In 2019, Martin Scorsese described the films from Marvel’s cinematic universe in a way that the ending “WandaVision” proved to be true. “The closest I can think of them, however well done, with the actors doing the best they can in the circumstances, are the theme parks,” the filmmaker told Empire. “It is not the cinema of human beings trying to transmit emotional and psychological experiences to another human being.”
In the end, “WandaVision” proved that much of Scorsese’s summary was true – but not all. About 30 of the 50 minutes of the finale was one of those tours. This diversion happened with star witches who threw energy balls at each other while floating in the sky. The nosy neighbor Agnes, revealed to be the sorceress Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), abandons her glamor to face Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) while Wanda’s Vision (Paul Bettany) faces her resurrected twin tin man as a government weapon.
Cars fly by the houses; the heroes are crushed on the asphalt. Newly overpowered Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) defeated a possessed mysterious man disguised as Wanda’s brother Pietro, but who turned out to be an anonymous guy whose surname sounds like “horny”. And, spoiler alert, Wanda wins by losing everything. She created a sitcom version of Westview, and her loveliest version of Vision, to escape facing her pain. The only way to end it would be painfully – not the kind that hurts physically or draws blood. The kind that tears your heart out.
It does not matter. This being an MCU creation, everything eventually unfolds. . . and explosions, screams and flames. Amusement park emotions, just like the man said, and not a particularly pulsating version of it.
However, once the fight is over, the ending evades Scorsese’s assumptions about superhero titles and returns to the attributes that make “WandaVision” a marvel. To save the people of Westview, she ends her perfect little world and imprisons Agatha in her role as a “nosy neighbor” like Agnes. And in his final heartbreaking moments with Visoin, Wanda does his best to convey the emotional and psychological experience of his humanity to the synthetic being he loves.
“Wanda, I know we can’t be like this,” Vision says softly as his death approaches. “Before I go, I feel like I should know: what am I?”
“You, Vision, are the piece of the Mind stone that lives in me. You are a body of threads, blood and bone that I created,” she tells him. “You are my sadness and my hope. But most of all, you are my love.”
He sheds a tear, kisses her hand and observes: “I was a voice without a body. A body, but not human. And now, a memory made real. Who knows what I can be next? … We have already said goodbye. before, so it’s logical – “
She ends, “- let’s say hello again.”
This was not a simplistic roller coaster dialogue. It was the magic of romantic cinema, as Scorsese defines it in a subsequent article published in the New York Times. If, as he says, cinema expresses “the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can get hurt and love each other and suddenly come face to face with themselves”, then “WandaVision “is the first title MCU that meets the Scorsese qualification.
And the only way to do that was as a TV series.
“WandaVision” should not be ruled out for moving away from the standard violence screen of the genre to work on your feelings creatively, not to mention in a way that embodies who Wanda is and not just that, Vision and who Monica Rambeau has always been been in the heart.
It is true that Wanda’s tour has the miserable effect of torturing a city full of innocent passers-by, leaving us with the feeling that his despair has permanently damaged their psyche and their reputation. None of the most interesting supers is entirely upright all the time. Comic book fans understand this, as do people who love daytime and prime time soap operas.
That’s why Marvel put Wanda Maximoff’s tale on TV, a medium whose larger networks have historically distorted the female sex – certainly on ABC for most of recent history. Presumably Disney, a brand built on princesses and brides, lasted forever.
Since “WandaVision” is a bridge between Disney + and theaters, and between TV and cinema, why not build that bridge with the story of a woman who is also a witch, wife and mother, and whose only job is keep the world running, happy and stable? After all, the best TV versions of superhero stories are about women. This was true for “Wonder Woman” and definitely for “Agent Carter”. Even “Legends of Tomorrow” became necessary to see once the woman took over as the leader of the team.
This woman simply asks us to get off the roller coaster of deadly lasers and fights, allowing us to better appreciate the lovely anguish in thoughts like, “What is sadness, if not persevering love?”
Bettany pronounced that phrase with all the contemplative kindness it deserved and in a calm environment, free from threats or even loud noises.
“WandaVision” launched dozens of ideas because there are countless ways to think about it. But its ending proves that someone at Marvel took what the great filmmaker said seriously.
The frustrating part for moviegoers may be that the result was a beautiful and thought-provoking TV series, as opposed to a revealing but concise superhero film. But all the artistic dimensions that the filmmaker values are summed up in a single concept, intimacy, that no franchise action film can channel with any depth.
Television can. Consequently, “WandaVision” worked best when the battles were psychological and emotional, rather than relying on some heavy approximation of the visual effects of raw conflicts. That is also why such a story could only star and be about a woman who has no superhuman strength, exceptional fighting skills or bulletproof skin, and who was not entirely heroin or villain. Wanda is simply a person paralyzed by pain.
Whether this is for the benefit or the loss of the series depends on what you expect from a Marvel title, or from DC or any other brand of comics.
The common complaints among people who don’t like “WandaVision” often boil down to the lack of fight scenes. My husband, who only watched the film because he did not want to lose any narrative thread that would be transported to future films, considered it a soap opera.
But all comic book hero stories are novels. What are soap operas if not stories informed by losses, psychological trauma, despair, tortured love affairs and revenge? If you mourned Iron Man’s death at the end of “Avengers: Endgame”, it’s probably because the MCU spent nine feature films building Tony Stark’s emotional profile, including three “Iron Man” films, building bones most basic of a romantic relationship between Stark and Pepper Potts along the way.
His great love was threatened, kidnapped, seemed to die and was reborn. Sorry to pop your bubble, folks, but this is premium foam material.
And on TV, using playful images and destructive dialogues instead of putting the amplified savagery in front and center, we get a sense of the human complexity and the paradoxical nature that Scorsese was talking about. In their stillness, the show provided us with a backstory about these two people at the same time that it placed us face to face with some part of ourselves.
Unfortunately, there will be no sequel to “WandaVision”, only the next chapters of the stories born there and carried out within the plot of another character – specifically “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and the next Spider-Man movie, each guaranteed to be full of eye-popping visual effects and digital destruction.
As regrettable as that, at least from a filmmaker’s perspective, this does not mean that neither she nor another Marvel series to follow, the next “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”, is likely to influence their related theatrical releases to reach the psychological level or emotional complexity Olsen, Bettany and Parris bring to their presentations here. Instead, they will further blur the line between TV and movies, between the need for streaming services and the uniqueness of the theatrical experience.
If we’re lucky, we’ll have more shows like “WandaVision” at the bargain, stories that involve that emotional danger that Scorsese hails instead of discovering new ways to show impossibly muscular beings breaking each other’s bones. Stories from the heart and about heartbreak are embedded in our memories more permanently than a thousand artificial fireballs and outbursts of anger, and we could use many more of them.
TV and comics share something else that theme parks do not share, which is the notion that successful narratives can end, but the stories that originate them are not completely dead. Therefore, the ending of “WandaVision” may not be a final goodbye to everything you have strived to achieve. Perhaps it is simply a melancholy “See you later, dear”.
All episodes of “WandaVision” are being broadcast on Disney +.