Childish Epistemologies: Part I
A picturesque crescent moon is suddenly disturbed by the plop of a lure. Ripples run across the scene. The starry night sky is revealed to be a watery reflection. Meanwhile, the camera traces a feint fishing line up through the clouds to a boy reclining on the real moon. Now accompanied by a soaring flute melody and swelling string harmonies, the shot pans right as tall white letters start illuminating the sky. The name “DreamWorks” emerges from the clouds and one of the most recognisable studio production logos from my twenty-first century childhood is revealed. Only the sudden eruption of the title’s concluding “S” into a swampish green, as if vandalised by some invisible sardonic hand, and the appearance of two trumpet-like ears on the letter’s crown hint at the tone of the film to come.
Nearly twenty years on, DreamWorks Animation’s films have become a fixture of my childhood memories of growing up in the early 2000s. Shrek (2001) was released to cinemas when I was six years old. Although I can’t remember whether I first saw everyone’s favourite Scottish Ogre on the big screen, or later at home, he still stands dazzlingly green over those formative years. Shrek is love, Shrek is life; Shrek was always just there.
With the benefit of hindsight, Shrek’s ubiquity now seems in no small way due to the winning formula of children’s animation films that DreamWorks later perfected throughout the 00s. As with the Oscar-winning Shrek, films as varied as Shark Tale (2004), Madagascar (2005), Bee Movie (2007), and Kung Fu Panda (2008), although not all great films, did deliver the studio’s unique brand of irreverent humour and recognisably computer-generated animation. At the time, these titles fell into a satisfying middle ground of children’s feature films. They felt more ‘of the time’ than the story-bookish, two dimensions of 90s Disney, yet satisfyingly less meticulous and polished (maybe even just that joyful bit shittier) than the sincere but all too infrequent Pixar films. Throughout the 00s, DreamWorks hit what feels to me like the perfect balance between substance and quantity that would appeal to a generation of viewers who remembered VCRs and dial-up internet but, by high-school and late onset adolescence, would be wielding iPhones and become fluent in meme culture.
But why are these iconic gems of children’s cinema that my generation grew up devouring then, so different from the kids movies I see being enjoyed by millions today?
A few weeks ago I saw both Paddington films for the first time, Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2018). And I cried. These were genuinely beautiful films. So much so, that I realised any comparison to Shrek couldn’t possibly be a simple case of things-were-better-in-my-day. I can’t imagine ever crying to Shrek now, or even back when it was socially acceptable for me to watch children’s movies. So what has changed?
The Paddington films aren’t necessarily doing anything better or worse than Shrek or its subsequent franchise entries. Both have brought joy to millions worldwide. But something in the way we tell our stories has changed too. I want to argue that they are doing something different to each other. In this multi-part essay I hope to answer a few of the hard-hitting questions that have plagued cultural critics, Shrek, and Paddington fans alike. What exactly was Shrek? Why was Paddington so good, yet so different? And what the hell happened in the fifteen-or-so years in between? In this first part, we lay some foundations and explore the possibility that Shrek represents the most postmodern children’s film of them all.
Shrek and the Postmodern
I’ll let you in on a hunch. I suspect that the Paddington films might be indicative of what many critics describe as the post-postmodern moment. While the critical jury is still out on what the post-postmodern definitively is and what we should call it, many commentators such as the Canadian critic Josh Toth have already suggested that in order to properly understand the post-postmodern we must first understand what came before it. We must consider what the postmodern was and/or still is. Therefore, to fully understand Paddington we must return to Shrek. And if it is possible to consider Paddington as post-postmodern, and at risk of incurring the mighty internet’s wrath, we might ask: Could there be any more of a postmodern children’s film than Shrek?
First, some ground work. What is postmodernism? Broadly speaking, postmodernism was a cultural and aesthetic mode that rose to prominence in the West sometime in the 60s and continued on as a dominant mode (depending on who you ask) until anywhere between the mid-80s to the turn of the millennium. Literature, film, art, architecture, critical theory, politics and philosophy all had postmodern moments or prominent practitioners who engaged with postmodern thought. It became a cogent means for representing, understanding, and critiquing the socio-economic-politico-cultural world out of which it grew. But this enthusiastic and widespread adoption means that while many people have heard about postmodernism, it means something slightly different to each of them. Hence, we have lots of famous accounts and examples of the postmodern, but little conclusive consensus on the postmodern itself.
The aforementioned Toth lucidly described postmodernism in theoretical terminology as an epistemological configuration haunted by the belief in the possibility of a final answer to questions about the nature of knowledge and truth. Postmodernisms response to this spectral possibility was paradoxically to deny its reality, to expose it as a fiction, and break down any prevailing assumptions that might uphold such a fiction. In this language of critical theory discourse, Toth also points towards how postmodernism’s seminal theoretical texts such as Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), in their diverse arguments and application, all express this “postmodern need to expose” (118).
In less abstract terms, David Foster Wallace, the late novelist and one of the most infectious cultural thinkers of our time, described postmodernism literature as arising out of “distinctive forms of… cynical, irreverent, absurdist post-WWII literature” (178) that marked “a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative instantiation of deviance from bogus values” (178). Therefore, a postmodern aesthetic developed in Western and particularly American culture, found in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker, which, despite their differences, all came to be recognised as commonly postmodern.
What these postmodern works all have in common is their disdain for what Toth described as ‘epistemological assumptions,’ or what Foster Wallace calls bogus values. That is, received and unchallenged ideas about the nature of knowledge and/or truth. As examples, these works — in their use of forms, techniques, and styles that self-reflexively deconstruct distinctions between high and low culture, the fictional and the real — ran parallel to what Foster Wallace describes as a “deep philosophical change in how Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our willingness to be pleased” (178). To try and bring things back down to earth then, we might start trying to think of the postmodern as a pervasive culture of sending things up (epistemologically speaking) by whatever means available; whether that be irony, irreverence, deconstruction or something else.
So, what does this have to do with Shrek? If, as the critics say, postmodernism and the post-postmodern are simply names for stages in continually shifting cultural and philosophical attitudes, then it is conceivable that what once seemed new and controversial three quarters of the way through the twentieth century might have seemed palatable or even conventional by the century’s end. And could such a shift be represented any better than by the eventual adaptation of certain styles and attitudes from avant-garde art into commercial children’s cinema? Were we, as those very children, unknowingly watching a very postmodern Shrek?
Think about Shrek’s opening scene and Foster Wallace’s earlier comments about the postmodern philosophical shift in popular attitudes towards authority. The film begins with a scene of a book, illuminated in a fairy-tale, medieval style, open at its first page. The as-yet unidentified voice of Shrek reads: “Once upon a time there was a lovely princess…” As Shrek’s narration continues with the stereotypical fairy-tale of a damsel in distress, bewitched by a curse and imprisoned by a dragon, the book’s pages continue to turn as if lifted by an unseen hand.
It is only at the story’s climax, when it is prophesised that “true love’s first kiss” will lift the curse, that Shrek’s initial persona breaks. He laughs. An ogrous green hand reaches across the frame and tears out the book’s final page. The shot switches to a view of a lean-to outhouse in a swamp and we hear Shrek’s voice from inside say to himself: “like that’s ever going to happen. What a load of…” The sound of a toilet flushing drowns out all else out. As it’s gurgle settles, the all-too recognisable surf-twang of Smash Mouth’s radio hit “All Star” begins to play.
This is the tone of things to come: a recognisably postmodern incredulity towards whatever form of authority may arise. Shrek’s response of trademark potty humour to the narrative authority of the same old stories we’ve heard and told ourselves repeatedly, replaces wonder and suspended disbelief with the cynical belief that it’s all make believe. The irony isn’t lost on the audience, either; we know that Shrek is a similarly make-believe character himself, only one that is by the film’s definition against traditional notions of authority and the good of such narratives. He is an ogre, an outlaw, and a villain who is sick of the games such stories place him in and he just wants to be left alone to his swamp.
The insistence that all norms, which exert a kind of authority over your expectations of what a children’s movie is at the beginning of the film, are going to be upset, disrupted and subverted continues to make Shrek look more and more postmodern. Your narrator and hero is not the palatable and assumed neutral white man prince but a coloured swamp monster. Home is not a castle but a swamp. The soon-to-be-met villain Lord Farquaad is a comically short and manipulative inversion of how monarchs might appear in fairy-tales. He is a tyrant that the camera shots cut off below the nose, who has to have his own torture table lowered for him. The waiting to be rescued Princess Fiona’s curse is that she does not appear to be as she is: night exposes her as ogre and day exposes her as human. The new postmodern expectation that Shrek’s audience is primed to accept is not only an incredulity and sending up of their expectations but also an insistence that there can be no more safe and steady expectations; the only rule is that there are no rules. And what ever rules we think there are, the film will actively work to expose.
Now that you are primed and sufficiently postmodern, we will take some time next week to consider more closely what makes Shrek so postmodern. We will look into more of the cultural shifts regarding authority and sincerity that the film works to emulate. We will also start looking at the hallowed ‘End of Postmodernism’ and what might be said to have come (or be coming) after it. So, be prepared for onions, talking puppets, and hours of “All Star” on repeat.
Works Cited
Foster Wallace, David. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151–193.
Toth, Josh. The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.
