Douthat on Shrek

Ross Douthat has a review of the latest Shrek film in the June 21 National Review that reassures me that I'm not just a lone, crazy voice in the wilderness when it comes to this series, which I've hated from the get-go. He nails it exactly right:

What Sex and the City did for the love story, Shrek has done for the fairy tale: It's taken a classic genre and purged it of any trace of innocence, substituting raunch, cynicism, and a self-congratulatory knowingness instead, and then tying up the jaded narrative with a happily-ever-after bow.

Our culture robs children of their innocence as early as it can; and it is only in that innocence that the real meaning of fairy tales can be perceived. I believe this is one of the primary truths we learn from G.K. Chesterton. When we are older, we cannot but assume a critical distance from what we read. The child is still in the process of forming his self; what he reads (or is read to him) becomes a part of him in a way it never can again. For Chesterton, every truth worth knowing he learned in the nursery.

It is bad enough our children are exposed to things that destroy their innocence early on, and make the appreciation of fairy tales more difficult. Now, in the Shrek series, the fairy tale tradition itself is subverted. This constitutes a kind of inoculation against the power of fairy tales. Douthat is as depressed about this as I am:

I have a horrible feeling that the Shrek franchise offers millions of kids their first exposure - and worse, their last - to the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.

The result is the sort of impertinent, self-satisfied young adults whom I encounter among my children's peers. They are not exactly insolent; but they are already jaded at age 17 and unselfconscious in their conviction that the world offers nothing before which they should bow. The notion that there might be something out there that might be more grand, significant and awesome than themselves is something that can't occur to them; they've been inoculated against it as they might have been inoculated against small pox. That such youths are somewhat unpleasant is not the major point. It is that they have been robbed of the virtue of humility that is the prerequisite for eros, the deep and mysterious longing in the soul for it knows not what. To draw on Chesterton one more time, we can perceive the gigantic only to the extent that we are small.  This is one of the primary lessons of fairy tales, a lesson our children can no longer learn... at least as long as Shrek and its ilk is available to them.

DeFanging the Dragons

Good article from Jonah Goldberg on one of my favorite topics, the subversion of traditional children's literature. Jonah doesn't mention them, but the Shrek films are high on my list of cultural subversives. Like the modern Grinch, Shrek is merely misunderstood rather than an example of the uncompromising evil of the traditional ogre. As soon as Shrek used pages from a book of traditional fairy tales for toilet paper, I knew I was going to hate him.

Another modern theme that parallels the subversion of traditional icons of evil is the too easily defeated paragon of evil. In Harry Potter, for example, Lord Voldemort is an example of dedicated, mature, adult evil. Traditionally - and in truth - such deep evil can only be defeated by a similarly mature and deep good. Thus Pippin, when he gazes into the magic orb of Sauron, is captured by it and must be rescued by the intervention of Gandalf. Frodo Baggins himself is finally unable to overcome the evil of the One Ring on his own. Yet Lord Voldemort is repeatedly defeated by the schoolboy Harry Potter. This undermines the moral seriousness of the series and, despite all its pretensions, puts it on the level of Home Alone rather than Lord of the Rings.

But pretending that monsters aren't really evil, or that evil is never so serious that it can't be defeated by a child, does not do a child any favors. It only educates him into a dangerous naivete. Traditional literature used to introduce the child to the mystery of evil, not necessarily by scaring the bejeebers out of him, but by revealing to him that there is indeed deep and implacable evil in the world; evil that he cannot defeat on his own but against which he has good and powerful allies - fairy godmothers, handsome Princes and maybe, even God.