I’ve always thought I had a decently ironic sense of humor, but somehow the depths of internet irony poisoning always shocks me. I think I first fully realized this when I saw people sincerely praising the Unabomber. I’d previously viewed the “Ted Kaczynski was right” memes as just that, memes; sure he’d made a few good points about the alienation of modern life, our despoiling of the environment, and the ineffectuality of activists, but he wasn’t really right. He was a crackpot MKULTRA casualty (allegedly) who rehashed theories articulated with more clarity and nuance by others and blew up university professors and airline executives. He was sad and violent and that’s what made praising said sad violence so funny.
Except to a lot of people, he wasn’t funny but rather admirable. They’d all started off chuckling at a ridiculous statement and then via the weird mind-warping magic of the internet they’d come to agree with the premise and now they’d sworn allegiance to a meme ideology concocted by an elderly Polish-American sitting in a supermax prison. Everyone accused Alanis Morissette of failing to appreciate the true definition of irony, but it turns out no one else knew what it meant either. Now we’ve got an entire generation of people who are soaked in irony and yet completely sincere and it frightens me to my core.
Something similar happened with the Shrek fandom (or “fandom”). As a kid, I never really enjoyed the Shrek movies. Sure, I thought they were relatively funny and entertaining and I liked Eddie Murphy and John Lithgow’s voice acting, but I never saw them as anything special. They had silly jokes for the kids and more inappropriate ones for the grown-ups and there didn’t seem to be anything else there. So when people declared themselves “Shrek fans” and ran around making mashups of “All Star” and leaving “it’s all ogre now” in YouTube comments sections, I figured it was completely insincere, a sarcastic in-joke for a generation coming of age and looking askance at its puerile childhood influences (it didn’t help that the apparent origin was an extremely unprintable and explicit 4chan greentext story). I mean, really, Shrek is your favorite movie? It’s for little kids! The jokes are obvious and the animation is dated! Shouldn't we be watching more “adult” fare? Add a little sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to the mix?
I didn’t get it at the time, and still really don’t, but I have a theory why Shrek is so beloved by Gen Z: it’s the peak end-of-history film.
The singular Gen Z trauma is being born during the end of history and coming of age after its end. All of the illusions of endless forward progress after the defeat of the slobbering Soviet bear have evaporated completely: quality-of-life worsens, each new event is a total crisis, no one causing the mess is held accountable, and everyone’s ready to mock you on little glowing boxes connected to millions of other little glowing boxes. Technology is mostly a force for bad and the “good” stuff it accomplished involved abetting CIA-backed color revolutions. Everyone is totally alone and yet being judged every moment of every day by billions of people. Everyone feels “unsafe” Outside but it’s been years since they’ve gone and checked if Outside is still even there (I went back to Ohio/but my Outside was gone…).
Shrek was released in May 2001 and represents perhaps the peak distillation of the end-of-history aesthetic. We were still four months away from 9/11 so there was no reason to doubt that the powers-that-be weren’t right and everything would always just incrementally improve until doomsday. The opening song was sung by Smash Mouth, a group of dudes who married a self-consciously retro sound with a turn-of-the-millennium frosted-tips-and-wraparound-sunglasses aesthetic. It featured a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by Rufus Wainwright, a gay dude who was edgy enough to appeal to the alt crowd but gentle enough to please your mom. The ogre himself was voiced by Mike Myers, whose Austin Powers series was another peak end-of-history media property (indeed, Myers’ Shrek voice was the exact same as Fat Bastard from that series). Much as Smash Mouth and Rufus Wainwright raided the past musically, Austin Powers nabbed the aesthetic excesses of the sixties and seventies and held them up for loving ridicule now that all power had been drained from them. The entire premise of the series was the self-consciously subversion of the Disney animated fairy tale formula; it was cartoon Tarantino. Arguably, Shrek itself began the long processing of irony-poisoning which resulted in its vast maybe-joking-but-probably-not zoomer fandom. It robbed everything of its romantic, guileless glow for everyone at too young an age: the prince was a cad, the fairy godmother a bitch, and if you thought magic was real you’re a schmuck.
I’m just old enough to a) have distinct memories of that end-of-history era and b) have a childhood sans smartphones and with relatively limited computer time. Younger zoomers, however, haven’t been afforded that luxury. They were tossed into the smartphone snakepit in elementary school with few-to-no parental controls. Most or all of high school was swallowed by COVID, and they emerged with a fearful touch-and-go attitude about strangers and everyday interactions, which combined with a heavy dose of Gen X helicopter parent neurosis has had some pretty devastating consequences for our social fabric. They look back at the nineties and two-thousands with the strange wistfulness of someone who was born in 1958 but only knew the fifties via black-and-white sitcom reruns and Grease. Everything bad or troubling or complicated about that era is submerged by this strange bittersweet longing for an era when everything made sense. They’ll get all terrified and weepy at pictures of a tween girl’s bedroom from 2005 or taped TV commercials from 1999, seeing some weird frightening world of what-once-was where I just see the dregs of my childhood. The bedroom is that of my girl cousins in Bucks County who I’d visited as a kid. The TV commercials were probably still in circulation when I DVRed cartoon shows in 2009. None of these things are upsetting or exotic to me; that was just my childhood background radiation.
For them, Shrek isn’t dull and familiar but charged with this weird Proustian power: it’s a secret map detailing everything that’s happened in culture and entertainment since then. It’s self-referential and dismissive but also totally earnest and sentimental; they saw off John Cleese’s frog king to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” and they meant it, goddamn it. See, you assholes, it’s a James Bond reference! Now cry, because this is relatably depressing! The Unabomber speaks to Gen Z’s existential political angst, but Shrek fulfills their innermost desires. Shrek tells them that history is over and it’ll stay over and everything’s okay and mommy and daddy will tuck you in and kiss you goodnight and don’t have feelings or have too many feelings or feelings are only good if you can self-deprecate and keep your head down we’re trying to study and there is no future in England’s dreaming and look there’s a reference! I am also a zoomer! He who humbles himself desires exultation! We’re all in this together, baby! We’re a family! A family, goddamnit! I’ve led you all astray! There’s no hope, only Shrek! Mark Fisher’s grave is riven by earthquakes as he turns over and over trying to wake up and give the future back to us and he’ll never get out of there. Zombie capitalism, zombie Fisherism, who cares? Fukuyama is love, Fukuyama is life! Ha ha! We’re in a cultural time warp so let’s do the time warp again!
Maybe not, though. I think we’re working past the need for Shrek and his ilk. There is a future somewhere, and we’re gonna find it, like it or not. The twenty-first century is ours for the taking, and it’s mostly not our fault that our brains got broken. We’ll rediscover the actually true and beautiful elements of the past and use them to heal the present.
And regarding the final sentence of that penultimate paragraph: Susan Sarandon looks better in green than Princess Fiona.