Back when I was a professional film critic, I used to attend two different kinds of advance screenings. There were critic’s screenings attended solely by movie reviewers and publicists. Then there were public previews populated by critics, publicists and the moviegoing public.
Critic’s screenings were commonplace but sometimes studios REALLY wanted critics to see a much buzzed-about new movie with an audience so that they could see just how much the public loved their product and be suitably impressed.
I saw American Pie with an overflowing crowd of rowdy college kids during my University of Wisconsin at Madison days, for example. Within minutes I knew that the raunchy throwback sex comedy would be a MASSIVE blockbuster.
Anybody could. Some movies just WORK with audiences. American Pie was such a movie. The same is true of 2001’s Shrek.
I watched Shrek for the first, last and only time with an ecstatic preview audience at Madison’s Orpheum theater sometimes early in the new millennium. I’ll never forget the experience because people were losing their shit. They were going nuts. They didn’t just like Dreamworks’ smartass goof on fairy tale mythology: they fucking loved it. This was something that they were going to see over and over and over again in the theaters and then buy on home video. They damn near rioted with pure joy. THAT’s how excited they were.
I didn’t get it. I REALLY did not get it. Then again that’s kind of my thing. I walked out of Avatar thinking it’d be one of the biggest flops in film history. After a critic’s screening of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I asked a colleague who on earth would want to see a movie with no stars and no conflict.
I was decidedly wrong in thinking that two of the most successful movies of the last 25 years would find no audience. I knew damn well that Shrek would find a HUGE audience, just as Scary Movie did a few years earlier, and I knew why these movies would connect with movie-goers.
Scary Movie and Shrek are both deeply cynical, pandering endeavors whose irresistible allure is rooted irrevocably in the cheap buzz of familiarity, in the superficial but powerful jolt that comes with being confronted with something you recognize in a new context.
I knew immediately that Shrek would be not just a hit but a goddamn PHENOMENON.
I couldn’t have anticipated the way the internet would make Shrek its own, transforming a multi-billion dollar franchise into an inside joke shared by anyone who has been online at any point during the last twenty years.
I also could not have foreseen that twenty-two years after Shrek’s release I would spend WAY too much money and leave my home on a weeknight to attend something called a Shrek Rave.
Yet when I learned about the existence of a traveling Shrek-themed rave my immediate response was, “Oh my God. That sounds so pointless and stupid. I’m in!”
My wife was supposed to go with me but she came down with either a cold or an unfortunate case of Maturity and Solid Judgement the night of the rave so I ended up going by myself.
I’m not gonna lie: the idea of NOT going to a Shrek-themed rave and staying at home with my wife was VERY appealing but I had spent, as we previously established, WAY too much money on tickets and promised YOU, the Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas subscriber, that I would write about the Shrek Rave so I had to go.
My ideas about rave and rave culture come almost exclusively from books and documentaries about Michael Alig, the killer club kid, and fuzzy memories of the rave tent in the Woodstock 99 docu-series.
In my mind raves are illegal dance parties thrown by club kids in Manhattan all hopped up on goofballs and screaming meanies in the 1980s.
A club kid would find a really cool garbage barge, unused storage space or Burger King bathroom and decide to throw a rave there. Then he’d inform all the other club kids of the rave’s location and time via carrier pigeon.
It was all very hip.
Club kids would dance and have fun and use club drugs and freak out the squares and at the end of every rave a drug dealer named Freeze would be killed as a morbid sacrifice to the God of dance.
In my very limited experience, it seems like raves are all about exclusivity. They’re about keeping the wrong people out and the right people in. You had to be part of the in-crowd just to know that a rave was happening and where, part of an exclusive community dedicated to mindless hedonism and flamboyant self-expression.
That is not true of the Shrek Rave. It was open to EVERYONE over the age of eighteen willing to spend WAY too much on a ticket to do something spectacularly, egregiously, wonderfully idiotic: celebrate the art and culture and essence of Shrek alongside like-minded souls.
The Shrek rave promised to be the internet, more specifically the part devoted to social media, in real life, or IRL as the kids say.
Depending on your orientation, that sounds like either tons of fun or positively excruciating. All I knew was that I wanted to take lots of drugs and be around stoned people overjoyed to hear the Smash Mouth dumbass anthem “All Star”, and then hear it again and again and again.
You know what? I got just that but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The Shrek rave, which is touring the country to once again illustrate that the American people are a deeply silly breed uniquely devoted to clattering consumer nonsense, was held at the Buckhead Theater, a modest venue that hosts the likes of Nick Swardson and Michael Jackson, Prince and Bee Gees tribute acts.
The crowd was an adorably geeky aggregations of twenty and thirty-somethings in vaguely Shrek-inspired ensembles. The majority of the crowd got into the spirit with Shrek-themed outfits but nobody seemed to put too much effort into their costumes. Or anything else, for that matter! The whole thing was wonderfully half-assed in a way that betrayed its origins as a silly joke that went too far and yet somehow not far enough.
It was enough to wear a green hat with little horns, a sort of Shrek variation on the Pussy hats that were worn ONCE for a very specific purpose but that the right wing imagines is a staple of every progressive’s wardrobe.
But before I headed to the dance floor I first availed myself of a Shrek-themed cocktail. My Donkey Punch mixed drink cost twenty-six dollars before tax and tip although I really should have paid seven dollars extra and gotten a glowing green swamp-themed concoction that came with its own collectible container but the dad in me recoiled at the idea of paying thirty six dollars for a drink.
If you’re going to do something as stupid, expensive and pointless as going to a Shrek rave, then why not go the whole way?
At nine o’clock on a stage with the words “Shrek Rave projected on the background, a DJ with Shrek horns began spinning songs designed to get revelers into a Shrek state of mind.
This was accomplished partially by playing songs from the Shrek soundtrack, most notably Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” “All Star” is just one song on the Shrek soundtrack but it is synonymous in the public imagination with Shrek to the point where I think of it as the Shrek song.
I can’t think of Shrek without “All Star”, just as I cannot think of “All Star” without Shrek. The combination is pure pop. It’s pure trash. It’s pure, exquisite vulgarity. I got sufficiently excited the first time “All Star” was played in its original form and considerably less excited the next eight or nine times, when it reappeared in an increasingly sped-up, nightmarish dance remix.
There were a lot of dance remixes that night, a lot of songs everybody knows by heart whether they like them or not with seemingly the same generic dance beat. In other words, it was a lot like Shrek itself: something everybody recognizes in a boldly, brazenly silly new context.
The Shrek rave was fundamentally about celebrating vulgarity and our weirdly intense, even spiritual relationship with the pop detritus from our childhoods.
The crowd at the Shrek rave was really into it, to the point where I began to suspect that some of them may have been on drugs. Even more disturbingly, some of the attendees may not have been on drugs, a possibility so horrifying I don’t even want to consider it.
The idea of a Shrek-themed rave may represent a seemingly unassailable apogee of sneering pop culture irony but it played out much differently in practice.
Here’s the thing: joy is joy. Happiness is happiness. The pleasure that we feel listening to music we enjoy as a guilty pleasure or a goof or an elaborate put-on isn’t substantively different or lesser than the pleasure we feel moving to music we genuinely love and feel a deep connection to.
Early in the night, for example, the DJ played Natasha Bedingfeld’s “Unwritten” and the crowd went absolutely wild. They were hooting and hollering and literally leaping up and down with joy. It was infectious and undeniable both because the internet has adopted “Unwritten” the same way it did “All Star” and also because “Unwritten” is a great fucking song.
At various points in the Shrek rave the crowd would spontaneously begin chanting “Shrek! Shrek! Shrek! Shrek!” and I couldn’t help but ask myself, “What are you doing with your life, Nathan? Is this really how you want to spend what limited time you have on the planet? Do you want this to be your legacy?”
Incidentally, I make a point of chanting “Shrek! Shrek! Shrek! Shrek!” everywhere I go. I’ve gotten some very strange, judgmental looks at funerals and wakes as a result.
The DJs led chants of “Shrek” and “Shrek rave” and threw out waffles in appreciation of their place within the rich mythology of Shrek.
I am not a Shrek fan. I feared being exposed as a heretic in the House of Shrek but you ultimately didn’t need to be a fan of the Dreamworks smash to have a good time.
I imagine it would help, however. Shrek fans lost it when the DJ sampled “What are you doing in my swamp?”
Anything even vaguely Shrek-related got a huge response. A dance remix of Counting Crows’ magnificent ear-worm “Accidentally in Love” was rapturously received despite it being a standout from the Shrek 2 soundtrack, not the OG edition.
It seemed like they played a lot of songs that are not part of the Shrek universe until I discovered, or re-discovered, the existence of Shrek In The Swamp Karaoke Dance Party.
It’s Dreamworks’ first direct-to-video musical short as well as a piece of pure product cynical and pandering even by Shrek standards.
Shrek In The Swamp Karaoke Dance Party is a micro-jukebox musical that manages to fit snippets of all of the following songs into three jam-packed minutes: "Just The Way You Are", "Like A Virgin", "Baby Got Back", "Feelings", "YMCA", "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me", "Stayin' Alive", "Who Let the Dogs Out?", "Dance to the Music", and "Happy Together”.
So when “Staying Alive”, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”,“Like a Virgin” and “Baby Got Back” were all played at the Shrek rave I could have enthused, “Fuck yeah! I am familiar with ALL of these songs from Shrek In The Swamp Karaoke Dance Party, and only from Shrek In The Swamp Karaoke Dance Party! I enjoy references!”
The Shrek Rave wasn’t a celebration of one particularly tacky, vulgar piece of pop culture but rather an only semi-tongue in cheek celebration of pop culture at its tackiest and most exhilaratingly vulgar.
In that respect it wasn’t terribly dissimilar from the Gathering of the Juggalos, another deeply uncool, extremely fun world where man-children like myself can re-live cherished memories in a safe, supportive, drug-intensive environment.
“It’s dumb just have fun!” teased the poster for the Shrek rave, along with “Cool is Dead” and “Who cares!”
That captures the essence of Shrek rave. It was very, very dumb. It was deeply uncool. And it was fun. And as far as I’m aware, nobody died.
The Shrek rave was pointless, self-indulgent and childish. I’m glad I got to experience it for myself for two and a half ridiculous hours, and for all of you, who have far too much common sense and self-respect to even think about doing something so gloriously idiotic and enjoyable.
I also enjoyed this silly write up of a silly, nonsensical experience (probably much more than I would have enjoyed the rave itself, even without having to pay $26+ for a drink). I endorse this kind of essay!
I really hate Shrek but this was a fun read. Thanks!