The other day my parents and I decided to sit down and watch a movie as families are want to do on a lazy weekend, and surprisingly enough, they let me pick and they agreed to watch a lovely little epic known as "Shrek the Musical!" This play is easily one of my favorite musicals not written by Sondheim. It's funny, campy as hell, and the music is actually incredibly well written and performed by an equally talented cast. It certainly helps, however, that the story of Shrek is actually incredibly beautiful both as a meme and a serious narrative.
Sure, everybody loves that Shrek is a Scottish brute that likes to fart and hates other living creatures because he just wants to be left alone. And everybody also loves that Donkey is totally oblivious to the fact that Shrek is an ogre and not that pleasant but he loves him anyway because he's happy-go-lucky and just wants to be friends with everybody, and while Fiona in the movie is kind of blah to me, her musical counterpart is goofy and commanding and ready to get what she wants and I live for that. But the actual love story that Shrek tells is one of the most healthy love stories I've ever experienced.
Movies like "Titanic" and "The Notebook" have always really frustrated me because their depiction of love seems so shallow to me. It's cutesy and romantic and like a real life fairy tale and it's incredibly whitewashed to the point that it's almost sanitized of anything that looks like what real love is like. It teaches people that they aren't complete until someone else loves them.
But what makes Shrek so captivating to me is that its depiction of love is multidimensional. First, you have Shrek and Fiona. Shrek has lived his life in isolation because society thinks he's too ugly to part of it, and after a while, he became okay with that. Fiona also spent her life in isolation because she was too ugly to be part of the rest of the world, but Fiona has faith that the part of her that makes her ugly will go away if someone will love her. The two eventually meet and begin to fall in love with each other. However, Shrek is convinced that Fiona cannot possibly love him, and Fiona wishes to marry someone who will make her normal in response. However, their story reveals intimate truths about one another to themselves that, to me, create an incredibly important depiction of love. Shrek realizes that in order for him to love himself, he has to admit that he loves someone who probably won't love him in return. Fiona, however, learns that her beauty comes not from being loved because of her beauty, but being loved so much that she becomes beautiful in the eyes of those who love her.
Meanwhile, you have the tale of Lord Farquaad and the fairy tale creatures. Farquaad banishes the creatures from Duloc because they're odd, freaks, not normal enough. Farquaad himself is abnormally short due to being the son of a dwarf, but he hates his identity as being weird so much that he banishes everyone that's like him. He hates himself, and the fairy tale creatures almost begin to hate themselves as well. But at the last minute, they realize that what makes them weird makes them unique and themselves, so they take back Duloc from Farquaad.
What makes Shrek so revolutionary for me is that love is not just a matter of "I want to be with this person." To Shrek, love begins with loving yourself enough to fight for what you want, whether it's the right to exist or for the love of another person. Unlike every other love story, love isn't about someone else. First and foremost, love starts with ourselves and goes outwards, it isn't an inward validating force.
