A film for adults: Shrek 4

I'm not quite sure when the Shrek franchise started to tell the story of my life.  Not in 1 or two, clearly (I haven't rescued many princesses or defeated any evil fairy godmothers), but somewhere in Shrek 3, about the moment when Fiona is yelling out to Shrek on the boat leaving the harbor, the movies began to get too close to home.  Painful, incapacitating anxiety about fatherhood?  Yep, got that one.  Nightmares about vomiting babies?  That too.  And then, Shrek 4.  I'd seen it when it came out, right after Helena was born, but yesterday they had it on TV here in Brazil, and it hit hard.



The plot line is pretty amazingly complex, and I found myself explaining what was going on to Helena and her cousin more than a few times.  Family is great for Shrek... except that all of those good parts repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, ad nauseum.  (Literally, in fact, given the tendency of the little ogres to throw up on their parents)  Family life, for all of its charm, has become meaningless.  Finally, Shrek explodes at a birthday party: he longs for his old life of adventure and violence, when the villagers would hunt him with pitchforks and he would destroy them with strength and fear.

Been there, done that.  OK, not the nostalgia for violence and pitchforks, but in the first years that Helena was with us, I could only remember the wonder of climbing so high in the Andes that I couldn't breathe, hiding behind concrete walls in Medellín so that bullets wouldn't hit me; lonely nights camping in the jaguar preserves of Central America or hitching across northern Colombia with drug traffickers.  From the outside, why would these sort of things inspire nostalgia?  They seem as miserable as Shrek's lonely life in the swamp.  But that kind of a life breeds stories worth telling.  When you look back, it seems adventuresome and meaningful and special, while the day-to-day pleasures and pains of caring for a child, as wonderful as they are at that moment... they don't make for epic narrative.  The Iliad, as far as I know, includes no scenes of changing diapers.  Or of making faces at a baby and sharing a joyful first laugh.

Shrek thinks he has found a solution, or at least a break, when the evil Rumplestiltskin gives him the chance to go back to his old life in exchange for "one little day, one you don't even remember" of his life.  That day, of course, is the day Shrek was born.  By losing that day, all of history will change, and Rumplestiltskin will be king.  Shrek has to re-conquer Fiona, overcome the evil King... but the more important struggle is to see that "You don't know what you got till it's gone."  Only from the outside, from the perspective of loss, can he see the wonder of his family.  And, in the process, the experience becomes a story, worthy of being told, being filmed, being proud of.

Helena liked the movie.  It's funny, it's well animated.  But the moral of the story isn't for her.  It's for me, and for fathers and mothers like me.  A simple moral, I suppose (even an 80s heavy metal ballad I remember from hight school includes the lyric "You don't know what you got till it's gone" (followed, melodramatically by "Every cowboy sings the same, sad song").  But as a wonderful philosophy professor of mine once told me, "Truth of it is, most important things that philosophers say, everyone already knows them.  Not clever, not worth a huge book and a tenured job.  But we should still say them, again and again."