The first Shrek movie kicked off to the strains of Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” the worst hit song of 1999; Shrek the Third, the latest and lousiest installment in the saga, includes a cover of Heart’s “Barracuda” performed by Fergie, a pillow-lipped chanteuse best known for her chart-topping single “My Humps,” and perhaps for the humps themselves. Smash Mouth is more or less forgotten nowadays, and within five years I expect that Fergie will be as well. If there’s any justice, by then the Shrek phenomenon will have joined them in the pop-culture dustbin, remembered only for being as rancid and calculated as anything foisted on the American family in recent memory.
If every culture gets the fairy tale it deserves, though, Shrek may be with us for a while yet. The story of the ogre who wins the beautiful princess (who turns out to be an ogre) gets laughs by upending fairy-tale convention-monsters are heroes; Prince Charming is a preening SOB; damsels-in-distress turn out to know kung fu-but it isn’t a Monty-Pythonesque parody of the genre, tongue firmly planted in cheek throughout. Rather, it’s a straightforward revision with comic flourishes, designed to flatter the prejudices of what a recent study suggests may be the most narcissistic generation of Americans in history, by imparting a moral-be thyself-that’s as old as Polonius and as new as The Secret, and as brainless as both.
Comments