an ogre.’

Shrek tries to reject the role of the knight, but confronted by a rejection from the other, he admits that his rejection is based on a falsehood: he only acts like an ogre because he’s worried that people won’t accept him. His inability to live up to the knight-myth, then, is represented as a fault of Shrek’s, where humour is then used to facilitate his easy, humbling transition into the role of knight. The film pokes gentle fun at the ogre trying to become a knight, in order to coddle him into conformity with the image he feels inadequate next to. This is the first problematic step in the film’s postmodern treatment of the knight-myth: by representing its poor fit with Shrek’s character as a fault of Shrek, rather than as a fault of the myth, it suggests that the myth captures some eternal aspect of human nature to which we should continue to aspire, despite our having been revealed as ogres. It says, ‘don’t worry that you’re an animal now - just keep trying!’

True Love’s Kiss

This message is encapsulated by the idea of True Love’s Kiss, which relegates The Ogre Within to the realm of the personal and uses the effectiveness of the knight-myth to reaffirm the eternal rationality of order.

The idea that the proper realm for The Ogre Within to be expressed and contained is compounded by the treatment of Fiona, who’s rejection of Shrek is revealed to be based on her own feelings of inadequacy due to the fact that she is half-ogre. This opens up the path for Shrek to continue to attempt to fulfil the knight myth in pursuit of true love. Despite not fitting the role, the revelation that there is another who also doesn’t fit the role justifies, for Shrek, the decision to live up to the myth, leading him to interrupt the wedding and kiss the princess. Having been precluded from genuine knighthood, Shrek acts it out anyway in pursuit of love, and that, for him, makes it worth it. When True Love’s Kiss establishes order throughout the land, banishing Farquaad and restoring the fairytale creatures to their rightful homes, it sends the message that it is only by enacting the knight myth that order can be created, and love preserved.

This chain of events establishes a complex relationship between love and order. It suggests that love is the reason for establishing order, where order is required for the maintenance of love, myth is required for the maintenance of order, and where performing the roles prescribed by the myth, pace the acceptance of one another’s ogreness, is the only way to preserve these forces. In this way, love and order are presented as mutually supportive: the prevailing order, having been shown to be right by the effectiveness of the myth, accepts the ogre, and rewards him with the possibility of love. However, he is accepted in a permanently Othered condition: it is the ogre that has conformed to the image of the knight, not the other way round. The treatment of the ogre couple, who return to honeymoon in the swamp, thus prevents their difference from altering the structure of the society, built around the knight-myth, which is allowed to retain its essential form. With no new myth to challenge it, the old order is allowed to prevail, our imaginations closed off to the possibility of meaningful change.

Why it matters (honestly)

Treating the effectiveness of the knight-myth as representative of the enduring essences of Love and Order (and thus the enduring merit of the current social organisation which, at least to some extent, produces them) misleads us into treating the myth itself as a more-or-less accurate portrayal of the best way to achieve a definite and fixed goal. This way of thinking is deeply rooted in the western cultural ontology, which since Ancient Greece has spoken of abstract articles like Love and Order as if they were real, definable, describable things. Because we treat them as definable, we treat them as if they can be pinned down, as if their nature never changes, and this gives credence to the idea that the knight-myth could still be the best way of establishing order and love in a world that has changed beyond recognition from the days of knights (not morally changed, necessarily, but technologically, informationally). So: imagining that essences can be pinned down leads us to think that our formulations for pinning them down, which include our myths (as attempts to describe appropriate ways to live) continue to get something right about the world. Of course, some things never change. Humans will probably always be motivated by falling in love. But what constitutes love changes from culture to culture, generation to generation, etc etc etc. Love is not reenacting the knight myth; its just connection and that. So when a film sends the message that it is only by reenacting the myths of old that we can achieve love, it tells children not to think in new ways, not to tell new stories: it tells them to just fit themselves into the image of the knight as best they can, and remember to love each other and laugh along the way. If we are convinced by this, it is because we are convinced of the eternal and enduring values of order and of love. The rewards given to Shrek - a loving wife, peace in his swamp, friendship - are seen as good by any lights, and the death of the despotic Farquaad seems to bring peace to the kingdom. And if we are convinced by this, then we cannot fail to be convinced and motivated by Shrek’s reaffirmation of the knight-myth as a way to achieve this result. And there’s nothing strictly wrong with this: it does work for some of the people, some of the time. But what I am arguing is that, in an increasingly complex and cognitively diverse world in which the ideals of old have been shown, time and again (and shown materially, through the attempted and failed repression of countless groups opposed to the status quo) to be inappropriate to a vast majority of people, to result in ineffective conceptions of our roles in the world and the ways to relate to one another, then for films like Shrek to be part of the mainstream cultural output is to impede the progress of culture, by failing to show to the children who watch it alternative and wholly more appropriate avenues for expressing their animal natures.

Precisely because it reaffirms the same tired old myths using postmodern tricks, Shrek fails to show that love and order endure outside of their remits (that is, that love is possible for those other than knights and princesses). It shows love and order as necessarily tied to the knight-myth, as if that myth captured something enduring about how to establish those things, rather than something that was appropriate to the time but is possibly wholly inappropriate now. In doing so, it turns the human psyche in on itself, telling us to deal with the stress of being ogres by learning to love one another, but to keep that blight out of our social institutions, thank you very much, which are founded on rational principles, i’ll have you know, and needn’t change just because we have recognised that the man they were trying to fit themselves around the whole time was actually a monkey in disguise. In closing off the possibility of constructing new myths to capture the same dynamic essence of love, Shrek reaffirms the existing social order as a permanently rational organisation of things, rather than as a thing whose nature and essence changes over time. It represents an attempt to exploit our postmodern psyche through inversion, using our new-found self-awareness to undermine our self-confidence, to persuade us to seek comfort in the myths of old and the ways of life they propagate, and dissuade us from thinking about the appropriateness of the mythologies that shape us.

Cioran, as always, is on hand to remind us to doubt our faith in the enduring power of myths. ’Idolaters by instinct,’ he says, ‘we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.’

For me at least, it is time to embrace the Improbable, and stop watching Shrek.