Monster mush.(FILM)

The first Shrek movie kicked off to the strains of Smash Mouth's "All Star," the worst hit song of 1999; Shrek the Third, the latest and lousiest installment in the saga, includes a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" performed by Fergie, a pillow-lipped chanteuse best known for her chart-topping single "My Humps," and perhaps for the humps themselves. Smash Mouth is more or less forgotten nowadays, and within five years I expect that Fergie will be as well. If there's any justice, by then the Shrek phenomenon will have joined them in the pop-culture dustbin, remembered only for being as rancid and calculated as anything foisted on the American family in recent memory.

If every culture gets the fairy tale it deserves, though, Shrek may be with us for a while yet. The story of the ogre who wins the beautiful princess (who turns out to be an ogre) gets laughs by upending fairy-tale convention--monsters are heroes; Prince Charming is a preening SOB; damsels-in-distress turn out to know kung fu--but it isn't a Monty-Pythonesque parody of the genre, tongue firmly planted in cheek throughout. Rather, it's a straightforward revision with comic flourishes, designed to flatter the prejudices of what a recent study suggests may be the most narcissistic generation of Americans in history, by imparting a moral--be thyself--that's as old as Polonius and as new as The Secret, and as brainless as both.

Traditional fairy tales are usually about turning into someone else, about the power of transformation in human life, for good and ill. So princes become frogs and swans and beasts and then princes again; maidens pass from life into sleeping death and back; youngest sons prove themselves worthy of kingdoms and despised serving girls make their way to royal balls. And the transformations these tales depict are demanded of their audience as well: A great fairy story initiates a child into the mysteries of adulthood, shadowing its enchanted landscapes with intimations of sexuality and mortality; adults, meanwhile, are tugged back toward childhood and the sense of wonder that comes with it, before habit and care made the remarkable fact of existence seem commonplace. As G. K. Chesterton once put it, "These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Walt Disney's adaptations tamed and commercialized the fairy tale, but wisely left this essential dynamic intact. The Shrek movies, by contrast, turn it on its head: They offer something to adults and kids alike, but instead of introducing children to mature themes and reminding grown-ups of childhood's advantages, they leave both the way they found them and encourage the worst tendencies of each. Just as Shrek's ogre hero is celebrated for staying exactly as he is--ugly, smelly, ...