Tag: The Other

Wedding Week: ‘Shrek’: Happily Ever After Gets a Green Makeover

Princess Fiona

This is a guest post by Megan Wright.

When I first watched Shrek, I can’t really remember how I felt about Fiona, aside from the fact that I thought it was fantastic that she was fighting Robin Hood and his Merry Men. As the years passed, I bought the movie, and it was also broadcasted on several channels. It was almost impossible to go a year without seeing it. So, as I watched it more and more, I could figure out the underlying themes in Shrek: appearances don’t matter, the locking away of those perceived as different is wrong, and that talking donkeys are awesome. But the most important theme of the movie is how a strong woman almost gets tricked into a loveless marriage because of her low self worth, all due to the standards of beauty society imposes on her.

I’m talking, of course, about Princess Fiona. Fiona is meant to be a deliberate contrast to the stereotypical princess. Her elaborate way of talking is forgotten in favor of insulting Shrek. When Robin Hood tries to rescue/abduct her, she promptly beats the crap out of him. She sings, but when she does, she accidentally blows up a bird. During her years in a tower, Fiona hasn’t simply gazed out a window, but instead taught herself first aid and martial arts. She doesn’t take Shrek’s plan to get her back to Farquaad happily. When Shrek complains that it’s his job, she replies “Well, I’m sorry, but your job is not my problem.” She knows the way she wants this rescue to go, damn it, and she’s not going to go along with Shrek’s plans simply to make it easier on him.

Princess Fiona, not in Ogre form

So why does she get bullied into marrying Farquaad?

The problem is that Fiona lives in a world that tries to separate anyone who doesn’t fit the ideal representation of perfection. Lord Farquaad first talks about it, saying that the fairytale creatures are ruining his “perfect kingdom.” Shrek shows a world that really isn’t too different from our own. Sure, the segregated group includes talking pigs, wolves that enjoy dressing like grandmothers, witches riding on broomsticks, but their problems are still similar. The fairytale creatures are kicked off their land and moved into an inhospitable area (Shrek’s swamp) simply because they don’t fit the norms of Farquaad’s perfect kingdom. It’s not that far off from real world situations.

Here’s an example of how much beauty means in this world–in the beginning of the movie Farquaad uses a magic mirror and is given a list of several princesses to choose from to make into a queen. One of those princesses is Snow White, who later shows up in Shrek’s swamp, exiled with the dwarfs. This sends the message that if magic can help him obtain a beautiful wife, then he’s fine with it. It’s only the “undesirable” fairytale creatures that we see Farquaad hates. Throughout the movie we think that Farquaad hates fairytale creatures, but he doesn’t. He hates the fairytale creatures that don’t match up to his obsessive standards of beauty.

It’s almost no wonder that in this world, Fiona would be desperate to become someone who wasn’t ostracized, or excluded. Fiona’s sole reason for getting married is that she wants to fit into society.

Fiona’s been raised on traditional fairytales, on handsome princes rescuing fair maidens from curses. Her parents stuck her in a tower for almost all of her life, keeping her from realizing that, just maybe, being an ogre isn’t the worst thing in the world. Fiona’s strong and capable, but she’s also been extremely sheltered. She’s constantly been taught that being anything other than the princess in the traditional fairytales is wrong, and she’s never seen examples to prove otherwise.

That’s why when Shrek walks into her life, she starts to come out of her shell. Here is someone different from society, someone like her, and he’s kind and warm (to her, at least). He’s not even lacking in companionship–he’s got Donkey for a friend. With Shrek, Fiona slowly begins to realize that it’s okay to be an ogre.

Princess Fiona and Shrek

Still, Fiona’s self-loathing over her ogre self goes extremely deep. When she confesses that she’s an ogre to Donkey, she says that no one would want to marry a beast like her. Shrek overhears this, and believes she’s talking about him. When he confronts her about it, and throws her words back in her face, she immediately assumes he’s talking about her. Fiona has overheard Shrek make comments about his identity as an ogre and the issues that come with it, so it wouldn’t be a huge leap for her to consider the possibility that Shrek overheard her and thought she was talking about him. But Fiona’s self loathing runs so deep that she doesn’t even consider the possibility.

Ironically, Fiona doesn’t even seem to focus on the fact that if Shrek is rejecting her, he’s also rejecting himself. After all, he’s an ogre just like her. But, again, she loathes herself so much that she doesn’t even think of that.

Fiona’s marriage to Farquaad is, even from the beginning, one of desperation, not love. She wants to love him because she wants to believe that his kiss will break her spell. When she later realizes that he’s a jerk, she still goes along with the marriage because she wants to have the curse removed. It’s been so ground into her that being different is horrible, that she believes, even though she doesn’t love Farquaad, the kiss of someone “normal” will make her better.

In the short amount of time that we see Fiona engaged to Farquaad, we see that she loses a lot of the character traits that she shows throughout the movie. She reverts back to the eloquent talk that she had in the beginning; she passively sits around waiting for the wedding to start; and she doesn’t speak up for herself, even though she’s clearly miserable. By reverting to the expectations society has for her, she’s “normal” but unhappy.

That’s why the climax of the story, where Fiona reveals that she’s an ogre, is so powerful. By revealing herself to Shrek as an ogre she’s saying that she can’t let him love her, if he can’t love all of her.

Shrek and Princess Fiona

It’s symbolic that Fiona’s ogre self, the self that has been rejected by society, is Love’s True Form. It doesn’t match up to society’s standards (which makes sense, because society’s standards told her to marry the heartless Farquaad), but it’s the best version of Fiona.

Fiona’s rejection of Farquaad’s marriage proposal is a rejection of the conventional life she’s been taught to want. When Fiona accepts Shrek’s love, she also accepts herself. By Fiona embracing Love’s True Form, she embraces the life that she secretly wants–a life as the best, truest version of herself, no longer in hiding.

Megan Wright is a TV reviewer and co-editor for Watch It Rae! She can be found glued to her computer blogging about her favorite TV shows, movies and books.

LGBTQI Week: The Good, the Bad, and the Other in Lesbian RomComs

This is a guest post by Gwendolyn Beetham.

I have a confession: I love bad lesbian romantic comedies. I once had a summer where I watched little else, delighting in the bad hair, worse puns, and silly sex scenes.

Before I begin, I want to offer a point of clarification. When I say that I enjoy “bad” lesbian romantic comedies, I do so because the unfortunate truth is that there is little else (see here). But it is also true that, until we have a bigger pot to choose from, we can’t be too picky.

The bone I’d like to pick here is not regarding bad dialogue or unrealistic sex scenes, but with the depiction of race, religion, and culture in lesbian romcoms to date. And with that, another disclosure: I am not a film critic or scholar. What I am is a queer feminist academic (and self-disclosed lover of bad lesbian film). And what I’ve observed in lesbian romcoms is a noticeable pattern of “othering” when it comes to the acceptance of homosexuality.

There has been a lot of work in feminist and queer theory lately on the concept of “othering,” most prominently with the work on homonationalism, a concept first coined by Jaspir Puar. Without getting too academicy, the concept describes the way in which Western-based understandings of homosexual rights and acceptance are pitted against “other” cultures’ lack of rights/acceptance. It goes without saying that many of these countries themselves (the US is at the top of this list) do not extend full rights to the queer community. However, in positioning themselves against “others,” (white) Western cultures try to promote a more “liberal” and “democractic” showing of acceptance that proves that they are more “advanced” than “other” cultures. I think that this concept has great relevance for the way that lesbian films deal with race, class, religion, and culture.

Movie poster for Chutney Popcorn

The first example I’ll use to illustrate this phenomenon is the 1999 film Chutney Popcorn, set in New York, and centered around the Indian-American Reena and her white girlfriend Lisa. Although Reena’s sister is married to a white man, which their mother accepts, she “draws the line” at Reena’s lesbianism. Lisa’s mother is completely supportive – in a role almost as annoying in its supportiveness as Reena’s mother’s is in its disproval. The dualistic division of acceptance – white = accepting/brown = disproving – is clear.

In the hopes of gaining her mother’s acceptance, Reena offers to be the surrogate mother for her sister’s child. High jinx ensue. I won’t ruin the ending here (honestly it might be worth watching if you haven’t), but let’s just say that the more traditional characters in the film “evolve” towards the “right” way of thinking by the conclusion.

Shelley Conn as Nina and Laura Fraser as Lisa in Nina’s Heavenly Delights

Another example of the “othering” phenomenon is found in the 2006 Nina’s Heavenly Delights. While set in Glasgow instead of New York, Nina’s Heavenly Delights also features an Indian/white lesbian couple. Nina, the Scottish-Indian half of the couple, has returned to Glasgow from London, where she ran away to avoid an arranged marriage. She promptly falls for the white Scottish Lisa (apparently the name “Lisa” is code for white lesbian…), under the disapproving eyes of her family. Again, not to give away the ending, but you might guess that there is an “evolving” understanding of sexuality by the film’s end here as well.

The us/them othering and ethnic stereotyping in this film is all the more disappointing as it is directed and co-written by Pratibha Parmar. Parmar is a documentarian primarily known – in feminist circles at least! – for the 1993 film Warrior Marks, produced by and featuring Alice Walker. (If you haven’t seen that one, you should check it out as well – and watch for the cameo by Tracy Chapman, Walker’s partner at the time.)

The films Saving Face (2004)
 and I Can’t Think Straight (2008; and, yes, that really is the title) also feature disapproval from “traditional” families – Chinese-American in Saving Face, and Jordanian and British-Indian in I Can’t Think Straight. Although the films do not feature white partners with which to contrast the lack of acceptance from their families, cultural stereotypes and the process of othering nevertheless abound in both films.

In offering this critique, I do not want to suggest that cultural, regional, religious, class, and racial nuances in understandings of sexuality do not exist, nor do I think that directors/writers should start to gloss over these elements in their films. What I want to stress is that these nuances are not so black and white (no pun intended). The reality is that, sometimes, white lesbians are shunned from their families of birth, and black lesbians are embraced. And some brown lesbians are not rejected from their religious communities, but quite the opposite. These alternative narratives are not reflected in lesbian film.

It is refreshing then, that the pot of lesbian films to choose from is growing. For example, though technically not a romcom, the recent, and critically-acclaimed, film Pariah is a good example of how racial nuances can be dealt with on screen, showing that lesbians do not live in the “all or nothing” world that previous films suggest. We can only hope that the future of lesbian film will offer more realistic depictions of race, culture, and sexuality.

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Gwendolyn Beetham is an independent scholar, the editor of The Academic Feminist, and a semi-professional lesbian film watcher. She lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on twitter: @gwendolynb