Intriguing! I've never read such a deep take on Shrek. It makes me want to rewatch the movies!
And yet, as Adorno or Benjamin would no doubt remind you, they themselves did not view capitalism one-dimensionally. Shrek's entrance into bourgeois market society represented his first step toward a higher form of freedom than that which he could have enjoyed alone in his autarkic swamp. But, of course, that freedom is self-contradictory, and its pursuit has eventually ended up engendering the ridiculous society we inhabit now.
Of course, the whole point of the Frankfurt School was to indicate how regressed society - and the Left - had become. The organized rebellion and flight from the capitalist Far Far Away by the characters in Shrek represents a praxis that we today can not even aspire to, despite its clearly degraded nature. The Frankfurt School is the theory appropriate to the retreat from the duty to take control of capitalism expressed en masse by the Left and the broader working class around it since 1914.
Thus, if Shrek is to retain any hold on the 21st century's imagination, it must only be as a reminder that our art now expresses our longing for revolution, but even then only by anachronistically projecting capitalist reality backward in time so as to create a fictional continuity between us and the oppressed of all centuries. In other words, by virtue of being hopelessly reactionary and romantic to the point of silliness, art such as Shrek confronts us with our own silly inability to change the world around us.
But hey, after all, Shrek may be just another entertaining movie! It certainly won't stop me from laughing along with it time and again!
Intriguing! I've never read such a deep take on Shrek. It makes me want to rewatch the movies!
And yet, as Adorno or Benjamin would no doubt remind you, they themselves did not view capitalism one-dimensionally. Shrek's entrance into bourgeois market society represented his first step toward a higher form of freedom than that which he could have enjoyed alone in his autarkic swamp. But, of course, that freedom is self-contradictory, and its pursuit has eventually ended up engendering the ridiculous society we inhabit now.
Of course, the whole point of the Frankfurt School was to indicate how regressed society - and the Left - had become. The organized rebellion and flight from the capitalist Far Far Away by the characters in Shrek represents a praxis that we today can not even aspire to, despite its clearly degraded nature. The Frankfurt School is the theory appropriate to the retreat from the duty to take control of capitalism expressed en masse by the Left and the broader working class around it since 1914.
Thus, if Shrek is to retain any hold on the 21st century's imagination, it must only be as a reminder that our art now expresses our longing for revolution, but even then only by anachronistically projecting capitalist reality backward in time so as to create a fictional continuity between us and the oppressed of all centuries. In other words, by virtue of being hopelessly reactionary and romantic to the point of silliness, art such as Shrek confronts us with our own silly inability to change the world around us.
But hey, after all, Shrek may be just another entertaining movie! It certainly won't stop me from laughing along with it time and again!