Unpacking the Shrek Series | Big Joel

hey everybody today I'm gonna talk about the Shrek series you know there's something about just saying that sentence that puts a smile on my face I just love thinking about Shrek and knowing that Shrek exists and what's more I do think there's an unexpected amount of thematic stuff going on under the surface of these films and that they come together to say something interesting one might say and I'm not saying this but one might say that the Shrek movies are like onions and that they have a bunch of neat layers to them so anyway that's this video get ready to hear some hot takes about Shrek more than anything else the first shrek is a very simple movie that wants to express a very simple idea at the beginning shrek is a guy who society regards as an outcast he's seen as ugly and unworthy of love people take one look at me and go ah hell run a big stupid ugly ogre they judge me before they even know me but in the end after Shrek has made a friend and fallen in love with Princess Fiona the film culminates with the idea that shrek is worthy of love and acceptance and that he always was shrek doesn't need to physically transform for Fiona to love him and he doesn't need to change a lot about his personality either rather the only thing shrek has to accept is that p is the sort of thing that can be happy and live authentically to put it simply he attains self love and self actualization in a society that problematizes his identity that's what shrek is about right it was obvious to me when I saw the movie when I was five and it's obvious to me now the film says what it wants to say and I'm not here to challenge that instead I'm interested in looking at how this movie behaves the assumptions and themes that it expresses under the surface and how those themes play with the rest of the movies in the franchise so let's talk about that stuff to start off this movie is like really interested in the process through which identities and behaviors become deviant or unacceptable and the way Shrek treats this idea is probably the most unique thing about it what form I am before and you see people who watch a lot of kids movies like me are very used to seeing characters in marginal positions look at the beast or at Aladdin or at Quasimodo ins these are people who the world has turned its back on who live on the outskirts in one way or another why invite their colony and consternation stay but in all of these cases the relationship between society and our character is as simple as get out we don't like you the town Bell comes from hates the Beast once they find out he exists they immediately understand him as a disease that needs to be eradicated [Applause] the same holds true for Aladdin and Quasimodo the world they live in constantly tries to push them out or pretend like they don't exist but what's kind of cool is that power and Shrek doesn't just say get out we don't like you to the various characters in the film instead it says come in you are a subject in this society your purpose is to be deviant um let me show you what I mean by that at the very beginning of the movie Shrek is an outcast who everybody hates but this isn't actually posed as much of a problem shrek enjoys life on the margin gets off on not being a part of normal society no the real conflict starts when Shrek and his swamp are interpreted by Lord Farquaad as part of his kingdom your swamp yeah my swamp where you dump those fairytale creatures indeed alright oh girl I'll make you a deal go on this quest for me and I'll give you your swamp back suddenly in this scene the space shrek inhabits is included in the state of Duloc it becomes property something that the government can have claim to now don't get me wrong it's not like Farquaad actively wants to make shrek a member of Duloc kingdom or anything like that after all the whole reason he takes the swamp is so he can make a get over fairytale creatures still though the movie implies something really interesting here that for shrek to become a deviant for his land to become a place for deviants they must both be thrust into society and understood as things that can be used by that society now hand it over very well over the deed to your swamp cleared out as agreed take it and go and we can see this idea popping up with the other main characters in the film like look at the scene where donkey is introduced an old woman presents him to an agent of the law who's buying up fairy tale creatures so that they can be imprisoned well I've got a talking okay but before the sale can go through donkey has to talk he has to prove that he has an identity right well that's good for 10 shillings if you can prove him like Shrek the moment donkey becomes an outsider to the state is also necessarily the moment where he becomes a member of that state for power to render donkey as a non person this guy first has to agree that he is a person when we look at these two characters the protagonist and his sidekick we can see that they suggest that deviance is more complicated than society pushing some people away rather the film understands the construction of deviance as a balancing act one that brings people inside of society in the same breath it uses to push them away but ultimately Shrek doesn't like culminate in this idea right it's not a movie about a bunch of people realizing how oppression works I mean let's look at Fiona for a second on one level we can see her character as a total embodiment of everything I just said pretty human during the day ocher at night her identity is itself a negotiation between being acceptable and being unacceptable she's pushed into society as a princess and she's pushed out as a monster but in the end none of that complexity matters much because she and Shrek realize who cares how society constructs or forms their identity there is a way out of all this badness and it's called love within the first movie power in the state are the things over the that make you sad and our characters the people without power can only be happy and live authentically by kind of forgetting about society so it's time we turn our attention to the second Shrek movies in a lot of ways I think it picks up the matically where the first film left off Shrek to a movie centering on Shrek and Fiona visiting the kingdom of far far away and dealing with Fiona's dad is on the face of it more thematically fresh than the first film was I mean we can talk all we want about how strangely the state works in the original but at the end of the day the movie tells a story we've seen a bunch of times the characters who have power oppress the characters who don't but then the characters who don't have power end up beating the characters who do it's a classic fun tale but if Shrek one wants to tell the story of powerless people in a society that rejects them then Shrek 2 wants to ask what's it like for the people who are powerful what does the state do to the people who control the state so like at the beginning of the film Shrek's role in life is immediately changed after he marries Fiona Shrek goes from being a random ogre who owns a swamp to being a prince the son-in-law of the king and in theory that shift could put an end to Shrek feeling like an undesirable outsider but of course it doesn't shrek is detested by the king and he feels totally out of place in this position this is Fiona's choice yes but you were supposed to choose the prince we picked our Father I mean you expect me to give my blessings for this this thing and here we come to the theme that Shrek 2 really wants us to think about that having power or influence doesn't exempt you from being a deviant in fact the opposite is kinda true the same forces that pushed characters into and out of the state in the first movie are only magnified in the second King Harald Fiona's father is the most important example of this he the absolute ruler of far far away and so we might expect him to be a figure who can't be an outsider he is the state after all he's supposed to decide who is included and were excluded from that state but that's not how things work in this movie even though Harold is the king he's still subject to a higher and more abstract law that of social norms and expectations see we learned toward the end of the movie that Perrault is a frog trick Fiona will you accept an old frogs apologies the only reason he looks human is that he made a deal with the fairy godmother giving Fiona away in marriage to Prince Charming you see we made a deal Harold and I assume you don't want me to go back on my part indeed not so Fiona and charming will be together and considering that for much of the movie our King is subservient to another entity the godmother were forced to come to an unexpected conclusion within Shrek twos logic power is not owned by the king rather power acts through him his sovereignty over far far away is only absolute so long as he's acceptable and for him to be acceptable he has to conform and when we look at Shrek two with this conclusion in mind it kind of makes sense of just how over-the-top ridiculous and wonderful this movie is like the whole thing is brimming with people trying to change themselves and trying to negotiate with complicated power structures first off of course we have King Harold who's so desperate to maintain his human facade that he locks his daughter in a tower so Prince Charming can rescue and marry her then when it turned out Shrek saved Fiona the King puts a literal hit out on him to make the fairy godmother happy in response to finding out that his father-in-law wants him dead Shrek doesn't like get angry or anything no he thinks how can I change and be the normal that V ona and society need me to be maybe Fiona would have been better off if I wear some sort of Prince Charming he goes off and steals a potion from the godmother to make himself handsome but this act which seems to go against what the godmother wants gets folded back into her power play she has Prince Charming pretend to be the handsome Shrek so he can kiss Fiona and make her fall in love with him what happened to your voice the potion changed a lot of things Fiona not the way I feel about you it's almost overwhelming how much is going on here and it all seems to center on one main idea that every main actor in the film charming Shrek and the King has to distort themselves and their identities to have power or be acceptable to power they have to understand who they are as deviants who must be changed in some way well that's not entirely true is it like Shrek 1 the sequel ends with the idea that its characters can live authentically and accept themselves shrek ends up being happy as an ogre and King Harald ends up OK as a frog power might be distorting but we can work around it and find our true selves if we try hard enough and love each other the ending is optimistic and I think this might be the last truly optimistic ending in the Shrek series with that sort of ominous statement enter Shrek the third it's no secret that this movie represents a drop in quality for the Shrek franchise I mean the jokes aren't funny anymore right enough said but as not-so-great as this movie is I do think it says something kind of cool to the other two films we've talked about in fact I would say it represents an incredibly important theme attic turning point in the series in one of the first scenes in the movie King Harald on his death Bette tells Shrek that he's next in line for the throne if Shrek wants to avoid being king he has to find his replacement King Arthur decide from you that is only one remaining half so he goes and does that and just looking at the premise of this movie I feel like there's been a tone shift in the Shrek averse regardless of what you see in Shrek 1 & 2 I think there's one pretty uncontroversial statement we can make about them they pose Shrek against power and against the way that society tends to work either he's on the outside and is seen as an outcast or he's on the inside sort of and is seen as an outcast in Shrek the third though shrek is now just a weird cog in the power machine King Harold tells him you gotta be king or you gotta go find Arthur and shrek is like yes sir right away sir I'm gonna go continue the legacy of a man who incarcerated his daughter and tried to kill me a very strange but what's more striking to me than the fact that Shrek goes on this weird journey is that he doesn't seem to think there's another option from his perspective he has a choice between being power or being powers errand boy he could easily say no to Harold and it would cost him nothing but he doesn't do that it doesn't even cross his mind to do so and I think this moment tells us something about what this Shrek movie is doing with the ideas laid out in the first two films power is no longer far into Shrek no longer a strange force that has to be struggled against and negotiated with know he's been in the kingdom long enough to think of power as normal and necessary to look at the status quo and think how can we maintain this and what's kind of odd is that this new idea that power is normal and good is accompanied by a general sense of meaninglessness there's a whole bunch of loose threads in this movie that I have no idea what to with donkey and puss-in-boots switch bodies well that's cool enough I wonder what they're gonna do with that plot point oh nothing they just switch back at the end okay Fiona teaches a bunch of Disney Princesses that they can be badass well that's fine but it doesn't really connect to any sort of thematic through line that I can detect performance is emphasized throughout the film King Arthur is a good actor and Prince Charming the antagonist of the movie puts on a big play and that could be really cool especially because performance and masking has been a major idea in the Shrek series but here it amounts to nothing I don't know what to think about it it's just kind of there and when I see all these random things that don't really come together or develop the characters at all I can't help but feel like the film has nothing to say and it knows it at the beginning of Shrek 3 the state is an unquestioned good that the characters have to reproduce at the end the state is reproduced Arthur becomes the king and all as well but between those two events happening everything is incidental nobody questions who they are or what they're trying to protect and the movie can't feel motivated it can only show us arbitrary disconnected images at this point I think the most telling scene in Shrek 3 occurs right at the very end see there's all these fairytale villains in the movie who conspire against the monarchy and in the climax Arthur says this a good friend of mine once told me that just because people treat you like a villain or an ogre or just some loser it doesn't mean you are one the thing that matters most is what you think of yourself if there's something you really want or someone you really want to be then the only person standing in your way is you I don't think I've ever felt as betrayed by a movie as I did when I rewatched this scene and for that reason I think it's kind of unintentionally brilliant like the first two Shrek's are all about the idea that power does weird stuff that it constructs deviant identities and pushes people into unnatural positions Shrek wasn't an outcast because of anything he did rather it because he was forced into society and framed as an outsider but this movie turns all that on its head these fairytale villains Outsiders like Shrek was are the way they are because they made some bad choices it has nothing to do with society or the state then the only person standing in your way is you the current order of power is perfect and if these characters want to redeem themselves they have to uphold that power with this in mind let's move on to shrek forever after the final movie to date in the Shrek series a lot of people think the fourth movie is better than the third and I don't know if I disagree with that but I find it almost disgusting to watch it's just so inexplicably dark like there aren't a lot of jokes in it and a lot of it takes place at night and the villains straight up murder somebody for no reason it's a lot and I don't know why it had to be as much as it was but at least they took a risk I guess anyway if Shrek 3 took the series in a bold new thematic direction then Shrek Forever After takes a few little steps forward in that direction at the beginning of the movie Shrek is totally accepted by society and the conflict now comes from him being somewhat unhappy as an insider [Music] he's bored with his life and misses being an outcast so he makes a deal with Rumplestiltskin to get one day of pure ogre freedom because of that the world turns to garbage the royal family is killed Rumplestiltskin runs a terrible police state fiona was never saved from the tower and Shrek has to turn everything normal again so what does this movie tell us well it's simple right once you're included in the state just let it make you whatever it needs to make you you don't feel like you're living authentically you're unhappy being the person society thinks you should be suck it up and don't change anything life could get a lot worse and we're the antagonists of the first three movies were all fops who were either in positions of power or who felt they had some hereditary claim to power the antagonist in shrek 4 is small and ambitious and creepy looking tell me how do you enjoy your day he's a deviant who needs to be stopped so we can return to the status quo when we look at all four Shrek movies and try to see them as one cohesive narrative what we get is kind of horrific over the course of the films Shrek goes from being an outsider who rejects power to being powers unwitting and unthoughtful dupe the state goes from being this alien entity that we can be critical of and fight against to being natural and unchangeable at the end of shrek forever after everything does go back to normal shrek is happier now with his life but this time it's not because he found himself or anything like that I mean his domestic stagnant life goes totally unchanged no the only thing shrek realizes is that all things considered he lives in the best of all possible worlds how sad is that so um that's all I had to say about Shrek I really enjoyed making this one and I hope you liked watching it and if you did leave a comment that says who dog it didn't know video could make me this happy Shrek Shrek Shrek I have Shrek fever and then just close it out with a like a dot dot dot okay well uh no patreon question of the video this time around because I didn't get one again so I'll just see you later like comment and subscribe and I'll strike you on the next check

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 821,579

Keywords: Shrek, Shrek films, shrek movies, shrek video essay, Fionna, Donkey, Puss n boots, Shrek 1, shrek 2, shrek the third, shrek three, shrek forever after, Shrek 4

Id: QDiDqW760co

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018

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