Puck on Film

The Real World of the Unreal

Rather than setting up Oberon, Titania and their crew as wandering fairies within a forest, Hoffman creates an alternative town for the fairies, sprites, spirts, satyrs and any number of magical creatures. When Puck ask the fairy “Wither wander you?” they aren’t in the greenwood. Instead Puck himself is hanging out in a tavern – not that removed from where we were first introduced to Bottom.

Later we see the fairies of Titania’s bower playing with stolen trinkets from the mortal world – such as phonographs (or vinyl records).

It’s an attempt to invest some earthy reality into an otherwise magical world – an attempt to bring the magical world within the artifice of movies that we term “naturalism”.

The sets are impressive. The make-up is top-notch. And yet, it doesn’t quite work.

The fantasy creatures in this film seem less real than the aliens in Star Wars or Star Trek, or the creatures in any number of fantasy films. In those films, the entire world is constructed. A pointy-eared alien looks at home on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. But if Star Trek had opened with long and lavish scenes in turn-of-the-century Italy, viewers would have been more likely to reject Spock.

Hoffman and his team haven’t created a new reality for the fairy creatures. They’ve created a distorted copy of our world and our brains recognize it as such -- the Diet Coke version of reality. In some ways, the greenish make-up of the 1968 Dream is more effective by being less “real”.

The super prefix in supernatural means “over” or “above”, not something that is part of nature but something that is other than nature, something beyond nature. By attempting to give physical reality to the fairies, they are in some ways diminished.