Shrek: Big Green Screaming Monkey Whore

I haven't seen "Shrek The Third" yet. Almost no one has, in fact. But I've got Shrek on the brain, like so many others across North America. Why? Not because I'm a raving loony fan -- I liked the first two, but am in no hurry to charge out and see the new one. As a matter of fact, I've decided to NOT see it. Not because the premise has likely been stretched thin, and not out of fear that Mike Myers et al phoned in their performances... although those both seem like reasonable probabilities.

Shrek is in my head because of the damned advertising.

Not ads for the movie itself, mind you... I'm talking about the M & M ads. And the Dodge ads. And HP. And McDonalds. This is all prior to the movie's release date... imagine the deluge of action figures and cereal and toys and candies and clothes and cleaning fluids and novelty condoms yet to come.

I have this theory about advertising. Although I think we have magnificent intelligence, I don't think our nervous systems are terribly unlike those of monkeys. If you're a monkey in the jungle, your very life (and that of your species) depends on being able to recognize food, a mate, and potential threats. It also follows that survival depends on what signals you are able to ignore. If you overstress a monkey that way, he has a breakdown.

The study of the human mind is called psychology. The application of psychology to the goal of making you think you need things you don't is called advertising. I am convinced that we are turning our psychological environment into a cluttered landscape of eat/fuck/kill/LOOK OUT! signals that would drive any monkey batshit crazy... except we are just smart enough to do it to ourselves, and NOT smart enough to realize we're doing it. Like all those coal-fueled factories in Britain in the 1800s, we are destroying our environment and blackening our lungs and we don't even realize it... and maybe (like in Britain in the 1800s) we won't realize it until the day we notice all the white moths are dead and the dark ones have taken over.

I fear we have all unwittingly become monkeys, screaming silently in an unsupervised laboratory of our own design.

What would Futurama have said about all this...?