(No spoilers for WandaVision, spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which you should see before watching WandaVision. Come to think of it, throw Captain America: Civil War in there as well, between Age of Ultron and Infinity War.)
The world can feel like a sci-fi tragedy sometimes. There are a number of worldwide situations demanding our attention. The temptation exists to retreat from grim reality into a screen, and stay there. Maybe this is a good idea, if what you need is a safe place to heal. Then again, maybe it’s a surrender, giving victory to the destructive forces that seek to overwhelm us. It’s hard to judge sometimes.
This is what WandaVision is about. Wanda, known in the comics as the Scarlet Witch, but never referred to as such in the movies, is an extremely powerful superhero who suffers great losses and participates in major accidents. Her powers are ‘weird,’ and may have been considered ‘too complicated’ for movie audiences because what we get is a slightly spooky take on the powers of Jean Grey, of X-Men fame, instead. However they work, Wanda’s powers are impressive enough to give Thanos a serious beating (this is a thing Captain America, Iron Man and Thor working together couldn’t quite achieve). With the possible exception of Captain Marvel, Wanda came out of Endgame looking like the toughest superhero left standing, but that doesn’t mean that all her mistakes were erased and her losses recouped. All of that power now goes to the purpose of creating a screen for Wanda to hide in.
I get that impulse. I’ve found myself hiding in screens, too. Video games like Fallout, Civilization and The Sims are all excellent places to avoid the world. So are all the movie franchises like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the DC challenges to Marvel’s superheroic supremacy. Books can be screens, too, and have just as much escapist value as any other media. I’ve caught up a bit on Mark Twain. Reread some classics. Glad I did. Joan of Arc is one of the best books I’ve ever read. The ending aside, it’s a great place to hide.
I found this a fun show to hide in, personally. The particular magic of television, and I think the reason people love it so much, is that it can become an ongoing facet in your life, week after week, month after month, season after season. Movies and books and all the other media have their own kinds of magic, but this specific rhythm and way of occupying space and time in our lives is mostly unique to television. This show functions as both a love letter to, and a cautionary tale about, this function of television. When the civil war outside your window gets you down, Mary Tyler Moore sounds awfully appealing. Sitcoms through the decades have offered many comfortingly bland, soothingly vanilla visions of life. This is like the opposite of the coffee that gives us the headbutting power to get through the morning — sitcoms are more like a placebo meant to calm us down and make us feel like we’ve accomplished something after a long day of grinding to make some rich guy feel richer. We might not have the perfect, blameless lives of the characters in our favorite sitcoms, but we at least get to watch and pick up all those aspirational messages.
I’ve often felt that Marvel’s movies needed to stretch themselves a bit more. When the range goes from action-comedy to comedy-action, covering the distance between Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America … well, I do love all these movies individually (maybe not Dark World), but the comics were certainly a lot more varied in terms of tone, style, depth and intention, and it didn’t get in the way of having a shared universe, it made the shared universe better by showing multiple, sometimes conflicting visions. The necessity of moving the story from movies to television, at least in part, may force the Marvel franchise to broaden in the way I’ve been wanting. This show is definitely different.
I loved the way it brought back some characters I felt had been sorely neglected. I also liked the way it moved the familiar characters into new territory, expanding them greatly. There are a lot of characters in the Marvel movies that I’ve felt are underused — this show did a lot to fix that for a few of the worst cases.
Loved the whole gimmick of switching from sitcom to sitcom, too. I know that there were a lot of Easter Eggs I couldn’t catch, because these writers clearly cared more about sitcoms than I do. The love of these writers for their material was evident. They made me reflect on the value (and dangers) of sitcoms, too.
What we have in WandaVision is a reminder that there is something to be said for the healing value of those screens that we hide in, but also that we can’t hide forever. We can pretend that we’ve suffered no losses, but we still have to figure out how to function with those absences, whether that’s our friends, or our loved ones, or our homes, or our ecosystem, or our sense of the cultural advancement of the society we’ve built. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we never made any real mistakes, just the little ones that make life a little funnier between commercials? But we have made mistakes, and the consequences of those mistakes are still ongoing, and the human cost is staggering, and there’s still a real world that needs us very badly. We can’t hide in screens forever — it would be, frankly, an act of evil to do so.