From Borges to Cervantes to Shakespeare to Velazquez, the best artists have always considered this question, and played around with the play-in-play, or painter-in-painting, or novelist-in-novel, and so on, ad infinitum. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no exception, and in class we have been drawing conclusions about this concept, as well as looking to the filmmaker Wes Anderson for help and ideas.
I mentioned Dead Poets Society in class, since in the movie one of the main characters gets cast as Puck for the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One wonders why a movie about a group of students and a teacher who decide to break some of the rules in order to expand life experiences would also use this play in particular? We talked in class about the use of a play-in-play as tool to reflect a distorted reflection of reality, and I wonder if this was part of their intentions. Below is a edited together YouTube music video of the movie, with The Decemberists’ song “I Was Meant for the Stage”:
Finally, I cant end this post without adding the trailer to Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a movie about making a movie based on an unfilmable book.