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pizzawendell · 1 year

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Shrek Is Good, Actually

This is not what Shrek is about. Shrek is about superficiality.

The obvious aspect of this is how people judge each other by their appearances. Shrek is judged for being an ogre and people don’t like him. Fiona is judged for her curse and is afraid that Shrek will do the same. Farquad is obsessed with cleanliness and having the ‘perfect’ kingdom, even though he is a little bobblehead man. Shrek says onions have layers because on the inside we’re all beautiful. It’s a classic anti-cinderella story. Pretty simple stuff, if fairly against the grain in 2001. I won’t dwell on this too much because it’s fairly obvious and something that you can get from most post-Shrek kids movies.

However, this movie has layers. Sure Shrek and Fiona are fine just the way they are and we should all learn to love each other despite our appearances, but the movie has more to say than that. This isn’t even a particularly deep reading; this is very much explicitly in the text. The characters in Shrek all use the misconceptions other people have about them to hide from things they don’t want to understand about themselves. They are all afraid to be known- most of all by themselves. The clearest and most explicit example is Shrek himself.

Shrek

Shrek starts off the movie living alone in his swamp. He has signs up all around which declare ‘danger: ogre’ etc with scary pictures all around. As the opening credits roll, a mob of villagers group together to go and kill Shrek because they believe that he is dangerous. He goes on to use their fear of him against them to get them to flee. The first scene of the film is Shrek using what people think they know about him to push people away and stay alone- which is what he tells himself that he wants.

Shrek then meets Donkey, who persistently refuses to accept Shrek’s claim that he wants to be alone.

Shrek: Listen, little donkey, take a look at me! What am I?

Donkey: Ah... really tall?

Shrek: No! I'm an OGRE! You know, "grab your torch and pitchforks!" Doesn't that bother you?

Donkey: Nope.

Shrek: Really?

Donkey: Really, really.

We pretty quickly see that Donkey is right to think that Shrek does actually want to have friends, he just doesn’t want to admit it.

Shrek: Look, I'm not the one with the problem, okay? It's the world that seems to have a problem with ME! People take one look at me and go "Aargh! Help! Run! A big stupid ugly ogre!" They judge me before they even know me - that's why I'm better off alone...

Donkey: You know, Shrek... when we first met, I didn't think you were a big, stupid, ugly ogre.

Shrek: Yeah, I know.

By the time they get to Fiona’s tower Shrek actively goes out of his way to save Donkey. As Shrek and Fiona begin to fall in love, Shrek and Donkey become genuinely close friends. When Shrek overhears what he thinks is Fiona calling him a 'big, stupid, ugly ogre' he reflexively reverts to pushing people away. He hasn't actually unlearned his belief that he is unlovable, merely temporarily put it to the side. This leads to the argument which holds the emotional core of the movie.

Donkey: You're so wrapped up in layers onion boy, you're afraid of your own feelings!

Donkey identifies Shrek's layers as the thing truly holding him back. Shrek knows that he's more than just a scary ogre, but he thinks of that perception as an outer layer which he uses for protection. However, he's so wrapped up in it that he can't actually escape. He has pretended for so long that he has come to believe it. Shrek does not deliberately draw on Frantz Fanon here, but there are parallels which we can draw.

To be clear, Shrek isn't about colonialism or racism (beyond some of its broadest strokes). Rather, Fanon's psychological argument that oppression can be a dialectic which ultimately causes the oppressed to internalise some aspects of how they are perceived by their oppressor is relevant to Shrek's behaviour. His relationship with the outside world has caused him to subconsciously believe things which he thought he was only accepting out of convenience. By attempting to use superficiality to our advantage we weaponise it equally against ourselves.

Love

How then, asks Shrek, do we escape? The answer is emphatic: through love. Only by loving others and allowing them to love us back can we step outside of our superficialities and truly self actualise. We see this when Donkey issues his final refusal to allow Shrek to push him away.

Shrek: If I treat you so badly, then why did you come back, huh?

Donkey: Because that's what friends do, they FORGIVE EACH OTHER!

Donkey offers his unconditional forgiveness for the ways Shrek has hurt him. He does this for no other reason than the fact that he loves Shrek. This forces Shrek to confront the fact that he is genuinely loveable. This makes it possible for him to believe Donkey when he tells him that Fiona isn't disgusted by him and resolve to stop her sham marriage to Farquad. Donkey's love allows Shrek to see himself from outside his warped self perception.

Fiona

Fiona's journey mirrors Shrek's. Rather than keeping people away emotionally with physical and emotional ugliness, she does it with beauty and propriety. Fiona only allows people to see her when she is in her human form (which we eventually find out is not her 'true' form). When Shrek first meets her she acts 'properly' by expecting him to wake her with a kiss and recite a poem. She also offers him a favour, which he uses to wipe away his sweat. All of this serves to stop people from knowing who she truly is, which is her greatest fear.

Just like Shrek, Fiona can only escape the emotional prison she has built for herself by allowing someone who loves her to truly know her. On the journey back to Farquad's castle she starts to believe that this could be Shrek. She starts to open up in small ways. She shows him that she enjoys the same foods as him, that she can fight like he can. However, their misunderstanding causes her to revert to her usual defence mechanism. When he pushes her away and she believes that this is because of her true form, Fiona begins to act how a princess is expected to again. It takes Shek storming the wedding and publically declaring that he loves her for Fiona to accept herself for who she really is. Shrek and Fiona’s kiss is therefore the most literal manifestation of love conquering superficiality, as Fiona transforms permanently into an ogre in front of the whole kingdom while it takes place.

Farquad

There is one character who does not escape his superficilaity and it kills him. Farquad spends all of Shrek tring to hide his percieved inadequacies with appearances. Farquad banishes the fairytale creatures to the swamp because they aren’t perfect enough. He has machines which immediately tell new arrivals that Duloq is not only perfect, but that it has strict rules. When he appears at the tournament he is deliberately positioned so that his height is obscured. Most significantly, he sends Shrek on his quest because he wants to officially be king. There is no reason for him to want this beyond the superficial trappings of the title. He clearly has total control over Duloq and he never shows any interest in having a romantic partner.

The tragedy of this is that Farquad is trying to cover up the fact that he is very short. Compared to every other human we see in the Shrek series, Farquad is very very short. Since this sets him apart from most humans, he is in many ways closer to the fairytale creatures than to his own people. The irony of the fact that it is Farquad who thinks of himself as so much better than people like Shrek and Donkey is repeatedly signalled by people making fun of him for his height. When he banishes the creatures it seems to partly be a manifestation of a degree of self loathing. Farquad clearly hates to see himself as he truly is (he literally threatens a mirror into showing him what he wants to see) and seeing other people who don’t conform to society’s expectations reminds him too much of himself.

Farquad externalises his self hatred by trying to make everything around him perfect, no matter who it hurts. He can only make his kingdom superficially perfect, but this will never make up for the fact that he can never change what he truly dislikes about himself. The villain of Shrek is too far gone. He cannot be saved by love because he has created a political system which prevents anyone from truly knowing him. We see this at his wedding when guests are told how to emotionally react. No one can sincerely know Farquad and love him for who he is because anyone who might can never get close enough. In the end, we see the consequence of this: his death.

Conclusion

This is not a particularly deep reading of Shrek. In fact, I would argue that this is the explicit message of the film. There are more subtextual readings, though. For one, there is the queer subtext which only gets stronger in Shrek 2. Shrek has deeper layers still about fascism, myth and, of course, Disney. Not everyone likes Shrek and that’s fine. You don’t have to like it if it’s not your thing. However, what I will not abide is anyone slandering this film by calling it vacuous. Shrek is a truly delightful story which tells its viewers to revel in who they are, to love and be loved and to know and be known.

#shrek #shrek and donkey #shrek and fiona #lord farquaad

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