The Canadian Press
‘WandaVision’, a sitcom article, was also a pandemic parable
Imagine being trapped in the confines of your own neighborhood, losing track of the outside world – and yourself – with each passing day. Things have been looking kind of flat lately, and sometimes completely colorless. Everything seems reasonably placid, but something is not quite right with reality. The days seem … episodic. Does the world shrink at the end of the block? Does life come back to itself? Are your neighbors with you or against you? That has been the premise of “WandaVision”, Marvel’s latest foray into the intricate and immersive universe, first patched in Stan Lee’s comics six decades ago. Not by chance, it is also an adequate description of life in many corners of America during this pandemic micro-moment. In an era when meticulously crafted fictional universes are the billion-dollar baby of entertainment, “WandaVision”, whose first and probably only season ends on Friday, has taken a step forward, transforming the seven-decade tradition of the American sitcom in a jump from a decade-old suburban prison. Episode by episode of TV tribute, it flowed through unsettling messages from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, “Bewitched”, “The Brady Bunch”, “Family Ties”, “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Modern Family”, engulfing an entire city of New Jersey and its people and, along the way, serving up a darker version of the already dysfunctional mirror at Marvel’s funhouse. The perfect result: a distorted reflection not only of America, but of the way she saw herself through her broadly designed television comedy over three generations. How did this program succeed (inadvertently, of course, since it was conceived before the virus arrived) to match the content of your moment of desire for comfort? Because it so lovingly reached the well-educated and structured tradition of sitcoms, which were a comforting food for the brain of the American viewer long before the word “streaming” fell into the lexicon. Television scholar Robert Thompson once described the contentment people find in old comedies as “the aesthetic of the anesthetic” – a narrative style that redefined itself every week, ensuring that society’s norms were enforced by presenting non-threatening communities , populated with non-threatening and non-threatening characters. “WandaVision” co-opted this view and took it down. As a contrast, he used those relief landscapes and the way they have been transformed over the decades to match the times. Its superficial tranquility and friendly conflict were the backdrop for a slowly unfolding Marvel storyline that, in its blinking gum darkness, was pure 21st century. There is also irony in the fact that Marvel has been owned by Disney for the past 12 years, a conglomerate built by “imaginators” who call themselves that were fundamental to stamp the sensitivity of the surrounding fantasy in more than half a century of American children’s life – and in the landscape itself. Wanda Maximoff, the witch who builds the world at the core of the show, is a replacement for Walt Disney himself, who transformed his childhood memories of the early 20th century into theme parks and an entertainment empire. Like the world of “WandaVision”, Disney’s creations reflected not exactly reality, but its sugary, recognizable and attractive half-body, but hardly real life. When “WandaVision” went on television in the 1980s, the soft opening credits for that “very special episode” sang this to us, revealing the theme of the program (and also of pandemic life): “We are succeeding as we go along. However, like those horror films from the 1980s when the nightmare dreamer wakes up, only to find that he or she is still asleep, in “WandaVision” the “real” world is still the fantastic universe of the Marvel Universe. The “Inception” model is at stake: you are still in the layered matrix, still separated from real reality by several Marvel strata and a robust Disney layer. In one of his later episodes, “WandaVision” offers his opinion on the opening credits of “Malcolm in the Middle” from the early 2000s. This theme song, more aggressive and insolent than its predecessors, has the following lyrics: “ What if everything is an illusion? Sit down. Enjoy the show. “As the first storyline of its surprisingly extensive line of streaming shows ends, that could be Marvel’s general slogan. Because – first in the comics, then in the cinemas, now on all of our varied screens – Marvel IS the universe are comics and movies and video games, TV and toys and collectibles, cosplayers and souvenirs and an entire pantheon of secular gods You can even argue that your perfectly cross-market cosmos is the new American suburb – a completely immersive, interconnected neighborhood and self-perpetuating, privileged and complex and, at times, overflowing with the emptiness of the Technicolor narrative manufactured industrially. It is us, but amplified. “Thousands of people under your control, all interacting with each other, according to complex stories?” a character, who will remain nameless for spoiler prevention purposes, says to Wanda as his dream microverse with magical energy begins to wear out. “Well, that’s something special, baby.” Does life imitate Marvel, then? Maybe just a little bit. One day, after the pandemic dot is finally over, we’ll all be back – well, most of us. We’ll resurface in the real world, blink hard, look around, reconnect with our neighbors and evaluate what we’ve all missed. We’ll say to each other: What a weird and comprehensive dream that was. And then we’ll dream again. Roll the credits. Rinse. I repeat. American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted Ted Anthony, The Associated Press