Movie Review - Shrek 1

Sometimes I'm a little slow on picking up on a good thing, and Shrek was one of those. It had a fame of the same sort as Harry Potter. Okay, so it might not have such a cultish following as Harry Potter, but none-the-less, it was really popular, and as with all things really popular, I'm skeptical.

But Shrek is a good movie, and instead of go over why it's a good movie, I think I'd rather talk about the issue of race in the movie. The old children's classics that Shrek sattires, like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella, all perpetuated racialized and gender normalized norms...damsels in distress were always fair, and helpless of course, and knights in shining armor were the defenders of these damsels as well as defenders against dragons, evil witches or ogres, all racial others. But in Shrek, the knight in shining armor is not this idealized white man, but it's in fact the ostracized racial other, an ogre, and in the end we even find out that the damsel in distress is also an ogre.

But what's most interesting to me is Shrek himself, and not the system of oppression...but maybe this system deserves a word or two. The "perfect kingdom", Dulock, symbolizes white suburbia. This is very easily interpretted from the film - the parking lot in front of the castle, the artificiality of the landscaping, the deadness but artificially-created 'perfection' of the castle inside, and especially the policy of keeping non-whites, such as ogres, out...because non-whites are scary...and eat weird things like slugs and eyeballs. But back to Shrek. He's a hardened guy, much like an "angry asian man", but only because everyone never accepted him. But when we close ourselves up and become angry, that anger consumes us, and racism wins in my opinion. Anyway, in the end, when Shrek said "you are beautiful," is when he begins to resolve his racial identity, because the "you are beautiful" statement also implied a "green is beautiful," echoing similar self-affirmations such as "black is beautiful," "yellow is beautiful," or "brown is beautiful.

Progress is slow, but it is there. After all, change, ironically enough, is one of the only constants in this universe.