Myths, idolatry, escape: Shrek

Last week, I talked about how A Bug's Life and Monsters Inc tried to teach kids about ideology.  The criticism of the power of myth is even stronger in the Shrek movies, where everyone becomes imprisoned in the idea of what they “should be.”  The  power of “should be,” defined in Shrek like a fairy tale or legend, is what the thinkers in the Frankfurt School call “ideology.”

When the movie narrates the rescue of Princess Fiona, it illustrates well the power of myth in a person’s life.  Fiona’s parents locked her up in a huge tower, guarded by a ferocious dragon, knowing that only her “true love’s first kiss” will break her spell.   She spends her time in the tower practicing martial arts and in reality, is a very very strong woman.  Nonetheless, when a knight in shining armor arrives to rescue her, she passively situates herself on the bed, with a flower on her chest, just like the Sleeping Beauty.  After confirming that the unconscious Shrek is okay, she runs to her bed to create a scene out of a Disney moive from the 1950s.  For her, the rescue scene has to be perfect: when Shrek wakes her up, she says, “This should be a marvelous, romantic moment”.  If reality conflicts with this Should, it is the Should that is going to prevail.

Princess Fiona talks a lot about destiny, understood as the force that transforms the world

Helena, dressed as Snow White.

from what it is to what it should be.    She explains that her destiny is to kiss her first love, free herself of the spell and marry the Prince that kissed her.  This obession with destiny makes it so that she can’t exercise her own free will, that she always chooses “what should be” instead of what she wants.  It is the same for the ogre, Shrek;  he’s ready to abandon his love for Fiona because he believes that world doesn’t work in this way, that he “should” be stronger than his desire.    When the princess goes to the palace to get married to the horrible Farquaad, Shrek returns to his bog and with perverse enjoyment says, “This is how it has to be.”  To abandon his own free will and conform with the absolute power of Should, becomes a pleasure.

Shrek uses other words to reflect on Should, especially “myth” and “fairy tale”.    It is the people who believe in it who give myth its power.   “The whole world knows what happens when you find your true love,” says Fiona, waiting to lose herself in the eyes of a lover, the Prince Charming who will rescue her from everything evil.    Waiting for the love that “the whole world knows”, she remains blind in the face of true love and chooses to abandon Shrek for the ridiculous Lord.   Lord Farquaad rides a horse-way better than an ogre who walks alongside a donkey!-therefore, this “should be” true love.  

As such, it’s important to distinguish between ethics as it is and the Should.  The Should stems from what “the whole world thinks”, which in reality, is not really what everyone thinks, but what I think others believe in or hope for.    Just like the “they” from “you know what they say”, the Should ought to be an empty category; probably no real person says what “they” say since we all know what “they” say.  It’s possible that no human being really wants to marry a man like Lord Farquaad, but “the whole world knows” that a princess “should” marry a prince, that’s why Fiona did it.    Shrek intentionally creates confusion between fairy tales and Should, because the two teach us how to behave and what to expect from the world, but without much reflection.  The poor and oppressed girl “should” be rescued Prince Charming;  it doesn’t matter if she is stronger than any prince, she should always be the victim.  It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t love the prince, she should always love the prince.  This is how the myth is established.

The ethical, in contrast, stems from reasoning, reflection, and love.   It is a decison that I make in dialogue with tradition, with the world, and other people, and it isn’t something that I passively receive.    In many cases, the ethical is the exact opposite of the “Should”.   Boy and girls live in this cross between the ethical and the Should, which is why children’s movies also raise the issue.  

Lord Farquaad embodies the opposition beween the Should and the ethical.   What the “whole world wants”-at least in the world of the Should-is power and prestige.    Lord Farquaad doesn’t love Fiona, but he will marry her because it is part of the path that will allow him to be King.    Nonetheless, it isn’t really clear if he wants to be King.  The Should teaches him that he should be King.    He thinks that everyone else thinks he wants to be King.  Because he should want to, he does.     And dominated by the Should, the Lord has very little time to consider the ethical.  He will make many people suffer and sacrifice themselves—this means he will oppose the ethical—because the Should makes him do it.

In the first scenes of the movie, there is a social cleansing campaign against magical creatures, which follows the same logic.  Lord Farquaad wants a “perfect” world, where perfection is understood in terms of Should.  What "the whole world" wants is cleanliness and prosperity, order and progress, but the kingdom that Farhquad creates is not viable, it is a place where no one wants to live.  No one is around when Shrek and the donkey arrive at the castle.  In reality, for all its perfection, it is an intolerable place.  The scene reminds me of my first trip to Brasilia, an ultramodern city created to be the capital of Brasil.  The government buildings surround a grand quadrangle, with perfect geometric proportions, green grass, and complete cleanliness, and there isn’t anyone there.  No one.  Even the government employees escape to other cities on the weekend.  It is a city that should be perfect, the incarnation of what the whole world wants and is a place where no one wants to live.  

In the Shrek movies, the powerful myths have to do with love and power.  In other children’s movies, they also talk about money as a myth that imprisons people: in Robots, the bad guy is the head of Bigweld Industries, an executive who wants to kill all of the poor robots in order to increase his company’s value.  However, even his wickedness is ambiguous.  In reality, more than evil, he is insecure around his powerful mother and on several occassions it becomes apparent that he doesn’t even know what he wants.  He lacks a clear desire-and without a clear ethic—he easily falls prey to the enchantment of money.  He abandons good values—solidarity, creativity, affection—because “there is no profit in that,” but neither is it clear what he wants out of all of the money he gains from being evil.   Even among the worst people, it’s the Should that runs everything.

Liberation Theology made an important advance in the criticism of ideology, a critique that first that arose in Europe and the United States in between the wars.  For thinkers such as Juan Luis Segundo, Enrique Dussel, and Franz Hinkelammert, ideology has the structure like idolotry: meaning, to worship a false god.  Money has turned into our divinity, and capitalism, its cult.  

The evil head of Bigweld Industries in Robots expresses this reflection very well.  In the middle of an existential crisis, not knowing who he is, the boss returns to easy pieties, the religion of the whole world.  He doesn’t know which god he wants to worship, so he worships the god he “should” worship: money.  In reality, it’s not just the head of Bigweld Industries who takes the easy way: I remember my last year of college very well when all of my friends were looking for the next step in their lives.  Very few had a clear path, so they took jobs they thought they “should” want: banks, Wall Street, law firms.  Like the bad guy in Robots, they entered a passive idolotry.  It’s not that they really believed in the money god (Mammon, as the theologians would say), but it was easier to believe in it, rather than to challenge the  “whole world” who seems to believe in it (money god).

In Shrek, the power of ideology imprisons everyone, the oppressed as much as the oppressors.  Lord Farquaad makes a “perfect” world instead of reflecting upon his own desire; Fiona marries Farquaad because that’s what a princess “should” do; Shrek thinks that he only deserves to live in his bog.  Nonetheless, there are some people who know how to manipulate myth for their own benefit, as the Fairy Godmother shows us in Shrek 2.  She – perhaps enchanted by her own Should of money and power—wants her son, Prince Charming, to marry Fiona.  In this way, her son will become the King of the Kingdom of Far Far Away.  Knowing that Shrek gets in the way of this goal, the Fairy Godmother starts a campaign against him, doing everything possible so that her son seduces the princess.

Shrek, oblivious of the Fairy Godmother’s scheme, goes to the magic factory to buy a potion that will resolve the conflicto with Fiona’s father, who doesn’t want his daughter to marry an ogre.  The Fairy Godmother, furious, searches through all of her fairy tales, showing that neither in Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, nor in any of the others, is there an ogre who lives “happily ever after.”  In the world of Should, ogres are not happy.  

In her first argument, the Fairy Godmothehr appeals to a Should for Shrek—that an ogre shouldn’t have a “happily ever after”-but doesn’t convince him.  The ogre already learned how to escape the Should in the first Shrek movie.  But later on, when Shrek sees the princess with Prince Charming for the first time, the Fairy Godmother presents another argument.

"I only wanted her to be happy", says Shrek.
"And now, she can be," responds the Fairy Godmother.  "She has finally met the prince of her dreams...it’s time for you to let her live her fairy tale.  She is a princess and you are an ogre.  And this is somthing that no potion will change."
"But I love her."
"If you truly love her, you will let her go."

Now that the argument that Shrek himself should or shouldn’t be happy has failed, the Fairy Godmother talks about what a princess “should have” in order to be happy.   Shrek enters this scene very insecure.  He has already seen bits of Fiona’s childhood-diaries where  she pictures herself as Prince Charming’s wife, dolls of wandering knights—dreams she had of her future.  He had met her parents, and the King had made it very clear that a princess should not marry an ogre.  With this sadness in the background, the Fairy Godmother’s argument is powerful: it’s impossible for a princess to be happy with an ogre, so if he wants her to be happy, he has to abandon her.  In the first Shrek movie, the Should makes Shrek deny his own desire.  In the second, the Should makes him deny his desire for Fiona.

With this critique of ideology, neither the movies nor I are saying anything new.  These are the same lessons that any mom would teach her sons and daughters: “It doesn’t matter what others think or do,” “Be faithful to yourself,” “It’s more important to be good than it is to be rich” and other simple and true lessons.   However, these are lessons that many adults only remember during encounters with their children.  In other moments, we are prisoners of the false gods of money, prestige, power, and myth… precisely the gods we don’t want for our children.  Because of this, it is worth it to re-examine the criticism of ideology with our kids, because  it also helps us be more honest.

"Just doin' my job": Monsters Inc.

In many cases, we think of ideology from the perspective of the oppressed; the person who suffers from “false conscience” and conforms to his oppression because of ideology.  Monsters, Inc., probably Helena Iara's favorite film at the moment, starts from the other side, with a more ambiguous question.   Sully and Mike, the monster-protagonists, are good guys.  The movie makes us identify with them.  They are hilarious, fun, and nice.  But…they make a living doing brutal work: scaring boys and girls.   They are good guys who do terrible things, so the movie poses a basic  question:   How is it that good people continue to do bad things?  The answer to this question helps us understand the attitude of the gangleader or boss, but also offers a path to change it.  

The first answer that Sully and Mike offer to this question is one that we have heard several times: “It’s my job.”   When police go to a poor neighbhorhood and begin to round up or beat people,  people complain, “You’re also poor and you come here to abuse us? How shameless!”   In many cases, the ones who defend the police will say, “Shut up, they’re just doing their job.”  In reality, the content of this excuse is “it’s somebody else’s fault, the boss who tells them what to do.  If he doesn’t do it, he’s going to get fired.”  Almost everyone can identify with this problem-“do I lose my job or my ethics?”-therefore, the police are forgiven.  And more importantly, the police pardon themselves and continue brutalizing the community.  

In Home on the Range,  the  sheriff finds himself in a similar situation.   He seems like a good guy, albeit weak and lazy, and is friends with the owner of the “Piece of Heaven” farm.   Nonetheless, he has to do the bank’s dirty work, evicting the woman from her house so that the bank and the villain Alameda Slim, make more money.  The sheriff knows that what he is doing is bad and even ask the owner to forgive him, but she knows the truth:  “Sorry isn’t going to save my farm!” With the sentence “I’m just doing my job,” the sheriff  justifies himself and continues to do bad things without feeling guilty.

The head of the company, Monsters, Inc., justifies himself similarly.   For him, the most important thing is the survival of his business during times of crisis; he inherited it from his family, employs many people, and provides electricity to the city.  But now, Monsters, Inc., is running out of energy, resources, and profits and is at its breaking point.

"I would do anything to save this company,” says the boss. “I don’t have a choice because the world isn’t the same.  Frightening [kids] isn’t enough anymore.”
"But kidnapping boys and girls?” asks Sully.
"I’m going to kidnap a thousand kids before I let this company die and will silence everyone who gets in the way!”

The boss is in control of Sully, the bank is in control over the sheriff,  the survival of the company controls the boss…Everyone wants to say that they don’t have a choice, that they only do bad things when they are ordered to do so.  In reality, they have the power to choose.  They can say that they won’t do it and they will look for other work.  But they don’t assume responsibility for their actions, and instead, blame others.

Helena and her cousin, Fernando.

The workers in the Nazi concentration camps made the greatest test of the excuse, “it’s my job.”  Their job was to kill Jews, gypsies, communists, and homosexuals.  After WWII, the whole world recognized that “it’s my job” doesn’t justify anything; the people that killed in the concentration camps are just as guilty as the ones who ordered them to do it.  To shift the question to a less serious context, imagine that a child does something bad and his mom asks why.  The excuse, “my brother made me do it”  doesn’t justify what he did.  Mothers know that each person has to be responsible for their actions and they will punish the child for what he did.   Nonetheless, when the police come to the neighborhood to kill poor people, we pardon the officials because they’re only doing their job.  This is the paradox that Monsters, Inc., and Home on the Range  highlight.

The other excuse of “good people” that do bad things is: “In reality, what I’m doing is good;” everyone knows the story of the father who abuses his children, saying, “I’m doing this for your own good!” Various movies clearly expose the hypocrisy of this discourse.  The slogan for Monsters, Inc., is  “We scare because we care”, as if scaring is a favor that the monsters do for kids.   This idea helps justify what the monsters do, but kids know very well that this is a thin and empty justification.   Similar is what the queen says in  A Bug’s Life, when she discovers that the “saviors” who came with Flick were nothing more than mere circus artists: “I never thought that that an ant would think of himself as more important than the colony."  In reality, what hurts the ants is the queen, in her conformity with exploitation, but she justifies her collaboration by saying that its for “the good of the colony.”

The clearest case of “for your own good” is Buck, the horse from Home on the Range.  Throughout the whole movie, he affiliates himself with the wrong side-first with the bank who wants to take Mrs. Pearl’s land and later, with the hypocritical vigilante, Rico- but in his fantasies, Buck is always the hero and that nothing  he does is bad.  His dreams are films, where the horse uses martial arts to fight the bad guys dressed in black, but Buck never goes beyond the black and white symbols to see what is really good and bad.   Here we encounter the ideology of the police: they might always hurt the people they are supposed to protect, but in their fantasies, what is really important is that they wear a blue uniform and define themselves as the “good guys.”

In all of these cases, ideology functions so that the rich, powerful, and oppressors can pretend that they are good.  And in each case, the movies show that these arguments are ridiculous, trying to remove the psychological support of the oppressor.  The movies also observe the question of the ideology from below, with different conclusions.

The crickets from A Bug’s Life manipulate the ideology so that ants don’t question the exploitation.  “The world is as it is,” they say.  “It’s imposible to change it, so it’s better to conform to it.”  According to this logic, the world has always been unfair and will always be unfair, but this is how it functions and it can’t function any other way.  It’s normal and natural.  This discourse was used to justify slavery during a large part of human history.   It was simply a natural thing, like the sun or rain, and it made as much sense to complain about slavery as it did to complain about heat in the tropics.   The world was like this.

The sentence that the crickets always use is: “you ants, you have forgotten your place!”  Be it the caste system in India, segregation in the United States, or apartheid in South Africa, the exclusion of  the marginal neighborhoods in Latin America, violence against women…it is always justified with “this is how the  world works.  The ants work, and the crickets take what they harvest.”  For a great majority of people, this kind of oppression becomes natural and normal, and is imposible to question or challenge.

Helena likes these movies... I hope she's getting this message out of them!

A Bug's Life in a Gang-Controlled Favela

One of Helena Iara's favorite films is A Bug’s Life, where the crickets make a living by stealing half of the ants’ harvest; they say that the seeds and leaves pay for the protection that the crickets provide for the colony, but in reality, its nothing more than a bribe. For the crickets, it’s fundamental that the ants remain ignorant about the power dynamics, because ignorance is their most powerful weapon, as we see when the crickets go to a fancy cantina to spend their dirty money.   They have so much fun that the gang members go to the boss and ask if they really have to return to the ant colony.  Life is already good, they say.  Why do we have to have to go through the trouble of blackmailing the ants just to get a handful of seeds?  The boss responds with a naked expression of power:

"If you let one ant question us, then you let all of them question us.  There are 10 little ants for each one of us, and if they figure this out, then our game is up!  This isn’t about food.  Its about control.  And that’s why we go back to the colony."

The crickets, like mafias all over the world, charge a “vaccine” or protection money, saying that they will protect the community from outside threats, when in reality, the gang is the greatest threat that the neighbhorhood faces.  The gang is only legimate as long as people perceive them as the only solution to their problems, but when people perceive their own power, they no longer need the gang.  The crickets manipulate fear and ideology so that the ants don’t become aware of their own pwer, of their capacity to be actors on the world’s stage.  As long as they are seen as weak and incapable, they will never become a threat to the powerful.

Helena with her cousin, Gabriela.

Almost the exact same story has happened in Medellín, Colombia.   In the context of chaotic violence, where anyone can die at any moment, the local gangs organized with two motives: to defend the public and to make money.  The problem was that when street crime stopped, the gang still wanted to make money, so they kept charging “the vaccine” – protection  money-from the people in their neighborhoods.   People complained but they still paid because they didn’t see any alternative and because they feared  the power of the gangs.

The strategy of resistance in Medellín, like in A Bug’s Life, begins with conscience.    First, as it well known in popular education, the oppressed has to become aware of the oppression, but later on has to be aware of his/her  own power and ability to do what the gang does.  In Medellín, the violence had fragmented the marginalized communities to the point where neighbors were afraid to talk to one another.   When there was conflict between them – land ownership, water that  left one family’s house and entered another’s-they would look to the gangs to resolve the conflicts.  And each time they would seek out the gangsters, they would recognize them as a legitimate power in the neighborhood, thereby justifying the exploitation.

The gang took advantage of its legitmacy, but didn’t really want to resolve conflicts since it was far from their fundamental mission: making money.   Therefore, when a group of youth from the neighborhood proposed that they be in charge of mediating conflicts, the gang passed on this responsibility with a sense of relief.   Nonetheless, when people realized that they could resolve conflicts on their own, the gang lost its legitimacy and disappeared within six months.       In A Bug’s Life, when the ants become aware of the fact that they can not only defend themselves from the dangers of the world,  but also frm the crickets that protect them—the gang also has to go.

But that's a story for tomorrow.

The paranoia of children's mysteries: Fishtronaut

Though I'm going to criticize it today, I really like Fishtornaut, a Brazilian cartoon that shows in the US on Discovery Family Channel.  The ecological messages are generally quite good, I like the characters, and it's funny.  From time to time, Helena Iara will go through a phase where it is the TV show she most wants to see.

Here's the basic premise of the show: a little girl (Marina) lives in a national park, where her grandfather is a scientist.  Her best friends are Zico the monkey and a "secret agent" fish who can fly into the air with a specially designed suit that keeps him wet.  In each episode, the friends are faced with a problem -- last night, the fish were getting sick in the lagoon -- and they must solve the mystery of what is going on -- again, in last night's episode, it turned out that someone had accidentally dropped laundry detergent in the stream.  The series focusses on problem solving, on preserving nature, on the teamwork of friends... all in all, not bad messages.

Here's the problem, though, and one that is even more clear after seeing the rather insipid Justin Time, which has the same problem solving structure.  In adult literature, mysteries require clues.  Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple find murderers by following the traces that they unintentionally left behind them.  In Fishtornaut, however, the clues come from a POP, a kind of beach ball that emerges from a giant clam in the middle of the ocean, and then explodes to offer the clue when the friends do a certain kind of dance (this is, after all, a Brazilian cartoon...).  The clue is, as such, given instead of found, which means that before the friends try to solve the mystery, someone else already knows the answer.

Kids' games work like this, of course: in a scavenger hunt, some adult has to know where all of the things really are.  I see two serious problems with this kind of approach to solving mysteries:

1. If someone else already knows the answer, then what the kids do doesn't really matter.  It is a game without consequences, because if they can't do it, an adult will step in and solve the problem easily.  This strategy seems part of a general world-view that sees children's actions as inconsequential.
2. If the adult knows and does not act to solve a serious problem (Fishtornaut's piscine friends almost died in the detergent accident described above), then that adult is perverse, even evil.

Many years ago, working as a street educator in Santa Fe, I met a brilliant young man forced to live on the street by a combination of bad family and mental illness.  He described to me about his occasional schitzophrenic attacks: "Suddenly, things aren't just there.  They all mean something.  They are all a message to me.  That pillow over there on the couch means that I have to leave the house.  That bird singing means that Mom wants me home.  And there are so many other things that I know that they mean something, but I don't know what they mean.  Like words that should mean something, but I can't read them."  The young man didn't know who had written these "words" in the world, who has sent him these messages, but someone had.

Helena, trying to understand Amazonian pottery.

Here's the difference between a murder mystery and its childlike equivalent: in a mystery, no one "sent" the clues, no one intended them to be there, but they still have a meaning.  When someone sends Fishtronaut the clues, on the other hand, the meaning is no longer simply in the solution to the crime, but in the intention of the sender.

The issue, then, is really about God.  Who is the adult who sends messages giving clues, but who will not act?  Who knows all and wishes all well, but who decides to withhold himself from the world?  And who, truth be told, provides rather confusing and ambiguous clues?  Who sent the messages to the buy on the street in Santa Fe by means of pillows and birdsong?  Fishtornaut depends on a kind of theodicy (trying to understand why evil exists) with a rather perverse God.

As they say, this question opens a completely different can of fish.