Day 44 : Representing Political Regimes in the Shrek Trilogy -Aurélie Lacassagne

The trilogy Shrek has been among the most successful animated movies at the box office in the history of cinema. DreamWorks, the production company, decided to make the green ogre a worldwide cultural product, by designing hundreds of products related to the monster. The profits of the franchise are estimated at 1.4 billion dollars (“Interview,” 2007). Just the first movie, Shrek, made a total box office of 479.2 million dollars (Hopkins, 2004: p. 33). This fact could clearly lead to insights pertaining to the political economy of film. This chapter, however, will focus on the narratives of the movies. We are interested in these narratives (in our case visual representations) and their interplay with power politics, especially race and gender conflicts. Insofar as movies constitute partly social reality, how can we interpret these visual texts? Our contention is that popular culture, including children’s movies, constitutes and represents the social world. Therefore, proposing an interpretation of these movies as texts also offers an interpretation and a representation of the world. Children (and in our case adults also) are more than just socialized by movies; the films as texts directly affect their representation of the world and participate in the constitution of the social world. As the early writers on cultural studies, such as Hall (1997), showed, popular culture is a site of struggles between the hegemonic discourse and resistance to it. The immanent divisions of our capitalist societies (in terms of class, race, and gender) are, at the same time, produced, reproduced, and contested through popular culture.
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The narratives being very rich, we will focus on representations of political regimes. Indeed, the movie series depicts a number of regime types: a liberal capitalist democracy, in the form of Far Far Away; totalitarianism as instantiated in the Kingdom of Farquaad; and finally, an individualist anarchist space— Shrek’s swamp. All of these regimes are disrupted by rebellions led by groups excluded from the established social order. The three political regimes identified are all territorially based. The space is segregated into an inside and an outside. This spatial segregation is associated with a social segregation. In international relations literature, Andrew Linklater (1990) speaks about this “tension” between “men” and “citizens.” Citizens of a particular spatially defined political community are entitled to specific rights, while outsiders are deprived of those very rights. But even within the community of citizens, appears the logic of “established” and “outsiders,” to speak in Eliasian terms (Elias and Scotson, 1994). This logic often relies upon exclusion based on perceptions of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and bodies. This chapter explores how these logics of exclusion are constructed. It is divided into three sections, each describing a particular political regime.

Individual Anarchism

The first few scenes of the first movie, Shrek, open with the ogre living by himself in his swamp. The space is clearly delimited by the “décor” of the swamp; but the ogre goes further and territorially marks his space with signs to signify to the others that this territory belongs to him and that no one can trespass. Two images can come to one’s mind while watching this scene. First, the absence of authority: Shrek lives alone in his swamp and he is the sole master of his life. It refers to individualist anarchism. Second, for anyone familiar with French literature and political philosophy, Shrek evokes images of the myth of le bon sauvage (the noble savage) depicted by Montaigne (1595/1960) in his Essays and Rousseau (1754/1983) in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men.

Individualist anarchism encompasses various conceptions. It is not the point here to refer to a particular conception of this philosophy but to make the point that, Shrek living in his swamp matches with the spirit of individualist anarchism. There is no state, no society. Nothing seems to prevent Shrek from fulfilling his self-interest. Shrek also appears very reluctant to engage in any form of social relations. One can say that he is an egoist. He represents more the tradition of Max Stirner than William Godwin. Shrek looks fully in control of himself—of his mind and body. Even if one can see a sort of melancholia, he seems satisfied and happy, enjoying the calm of his swamp and the easiness of his life. He eats whatever he finds around him and has arranged his shelter to his taste. He does not appear to have intellectual or spiritual concerns. As long as he can live alone in his swamp, he fully accepts the body he has; his physical appearance becomes an issue only when he enters into social transactions. These control and acceptance of his body are two key elements for the story itself as well as for his portrayal as an egoistic individualist anarchist.

~~Investigating Shrek- Power, Identity, and Ideology -eds.- Aurélie Lacassagne, Tim Nieguth, and François Dépelteau

Day 32

MACBETH: You have been writing science fiction short stories and novels for several years now, but your story ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ is one of a recent group which, I think, in structure are really quite different from your earlier ones. Perhaps the most striking feature to someone reading ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, for example, for the first time, is that it is constructed not in continuous narrative, but in a sequence of short paragraphs, each of which has a heading – in fact, they’re arranged in alphabetical order. But the key point, I think, is that they are broken up. Why did you move on to using this technique of construction?

BALLARD: I was dissatisfied with what I felt were linear systems of narrative. I had been using in my novels and in most of my short stories a conventional linear narrative, but I found that the action and events – of the novels in particular – were breaking down as I wrote them. The characterisation and the sequences of events were beginning to crystallise into a series of shorter and shorter images and situations. This ties in very much with what I feel about the whole role of science fiction as a speculative form of fiction. For me, science fiction is above all a prospective form of narrative fiction; it is concerned with seeing the present in terms of the immediate future rather than the past.

MACBETH: Could I break in there? Would you contrast that with what the traditional novel does in the sense it’s concerned with perhaps the history of a family or a person?

BALLARD: Exactly. The great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character. It’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years. It interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when one turns to the present – and what I feel I’ve done in these pieces of mine is to rediscover the present for myself – I feel that one needs a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
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MACBETH: You do literally, in many of these stories, draw connections between pictures of parts of the human body and certain landscapes, don’t you?

BALLARD: Yes. In the story ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ I directly equate the physical aspect of Marilyn Monroe’s body with the landscape of dunes around her. The hero attempts to make sense of this particular equation, and he realises that the suicide of Marilyn Monroe is, in fact, a disaster in space-time, like the explosion of a satellite in orbit. It is not so much a personal disaster, though of course Marilyn Monroe committed suicide as an individual woman, but a disaster of a whole complex of relationships involving this screen actress who is presented to us in an endless series of advertisements, on a thousand magazine covers and so on, whose body becomes part of the external landscape of our environment. The immense terraced figure of Marilyn Monroe stretched across a cinema hoarding is as real a portion of our external landscape as any system of mountains or lakes.

MACBETH: Are you aware of deliberately using surrealism as references in these stories? Quite often you refer to Dali in particular and sometimes Ernst, and sometimes to real pictures by them. How far is there a direct connection with those pictures and the events or descriptions in the stories?

BALLARD: The connection is deliberate, because I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds. I use the phrase ‘spinal landscape’ fairly often. In these spinal landscapes, which I feel that painters such as Ernst and Dali are producing, one finds a middle ground (an area which I’ve described as ‘inner space’) between the outer world of reality on the one hand, and the inner world of the psyche on the other. Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content. I think in exactly the same way today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. In fact the main task of the arts seems to be more and more to isolate the real elements in this goulash of fictions from the unreal ones, and the terrain ‘inner space’ roughly describes it.

~~ Interview from Extreme Metaphors, Interviews with J. G. Ballard