ENTRE A REPETIÇÃO E O DESLOCAMENTO: A PROPÓSITO DO DISCURSO SOBRE A DIFERENÇA NA TETRALOGIA SHREK

Abstract

One of the fundamental assumptions of Discourse Analysis is that there is neither transparency of language nor of senses nor of subjects nor of history. It is from this theoretical position that we propose our analytical gesture around the Shrek tetralogy, sequence of films produced by DreamWorks (2001, 2004, 2007, 2010). Our interest in the tetralogy was due to the affirmation that it constitutes a subversion of the histories of traditional fairies, whose effects is the update of the actual social real textualized in traditional fairy tales for a contemporary social real. By investigating the discourse about Shrek, we established an understanding of the conditions of production of the film, which enabled us to achieving the comprehension of “difference” (ORLANDI, 2008, 2014) as a research question to be investigated in two perspectives: the first one was about the Disney film productions and the second one was about the “different characters”. This path led us to confront the pair “repetition-displacement” in relation to paraphrase and polysemy (ORLANDI, 2011, 2012a, 2012b; LEÓN, PÊCHEUX, 2011), basic concepts in this research. With regard to the first perspective of analysis, we looked around the understanding of Shrek like a fairy tale in its relationship with Disney stories and it led us to the compositions of the opening and closing scenes as relevant brands to the discursive functioning of tetralogy as fairy story, that is, as prototypical scenes (LAGAZZI, 2015a) of fairytales. We also came to the formulation of the concept of performative narrative, from which we could concern the work of ideology in the textualization of the discourse about the difference by the way in which the tetralogy makes intervene an illusion of displacement of its functioning in relation to traditional fairy tales. On the other hand, giving consequence to the second perspective of analysis, we produced the clipping "faces in shock" with which we could highlight the functioning of estrangement (ERNEST-PEREIRA, 2009; FREUD, 1919) in relation to both the monstrous body and to the fact that this monstrous body occupies the positions of hero and princess. In this case the difference is constituted in relation to the "human x monstrous" duality, in which on the side of humanity is the normality and on the side of the monstrous is the abnormality. This analytical gesture enabled us to understand that, in relation to the characters, the Shrek tetralogy produces a displacement effect, i.e., a novelty effect, which conceals the ideological functioning, thus masking the production of an imaginary of the difference that marks, by the effect of the contradiction, the disciplinarization of diversity.