To bite into the sheath of the 3D glasses feels like too much to bear, knowing that once the plastic gives way an opening will race along a fault line as crisp and inevitable, after the fact, as the trippy floating text of three-dimensional titles was always in a way prefigured by the Hollywood sign. “Dreamworks”—I’d call the conflation ideological, but even Freud saw the unconscious as a laboring-place, and Stephen Dedalus refers to “the smithy of my soul.” Tell me about it. I’m so alone and wired on 5-Hour Energy drink and afraid I won’t do justice to Shrek.
I’ve never seen one of these, but I gather that by this point in the series Shrek’s a celebrity—fame monster—since a tour bus goes by his house every day, which bugs him. They want their privacy, as gods famously don’t like to be surprised in the bath. They also want, and by “they” I mean “we,” to cross an L.A. parking lot in pajamas and oversized sunglasses, lips flattening the straw of a frappuccino or some delicious and decadent equivalent, while in their low periphery paparazzi kneel, at risk of cart and car, making explicit by their presence what all shopping and spa/salon time really is: the handmaiden to craft.
Another comedy of remarriage, in which a kid’s birthday party sends the domesticated hero over the edge (he roars). Well. He signs one of those fairy-tale contracts whose riddles throw a cape over the two dire horns of any wish: you won’t get what you want, or else you will. To wrest his world back he fights witches and the Pied Piper, that wonderful orphic poet, pest control expert, and I’m guessing crypto-Jew. Shrek can’t understand why his roar doesn’t terrify the townspeople. What he doesn’t see is that it is no different from Alvin’s squeak, that is, the shrill whine of his own trembling before the void of even the most beloved series’ inevitable end.
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