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.
