Role model for a new generation
At the beach, Fiona – the female star of “Shrek 2” – wears a skirted-bottom bathing suit, the chubby woman’s secret to covering up at the lake. Fiona never apologizes for her body. She seems happy as a plus-size woman with a pleasant face and a great personality. Halfway through the movie, thanks to a magic spell, she’s transformed into a size-0 beauty. At the end of the movie, when faced with the decision to stay that way or return to her former self, Fiona chooses skirt-bottomed sturdy. Shrek, transformed into a hunk, decides to return to his inner ogre.
At that moment, I felt like standing up in the crowded movie theater and screaming: “We’ve finally come a long way, baby!” I looked around to see if others were reacting. Nope. Then I realized this might be a generational thing. We aging baby-boomer women watch “Shrek 2” and remember the Disney movies we grew up with, such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella.” These animated classics sent the message that women could live happily ever after if they looked like a million bucks and were lucky enough to get the big rescue by Prince Charming. So it felt amazing to see a heroine choose chunky over svelte, and choose a husband whose flaws are deeper than an ogre’s swamp.
If you saw “Shrek 2” over the long and rainy Memorial Day weekend, you know some of the $92 million it grossed nationally was grossed right here in the Inland Northwest. My mom and I tried to catch it Sunday afternoon at NorthTown. The shows were all sold out. I’d heard that the lines at the Spokane Valley Mall stretched for blocks. So we drove downtown and caught the 6:30 p.m. showing at River Park Square. Even though budget hour was over, and it seemed a tad late for young ones, the theater was still crowded. According to USA Today, “Shrek 2” had the best Memorial Day ever on record and has made $257 million since its release May 19. I wish it continued success, because it contains an important cultural message.
Allow me a short nostalgia trip. Disney’s “Cinderella” was the top-grossing film of 1950 and was still a must-see when my friends and I watched it more than 10 years later. Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” came out in 1959. Both heroines in the animated classics were blond, beautiful, thin and gentle of spirit. Both were rescued from despair by handsome princes. I was surprised to read the “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” version of “Cinderella” a few years later, because it’s much darker than Disney’s take. At Cinderella’s wedding, for instance, doves pick out the eyes of the wicked stepsisters.
Girls of my generation did not garner all their self-concept from animated movies or fairy tales, of course. But during the women’s liberation movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, women explored the damage these fairy tales had done to girls’ expectations of love and marriage. Colette Dowling’s “The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence” became a bestseller in 1981. And poet Anne Sexton’s 1971 book “Transformations” explored the gritty reality behind the fairy tales. Sexton’s Sleeping Beauty, for instance, has a lifelong problem with insomnia. And in the poem “Cinderella” Sexton writes:
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
There’s another reason I liked “Shrek.2.” At the beginning of the movie, newlyweds Shrek and Fiona experience right away some real-life marriage issues – flatulence, in-laws and guests who don’t know when to leave.
After the movie ended, I watched the little girls exit the theater. I’m happy that they have many more role models than we did. In their homes and schools, they hear that they can be anything they wish to be. They can. Now, they have Fiona, too. Way to go, girl.