WANDAVISION - REVIEW

 

WandaVision finished its run yesterday so I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts now that I've seen it all.

SPOILER ALERT!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED!
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So right off the bat, I'm gonna say this is the best product to come out of the MCU thus far, hands down. It did an amazing job of offering up something fresh, original and emotionally engaging, well beyond the standard "mega-punch-up", often exhausting 3 hour explosion orgies that comprise so much of the superhero movie genre. Thankfully, there was almost none of that stuff until the finale, which I'll give a pass because they didn't spend too much screen time on it and even had the dueling Visions ultimately resolve their conflict through a brilliantly REASONED DEBATE, though after a brief obligatory energy blast exchange.

It's that defying of expectations and refusal to bend to fan service that made me the happiest. All throughout the series, I'd see various commenters and theorists trying to second guess where this was going to go and who the "big bad" was gonna be and, almost without exception, they were all WRONG! That's right, no fucking Mephisto! Even though everyone and their dog was busily trying to find someone who was gonna turn out the be the "devil in disguise", it didn't happen. There really was no "big bad" in this show. Even the characters with nefarious intents didn't fall into the niche of a power hungry super-being like Thanos. Though Agatha may have come close, she was well tempered by the sincerity of her curiosity and simply being likeable and fun. NOT having that kind of antagonist, In the end, was a bold-ass move that made me love this show all the more.

Ultimately, the series is an examination of grief, how we cope with it through escapism and how that escapism inevitably harms those around us. That's a pretty ironic conceptual framework for a show set in a cinematic universe that uses escapism as its stock-in-trade. But this show has "meta" references built into its DNA. That was one of the primary engagement engines for it; deciphering all the cultural touch-points they used as the fantasy world created by Wanda evolved through its progression of decades. The show's creators invested incredible amounts of effort into meticulously recreating each era they explored along with every detail of its stylistic nuances, right down to shooting one episode in front of an actual studio audience to get the feel of the performances just right.

As good as all that packaging was, its true success comes down to the performers and the emotional depth they brought to their performances. There isn't a single cast member who didn't deliver on all the gut-punches of feeling that came through as the reality of this fantasy unfolded. As we peeled away the facade of the "perfect world" Wanda was trying to create, the unsettling indicators of how much pain was below the surface were all brilliantly communicated by the actors through a myriad of nuanced signals. It was all a candy apple; sweet and shiny on the outside, but rotten with misery within.

How appropriate is it that this show should appear at the tail end of the nightmare that is MAGA culture? Here, we have a group of people desperately trying to cling to a vision of an idealized America that never existed, just like the fictional worlds Wanda fell in love with while trying to escape the war and pain of her childhood. And how much pain has that delusion inflicted on the rest of us as these people insist on clinging to their lies and fantasies at the expense of every reasoned plea for compassion and acknowledgement of the problems we must come to terms with.

I certainly have high hopes that we'll see more work like this from the Marvel franchise, though I do hope that they can come up with a way to make it a bit more self-contained. My only real gripe with WandaVision is that I had to do a lot of homework in order to understand the backstories and motivations of the characters. Much of this involved hours watching overlong feature films where the characters I was interested in were only minor supporting players or else trolling through YouTube breakdown videos to learn about references to comic books I'll never read. That interdependence, on one hand, is an admirable feat of coordination from a fictional writing perspective, but it makes pursuing this franchise somewhat daunting if I have to slog through too much extraneous content in order to be able to follow a particular piece of this puzzle. That said, I am looking forward to seeing what else is in store from this world.