An episode of The Simpsons called “Homer Loves Flanders” aired twenty-five years ago. There’s a scene in it where Homer Simpson, rebuffed by Ned Flanders, disappears into some bushes. Once a week, I see a gif of that used on Twitter. What permeates Internet culture is fascinating and unpredictable (unless you’re a Tumblr teen, 4chan troll, or an avid redditor, I guess). The sheer amount of SpongeBob SquarePants meme formats alone is awe-inspiring. This type of Internet culture can’t be designed for, though a lot of fast food Twitter accounts try. There is no telling what bits will be latched on to, remixed, reused, and spread around.
On YouTube, there is a kid who takes a bite of an onion every day and posts a video of it. After he chews the onion, he looks into the camera and says “All Star!”. He high fives the camera and the video cuts to black. His YouTube account has more than 12,000 followers. His most recent onion video (Day 216 as of writing this) has 161 views. In my estimation, he can’t be older than 16. He says he is going to do it everyday until a new Shrek movie comes out. The first Shrek movie came out eighteen years ago. This week on Disenfranchised, Shrek.
The cultural phenomenon of Shrek goes well beyond the raw onion eating kid. For a little while, there was an online forum called Shrekchan where people only posted Shrek content. There’s a community of Shrek fans on Facebook and Reddit called Brogres (their name an homage to Bronies, the My Little Pony fans). A meme account I follow on Instagram posted an image of a Shrek dildo a few weeks ago. How did this happen? In the case of the last example, why did this happen?
Shrek opens with a voice over reading from a fairy tale picture book shown on the screen. A cursed princess, a noble knight, an evil dragon, and true love. Our narrator gets to the last page, laughs at the happily ever after, and a large, green hand rips the page out of the book. Hard cut to our protagonist, Shrek, throwing open the door of an outhouse, a flushing noise in the background. His outhouse has plumbing? Cue “All Star” by Smash Mouth as the opening credit sequence rolls.
Shrek bills itself as the inversion of a fairy tail: it is the story of the a grumpy ogre named Shrek (Mike Meyers) who becomes friends with a donkey named Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and marries a beautiful princess named Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz). This movie is based loosely on a book and I think that’s the only reason Shrek’s name isn’t Ogre the ogre.
Early in the movie, Shrek tells Donkey that ogres are like onions. Donkey assumes this is because ogres stink. Shrek insists it’s because ogres and onions both have a lot of layers. Shrek is dissatisfied with his solitary swamp life. He is lonely. He never stops being mean to everyone around him, though. Donkey eventually succeeds in befriending Shrek, but is still continuously mocked. Shrek is a little self-centered, too—when he overhears Fiona call someone ugly, he assumes she’s talking about him (she was talking about herself). He actively alienates himself over and over again. This, the movie tells us, is reflexive behavior. Shrek has been mistreated his whole life: chased by violent mobs with pitchforks, rejected by other fairy tale creatures, and constantly treated like a beast.
This movie also spends a lot of time telling us that we are not watching a fairy tale. Shrek doesn’t follow the heroic knight protocol when rescuing the beautiful princess from the dragon-guarded castle. Fiona breaks down in detail what Shrek does wrong during his rescue: no gentle awakening, no favor taken, no kiss. “What kind of knight are you?” she exclaims. The Big Bad Wolf (of Red Riding Hood fame) likes dressing like a grandma. The evil villain, Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), even tortures Gingerbread Man by ripping off his cookie legs. When Shrek and Fiona spend time together they both pass gas!
And yet, the movie still ends happily ever after. Shrek kisses Princess Fiona and she takes her “true form” which happens to be large and green (quite the makeogre). “I don’t understand. I was supposed to be beautiful” Fiona opines. “Aye,” says Shrek “you are beautiful.” Shrek, it seems, is not the only person with self-esteem issues.
I’ve been trying to think about how different it was to see Shrek when it came out—it may truly have been transcendent to watch a princess fight off some would-be attackers, but it doesn’t feel progressive now. Donkey yelps at one point about “unwanted physical contact.” The whole movie is littered with oddly specific bits of fortune telling. Smash Mouth predicts climate change: “The ice we skate is getting pretty thin/The water’s getting warm so you might as well swim/My world’s on fire, how about yours?” Lord Farquaad puts fairy tale creatures into “resettlement camps” while Shrek yells “go back to where you come from” and “I’m going to build a wall”. And, in something that may feel familiar to anyone that leaves their hometown and returns to a familiar bar or restaurant a few years later, a short-tempered ogre marries someone way out of their league and now they own a house (in a swamp).
What I do remember about watching Shrek in 2001 is that it was truly a popular movie. A hungover teacher once dimmed the lights and screened it for my grade school classroom one Spring afternoon. We all laughed, our teacher too. The movie feels one-dimensional now and I can’t explain how or when Shrek transcended from a pretty popular movie to an object of myth. I don’t think the answer is in the first movie. Maybe I can’t explain it because a cultural phenomenon is like a Shrek—it has a lot of layers.