Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Shrek
2001 · Andrew Adamson · Shrek on Sightlines
The film opens on a gold-leafed storybook, read aloud in the voice of a bedtime. Once upon a time, a lovely princess, a tower, a curse. Then a hand tears the page out of the book. Smash Mouth is on the soundtrack.
That's about eight seconds, and it's worth slowing down, because what happens there isn't quite parody. The page doesn't get refuted. It gets used. Everything written on it goes ahead and happens: there is a princess, there is a dragon in a tower, there is a rescue, there is a kiss at the end. What got torn up wasn't the plot. It was your posture toward the plot.
Deleuze sorted film images by how they reach you. Some arrive directly: a face fills the screen and you feel something, a fist swings and a situation changes. Others don't work at all unless you bring something with you. He called that second kind the relation-image, or the mental-image — the meaning isn't in the frame, it's in the relation you hold between this frame and a few hundred you've already seen. The audience is the third party to the transaction, and it has to be a knowing one.
Two finer tools sit inside that. A mark is an object that means by habit: see this, expect that. A tower, a dragon, a sleeping woman at sunset, and you know the next move without being told, because Disney taught you before you could read. A demark is the anomaly that snaps the habit and makes you interpret instead of anticipate.
Shrek is a machine for running marks perfectly straight and then demarking at the last possible instant. The princess gets rescued on schedule. The princess belches. The quest earns its kiss, the transformation clause comes due, and the ogre is still an ogre.
That last one is the film's real nerve, and the lineage tells you what it costs and where it's stolen from. Beauty and the Beast (1991) is the exact template being inverted: monstrous suitor, redeeming love, and redemption that looks like becoming handsome. Shrek runs the identical machinery and stops it one beat from the end. The gag does nothing to a viewer who hasn't seen the 1991 film. It isn't a joke about ogres. It's a joke about what you were promised in 1991 and have been quietly expecting ever since.
The other debts are just as specific. Rocky and Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales built the knowing-narrator storybook opening that curdles as it's read, which is precisely the gag of the torn page. Monty Python and the Holy Grail supplied the method for medieval satire: keep the armor, drop the diction, let lowbrow contemporary register do the deflating and let the quest take a scatological hit on the way down. The Princess Bride proved you can mock the clichés and keep the romance sincere, which is much harder than it sounds and is the thing most of Shrek's imitators could not do. Who Framed Roger Rabbit invented the crowded cross-property frame, dozens of storybook figures crammed into one shot, and Shrek runs on that crowd. Aladdin handed over the engine: Robin Williams improvising anachronisms in a celebrity voice, the mold Myers and Eddie Murphy are working in.
Now the part that makes the film last. Deleuze's central historical claim about cinema is that the action-image went into crisis — characters stopped being able to act effectively on what they perceived, and the films that followed watched and endured instead of moving. One of his symptoms of that crisis is consciousness of clichés: characters, and a film, aware they're walking through worn material. Shrek has that in every scene. By the usual pattern its plot should have gone slack.
It hasn't. Underneath the commentary, Shrek is running a textbook large-form action-image, the oldest working shape in movies: a situation bears down on a character (his swamp has been filled with evicted storybook creatures), he acts to change it (fetch the princess, get the swamp cleared), and the act transforms the situation. The circuit never breaks. That's the invention, and it's a matter of construction rather than tone. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson aimed the irony outward, at the audience's memory, instead of inward at their own story, which left the story free to actually work. Everything being mocked is outside the frame, in your head. Everything inside the frame is played for keeps.
Two decades of smirking, pop-scored imitators took the surface and missed this exactly. They kept the demarks and threw away the large form. A demark with no habit running underneath it is just noise.
Lord Farquaad earns a concept of his own. Deleuze describes an inversion-image: the sublime figure and his feeble double, grandeur played back at the wrong size. Farquaad is a very small man running an enormous kingdom built to the specifications of a theme park, gleaming and staffed and lethally clean. The grudge behind him is on the record; Katzenberg left Disney and the resentment got animated. What saves it from being mere score-settling is the method. The film never insults Disney. It builds a version of Disney's world that is pleasant, orderly, immaculate and unlivable, then lets you walk around in it.
Then there's the joke the film half-means. The fairy-tale creatures are processed like refugees: registered, bountied, loaded up, dumped on somebody else's land. Deleuze would call that crowd a dividual, a mass rendered as a single affective unit rather than a set of individuals, and he has a further idea about political cinema — that it often has to pass through the absence of a people, a population with no standing as a public yet. The evicted have none at the start of this movie. By the end they have a place and a party. It's a comedy, and it does this glancingly. It still does it.
Which brings you back to the swamp. In Deleuze's vocabulary a symbol is the object that condenses a film's organizing relation, and the organizing relation here is property. Quests usually treat home as the thing you leave. This one treats it as the thing the quest is for. The ogre isn't looking for love. He wants his swamp back, and every sweet thing in the film grows out of that unsentimental root.
One more piece of craft, because the art moves forward through individual decisions. Chris Farley had recorded most of the part before he died. Mike Myers took it over, then re-recorded the entire role in a Scottish accent, and DreamWorks paid millions to redo finished animation to match. That is an expensive instinct, and you can hear what it bought. The accent gives Shrek a class, not just a species. He isn't a generic monster who learns to be loved; he's someone with a background and a defensive history who is very tired of being read on sight. The self-acceptance theme has a body and a voice to sit in, which is why it comes out sweet instead of sticky.
What did it do to the art? It raised the floor of what a mainstream animated film may assume its audience already knows, and the institutions conceded the point almost immediately: the first Academy Award ever given for Best Animated Feature, and a competition slot at Cannes, where no animated film had been since Peter Pan in 1953. A film that opens by tearing a page out of a storybook, in competition on the Croisette.
Watch it again and watch the plot instead of the jokes. Notice how carefully it's built, how every setup pays, how the sarcasm never once gets to sabotage a scene that has to land. Then notice the bind the film is in and can't get out of. It can only demolish a fairy tale you still know by heart. Its jokes are a form of maintenance. Every time Shrek tears the page, he reminds a new eight-year-old what was written on it.
Concepts in play
- the mental-image (relation-image) — The whole comic system depends on what the viewer carries in: the film's irreverence is structural, aimed at the audience's stored fairy-tale chains rather than at anything visible in the frame.
- mark — The illuminated storybook opening and the rescue-from-the-dragon's-clutches structure are run straight as customary chains — see the tower, expect the kiss and the transformation.
- demark — The hand tears the page out of the fairy-tale book; the princess belches; the kiss arrives and Shrek keeps the beast form, breaking the chain Beauty and the Beast installed.
- consciousness of clichés — Anachronistic register, pop soundtrack and characters who move through fairy-tale conventions as known, worn material — the Monty Python and Fractured Fairy Tales inheritance made structural.
- large-form action-image (SAS') — A global situation presses (the swamp overrun by evicted fairy-tale creatures), Shrek acts to change it (retrieve the princess from the dragon), and the act transforms the situation — the sensory-motor circuit stays intact beneath the satire.
- inversion-image — Lord Farquaad as the feeble double of the sublime ruler: a diminutive villain presiding over a kingdom of gleaming theme-park perfection, with Katzenberg's post-Disney grudges animated into him.
- dividual — The fairy-tale creatures processed like refugees — registered, bountied and dumped as one mass, the crowd-of-storybook-figures logic inherited from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
- the people are missing — The evicted storybook creatures have no standing as a public when the film begins; the comedy's endpoint is their acquiring a place and a collective existence.
- symbol — The swamp — the ogre likes his swamp, and the entire quest is undertaken to get it back, making property rather than romance the film's organizing relation.