Abstract
In "On Fairy-stories," Tolkien introduces the concept of Faërian drama: plays which the elves present to men, with a "realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism," where the viewer feels he is "bodily inside its Secondary World" but instead is "in a dream that some other mind is weaving." In an earlier paper,* I suggested that Tolkien may have been influenced in his development of the concept by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, and looked at some examples of Faërian drama in Tolkien's fiction and poetry, concentrating especially on his final story, Smith of Wootton Major. Along the way I discussed A Christmas Carol and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two works with clear intervention by otherworldly beings. Here I want to look at several more recent examples of Faërian drama in fantastic film and television which achieve the same effect, but do so without the fairies: the movie Groundhog Day and the American version of the television series Life on Mars.