Shrek as metaphor

Dexter: the OG sympathetic serial killer returns

Eight years after going off-air, a new and improved Dexter is set to return to screens this week

hammad ali staff writer

The film and television industry has always had a fascination with serial killers. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the North American audience has always had a fascination with serial killers, and these industries have simply followed the money. A quick Google search reveals no less than 24 TV shows about serial killers available on one streaming platform or another. This is even before we count thrillers, police procedurals, and detective genre shows that often have minor story arcs dedicated to the theme.

There is, however, one show that stands out in the minds of crime fans for two reasons. First, since this show premiered in 2006, it arrived on the scene some time before the entire industry seems to be taken over by the hype. Second, it was possibly the first show to feature the serial killer as the protagonist, the character you are meant to root for and empathize with.

Based on a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter was a crime drama series about Dexter Morgan, a serial killer hiding in plain sight as a forensics analyst with Miami Police. His adoptive father Harry, who was a police officer, noticed the telltale signs in young Dexter. Instead of freaking out or trying to get Dexter to bury this aspect of himself, Harry then trains Dexter to become the perfect serial killer, the one who never leaves a clue behind and is simply uncatchable. The catch? In return, Dexter must promise to only kill those who deserve it: criminals and degenerates who somehow used their wealth and power to escape the legal process. From here, the show essentially is just a series of Dexter’s murders, always with the backstory on why these victims deserved it. In the first season, his victims range from a child molester to a gang member who keeps escaping the law because no one dares testify against him. Soon though, the storyline gets more involved. We see glimpses into Dexter’s past and are able to slowly piece together the reasons for his deranged obsession. In nearly every season, we are also introduced to one other serial killer, sometimes an adversary to Dexter, and others kindred spirits if not mentors. Interwoven with the tales of murder, police investigations, and Dexter’s frantic race to stay a few steps ahead of an FBI investigation, there’s the story of him trying to blend in. Initially, Dexter is dating and interacting with his coworkers simply because, as Harry taught him, not doing so would invite attention and scrutiny. But over subsequent seasons, maybe simply as fan service, we see his character grow, develop empathy, and form a few genuine connections. Will these last, though? Or will somebody in Dexter’s life notice the late nights, the blank look in his eyes at times, and his obsession with blood spatters? You’ll have to find out for yourself. Fair warning though, by the end of the eighth season you may find yourself more sympathetic to a serial killer than you would have originally thought possible.

The season 8 finale was aired on Showtime on September 22, 2013. While many ardent fans feel that the last season was a bit of a letdown, any TV show fan can probably think of a show that ended on a far worse note. You know, one whose title rhymes with “name of cones.” If, like me, you are a Dexter fan who never quite got closure, there is good news: Dexter is returning this fall with a ten episode limited series, and is scheduled to premiere on November 7 on Showtime. As fans who have seen the trailer may have noticed, it seems that all these years later Dexter has finally mastered completely blending in, playing the friendly neighbor that everyone has a nod and a smile for. Will it last? I, for one, cannot wait to find out!

On Being via Flickr A very angelic photo of Dexter Morgan – because all the angels I know have blood spatters for wings.

Shrek, colonialism, and the sands of time

For the students who weren’t alive when it was released

sara birrell news editor

The other day, as I was reading an old Seventeen magazine instead of literally anything else, I was reflecting on cultural changes over the past two decades, and in particular, the fact that there are students attending the U of R right now who have never lived in a world without Shrek. Since I’m [REDACTED] years old, and since this year marked 20 years since the film burst onto the scene, changing everything, I thought I would review it for those who weren’t alive to see it reviewed when it was fresh and young. More importantly, it allowed me to fulfil an obligation to the A&C editor without actually having to put on pants or leave my apartment.

Shrek, for those not in the know, is your standard quest narrative with the twist that it’s deliberately ripping off Disney conventions – like how it opens with a voiceover of our hero reading from a fairy tale story book before tearing out one of its pages and (presumably) using it to wipe himself in an outhouse. Subversive!

Anyway, at the start of the film, Shrek bursts out of the outhouse and onto the scene to the rock music of Smash Mouth, which is another signal that this isn’t your average fairy tale! And remember, this was before the age of COVID, so we had no way of knowing that Smash Mouth would one day sing “I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed” at a superspreader event in Sturgis that probably ended up killing hundreds or even thousands of people with questionable taste in music. All we knew then was that the years started coming and they didn’t stop coming. It was a simpler time. Bush hadn’t even done 9/11 yet.

Shrek’s sartorial choices are pretty inexplicable, primarily because he lives alone and doesn’t seem to care about social conventions, so why even wear pants or that horrid little vest (or maybe bralette?) that looks like it’s made from one of those no-slip mats that your grandmother has on the bottom of her bathtub? His pants are leggings for some reason, and they’re a foul plaid pattern and colour that looks like maybe he ordered them in the waning days of the LulaRoe empire. And I’m not here to body shame Shrek, but it’s very clear that he’s been skipping leg day.

While Shrek is sitting at his kitchen table eating a bowl of eyeballs, he’s blissfully unaware of the imminent arrival of ogre hunters, who want to kill him so they can expropriate his lands and deport undesirables to that location, which is a plot line that has been directly lifted from the history of the colonization of Australia (at this point I paused and hastily Googled “Shrek: post-colonial???” but all I found was one Prezi from 2017 that was pretty shoddily done, so if you’re looking for an idea for a paper, there’s a free one right there).

The film’s animation holds up as something that would be, if not impressive, at least not unimpressive in a movie released today, which is good since it took them four years to animate the thing, which is nearly as long as it took for the US to lose the Iraq war. At one point, while Shrek is explaining to Donkey that ogres are like onions, I recognize that this is a reference to Peer Gynt, something I didn’t notice in 2001, and I wished that someone was around watching with me so that I could loudly draw attention to the fact that I am familiar with the works of Ibsen.

The plot and humour also hold up in ways I won’t get into because I realized that A&C only needs half a page, so I need to wrap this up. I think if this movie were to come out for the first time today, it would receive reviews just as favourable as when it came out 20 years ago (don’t check if the reviews 20 years ago were actually favourable, I certainly didn’t fact check this claim) but we would have had a lot more Buzzfeed articles titled, “20 reasons why Shrek is a body positivity icon we can stan,” which is unbearable. Let me know if you do a paper on “Reclaiming the swamp: a postcolonial approach to analyzing themes of displacement and repatriation in Dreamworks’ 2001 film Shrek” because I’d like to read it.

Sanjeev Beekeeper via Flickr Before makeup and after.

Abby Lee Miller was abusive in many ways, but the body shaming may have been the worst

jorah bright arts writer

Mingle Media TV via Wikipedia The moms of Dance Moms who don’t dance and are just moms (and ones who subject their kids to torture, basically).

JoJo Siwa has become a household name these days. Kids know her from multiple works with Nickelodeon and her kid-friendly content. Adults know her as the first person to compete in a same-sex duo on Dancing with the Stars. She’s a gay icon, but few know her from way back when she first came onto the scene on Abby Lee Miller’s Ultimate Dance Competition, a spin-off of the popular show Dance Moms.

Dance Moms first started in 2011 and ran for seven seasons from 2011 to 2017, with an eighth season premiering in 2019. The show followed young dancers and their mothers as the children learn and compete several new dances every week under the instruction of Abby Lee Miller.

Miller is known for being incredibly mean and verbally abusive to her students. She claims that it’s just “tough love” and she’s helping bring out the best in her students, but her actions often lead the girls on the show to have panic attacks and shed violent tears. In 2014, Miller was even sued by a student for assault after they left the show, though the case was eventually dropped.

Dance Moms had a lot of problems – and I mean a lot. Miller was rampant with racism, and the show often featured problematic dances (anyone else remember when Jill wanted her white daughter to play Rosa Parks? Yikes.), but one of the most common issues found on the show was body shaming.

Miller dished out a lot of the negative body comments, and she received some herself. The most notable of these experiences was in season two. Miller threw a chair at a young dancer because her mother, Kelly Hyland, didn’t have time to put stoppers on the bottom of the chair. In response, Hyland said, “I’ve been here all day, making costumes for you, while you were down the road eating. Stop eating! That’s why you’re fat!” This line is now one of the iconic lines of the show, but Hyland using Miller’s weight in retaliation for being violent with her daughter isn’t acceptable either. Since then, Hyland’s el-

dest daughter has condemned her mother’s words and fat shaming.

Miller frequently attacked another dancer, Nia Frazier, for her looks. Nia was the only Black dancer on the competition team from season one through eight. In season two, Nia had gotten her hair done in braids, which her mother Holly said had been approved by the studio. In an action that was both racist and shaming Nia’s looks, Abby told Holly to “fix this hair, cause it’s horrible” and called the braids inappropriate.

In one of the last few seasons featuring Nia, Miller insinuated that the young girl was fat. While ranting about how none of the girls had been working over the summer before competition, Abby said to Holly that she didn’t believe her daughter had been working because she could “tell by the size of the thigh botma-ing [sic] into the air” that Nia had been lazy and unproductive. Holly was clearly upset by this and told Miller she needed to stop.

Another dancer, Ava Michelle, now known for her leading role in the Netflix original Tall Girl, danced for Miller in season four, but was featured on later seasons as part of a different team. Miller was frequently

unkind to Ava about her body, at one point saying her arms were “horrendous,” and forced the girl to dance with an unstable umbrella because she believed Ava needed something to cover them. She also told the girl she looked like a praying mantis because of her long limbs. Miller forced Ava to stand next to another tall dancer, and when Ava was shown to be taller than her, Miller told her that she was cut from the team because of her height. Ava revealed on So You Think You Can Dance that this majorly affected her body image.

The show tried to hide Miller’s body shaming at times. Dancer Chloe Lukasiak left the show in season four because of comments made about her appearance. Chloe had silent sinus syndrome, which made one of her eyes slightly smaller. Many believed that she just had a lazy eye, but it was a medical issue that would later need surgery. Miller made a comment about Chloe’s eye which was edited to say “Chloe’s finished, she’s washed up,” and Chloe’s mother, Christi, responded with “do you know anything about that kid? No!” It was later revealed that Abby had made fun of Chloe’s eye which was caused by a medical condition.

In September of 2021, Chloe revealed on her YouTube channel that she developed an eating disorder after leaving the show. Because she was no longer dancing as much after leaving the show, she started gaining weight, and she believed it to be “unacceptable” according to her standards of beauty, which were likely warped by Miller and the show.

Miller’s body shaming wasn’t exclusive to the show. In an interview with Hollywood Unlocked, Miller revealed that she used to force her dancers to jump while carrying 10 pound bags of potatoes, and Kelly Hyland said in a meet and greet that while doing this Miller would tell the children that “this is what it would feel like if you gained ten pounds.” In the same interview, Miller says that she used to weigh her dancers and then write their weights on the wall. Hyland said that the dancers in these situations were seven or eight years old. According to Hyland and her daughters, Miller went so far as to name each dancer’s stomach and often told the girls to “suck them in.”

The behavior continued into season eight. Dancer Pressley Hosbach said that Miller told her “nobody wants to see those thighs,” which made Pressley incredibly upset and insecure about her body. In one of Pressley’s solos, Miller tried to have her wear a costume with a huge skirt in an attempt to hide her legs.

Cheryl Burke, best known for Dancing with the Stars, took over for Miller in season seven of Dance Moms. Burke often talked about how Miller treated the girls and how she could see the lingering effects. Burke told US Magazine that “It was tough, there were a lot of tears, anger and insecurity. It was shocking to me. I couldn’t believe these beautiful girls that have zero confidence. That’s not the way to live life.” Burke added that the girls said they’d “been traumatized” by Miller “and her teaching methods.”

Since the show has ended, the mothers who have made comments on Miller’s weight have said that they regret those decisions and wouldn’t make them again, but Miller has said nothing of the sort about her words towards her dancers. Dance Moms had a lot of problems, but one of the biggest was body shaming, which is clear to see from Abby Lee Miller’s words, actions, and the reactions of her dancers.

“Miller says that she used to weigh her dancers and then write their weights on the wall. Hyland said that the dancers in these situations were seven or eight years old.