For an egregious portion of the past two weeks (while not writing these posts), I watched Marvel movies. This was a mistake.
Today I began to write about that universe (where size and number explain almost everything and characters pantomime their emotions) so as to contrast it to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Titania’s line: “These are the forgeries of jealousy.”
(In my watching binge, feeling bloated with Marvel, I turned to this play at some point and started to re-think Titania’s line. I here force the comparison I pondered then.)
All that matters in Marvel is who has what powers and how powerful they can be given the powers they have. Yet there are more crafty and “in question” power dynamics in Shakespeare’s one line than in all those dozen-plus movies.
Titania and her husband Oberon who, as Queen and King of the fairie world determine much of what happens among humans, accuse each other of dalliances that may or may not be true or may be made up or are, more likely, known to both of them as possibly true and possibly made up since accusing each other of such things is the nature of their bickering-flirting-keep the world together tussle of a relationship.
Not ‘these are the forgeries of love’ and not ‘these are insults caused by jealousy’ but these are forgeries of jealousy. Forgeries . . . something you planned and made and pretend are real because you are, or pretend to be, jealous. Jealous . . . an emotion others can see in us as a kind of feign and we may see this way in ourselves too, though not in such a way that gives them, or us, any power over it.
There is something to say about weight: Thanos, with infinity stones, snapping his fingers to destroy the whole plodding universe vs. fairie mom and dad, their whole hokum a brace to the world of love.
I wanted, in what I was going to write, to make claims about art that winks at being entertainment such that it must remind us it is commerce as compared to art that knows its status as fake such that it can upgrade reality, but I got that bloated feeling again.
So I went to the gym—Yo, that’s three days in a row, champ—where another three hundred such days might be all it takes to battle back against the last ten years of sedentary life.
Then I came home to make soup and write this.