What makes a movie meme-able? Catharsis and nostalgia, and Shrek, Arts + Culture

The first Shrek film came out when I was 6 years old. And, like many of my fellow youths, I watched that damn movie about 100,000 times before I turned 7. My brothers and I tormented our parents with constant, and not exactly culturally sensitive, renditions of Donkey’s best lines. But then, over the course of a decade, Shrek slowly faded out of my life. I watched the sequels, but the jolly green ogre was largely relegated to a fond, nostalgic corner of my psyche.But, sometime in the early 2010s, Shrek stormed back into the popular culture as a titan of meme culture, his ugly chartreuse mug contorted and re- contextualized into all manners of absurd internet humor. He wasn’t alone. In due time, Spongebob, the Star Wars prequels and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man series all joined the ranks of beloved childhood entertainment rebranded as hubs of meme-ery with dedicated online communities.What is it about these select cultural properties that elicit so much internet dedication years after their release? Why are there Shrek memes but not Madagascar memes? There are no easy answers to this question, but there are shared traits that can form the basis of an explanation.Largely, these movies and shows enjoyed a near-ubiquitous following among kids in the early 2000s, so much so that they entered the collective consciousness of a generation of American kids. There’s also a throughline of carnivalesque absurdity in most of these properties. They’re colorful, loud and absurd in ways we really liked as kids.Revisiting them now, more than a decade later, hardened by years of internet irony, we still connect with the absurdity, just in a different way. In that light, we can understand these meme movies as a kind of cathartic nostalgic exercise, where the collective consciousness of our generation can look back and trade inside jokes on a shared foundation of fond childhood memories and crippling irony. 

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