Spoilers ahoy!
Yes, I saw
Kung-Fu Panda 2 on the weekend. Without having seen the original and knowing that this was a sequel, I did not have terribly high expectations.
We were about ten minutes late, so we missed the introduction to the film. "Meh, well, I'm sure it will be at least a bit funny," I thought as we stealthed into our seats. And then this white peacock stalked into the frame.
Animated villains in movies are often fairly stylish, presumably because they are meant to be seen as a bit vain, kinky, or otherwise trying to compensate for their many personality flaws with Fashion.
So, accustomed as most of us are to the stylish appearance of animated villains, I was not immediately impressed by Shen as a character. Numerous villains wear nice clothes and have a flashy fighting style. Not so many, however, are given amazing voices by Gary Oldman and evince the sort of tragic dimension that one finds in this very, very bitter white bird.
One imagines that he probably smells like jasmine tinged with sulfur, and his voice reminds me of a semi-dry port wine. Intoxicating and disgusting, he mixes refinement with savagery. According to the
Wikia article on Shen, the armour on his claws is not only a weapon, but conceals burn marks on his feet, suggesting his primary strategy for coping with loss.
From the beginning, we learn that the possible neglect of his royal parents leads Shen to experiment with turning fireworks into weapons. Then, his exile drives him to not only forcefully reclaim his ancestral lands, but also gives him ambitions to conquer the rest of China and destroy kung-fu. Finally, after Po has destroyed Shen's fleet of cannon-equipped ships, Shen again throws himself into violence rather than heed Po's advice to let the scars of the past fade.
"I don't care what happens to scars!" an exasperated Shen shouts at Po, but throughout the movie he is shown either shooting canon balls at the things he fears will wound him, or hardening himself against accepting the pain that he has already felt.
In the Girardian sense, he commits an act of impure violence by massacring the panda village. He sees his attack as an attempt to free himself of the Soothsayer's prediction that he will be destroyed by a warrior of black and white, and so, although he is a prince, his actions defy the stability of the status quo. Rather than embrace the pure/sacred violence of Kung-fu that is practiced lawfully and promotes social stability, Shen chooses the volatile force of gun-powder, which threatens the positions of the elite kung-fu practitioners and therefore possesses the ability to create a crisis of difference. If the masters of kung-fu can no longer enforce their positions in the social hierarchy with the sacred violence of kung-fu, an apocolyptic upheaval may occur.
"All losses of difference ... involve violence; and this violence is contagious" writes Girard in
Violence and the Sacred, and so Shen's cannons manifest an impure violence that can be welded to unmake the world as the protagonists perceive it (281). Stripped of the rituals of kung-fu, the canons offer a violence that does not differentiate between commoner and master, and "when this difference has been effaced, purification is no longer possible and impure, contagious, reciprocal violence spreads throughout the community" (Girard 49).
In one sense, Shen is an opposite to Tai Lung, who adheres so closely to the rites of kung-fu that his desire for the dragon scroll destroys him. There is a moment in the first
Kung Fu Panda movie where Tai Lung opens the scroll and sees his own face reflected there, just as Po did.
If Tai Lung were a little less dogmatic in his practice of kung fu, he might have been able to see himself a dragon warrior too. This, however, would have required a kind of crisis of differentiation. The laws, myths, and rituals of kung fu would have needed to collapse in Tai Lung's psyche, allowing him to tear down the conventions that shaped his over-whelming will-to-power. Instead of seeing himself reflected in the scroll, Tai Lung sees only a useless double, unable to satisfy to his ambitions to become a master among masters. This shadow double is all that he perceives in himself as not merely mundane, but abject-- aspects that he has excluded and repressed in order to be the ultimate practitioner of kung fu.
"Who the hell are you calling mundane?"
Although Tai Lung does, to some extent, act as a rebel who defies the status quo, what he most craves are the words of the sacred order. His desire for these words sustains him through every conflict, and so, while Po is able to dismantle his conceptions of the sacred order enough to comprehend the dragon scroll, Tai Lung is destroyed by his own rigid adherence to convention.
By contrast, Shen embraces his role as a monstrous double. When Tai Lung lay imprisoned, he remained in thrall to the notion that a sacred scroll of kung fu could grant him more power and make him a master among masters.
But Shen, banished into exile for his attempt to subvert the status quo as defined by 'fate', never excels at kung-fu in the way that Tai Lung does. Due to his physical limitations and the impact of his banishment, Shen learns to see kung-fu as a convention and an obstacle that might be defeated. Rather than believe that fulfillment can be bestowed by the word of the sacred order, Shen states that one must
take happiness --preferably with the impure violence of his canons, and probably in the way that Machiavelli urges one to
take the lady Fortune.
"Fire ze missiles!"And so Shen returns, changed and frightening, like all things othered and repressed. He has his ancestral throne thrown out of the palace and replaced with a canon to demonstrate his refusal to partake in the rituals of the established hierarchy. When the Soothsayer asks if he will be content with conquering the earth, Shen replies that this "will be a start."
Although Shen makes this response into a quip, it is quite an honest statement. The impure violence that he advocates is a contagion, and he knows it. He also knows that no amount of forcefully obtained territory will repair the emotional damage that he feels has been done to him, even if he generally tries to convince himself otherwise.
Having rejected the sacred order and the purifying violence of kung-fu, Shen has also exiled himself from the stabilizing elements that might afford him some peace. Spheres appear throughout the movie, and Shen's cannon balls are depicted as a fiery, consuming force that is repeatedly juxtaposed against the single, round water-drop that Po meditates on while rediscovering his own painful past.
Again and again, Shen chooses the destructive path over the healing one. Unlike Po, he is far too alienated from the sacred order to attempt a re-entry. Po overcomes his unhappy beginning because he still values the peace of the status quo and subscribes to the purified violence of kung fu. Although he briefly touches upon the idea of vengeance, Po's fight against Shen functions more as a rite of passage. As Girard says, "instead of avoiding the crisis, the neophyte must advance to meet it, as his ancestors did before him. Instead of fleeing the most painful and terrifying aspects of reciprocal violence, he must submit to each and every one of them in the proper sequence" (283).
For Shen though, the purified, watery path of inner peace is an impossibility. He cannot bring himself to submit to reciprocal violence in the accepting manner of Po. In his defeat, after Po reveals the way in which he has avoided being consumed by the pain of his past, Shen chooses a final fight, not because he thinks he can win, nor because his resistance makes him any less miserable, but simply because, as a person who has rejected the hierarchy of the sacred order, he sees that there is now nothing left for him but death and violence.
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So yeah ... right now, I love the idea of Roderick doing a cosplay of lord Shen. We shall see if anything comes of it.
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