The trouble with WandaVision
So it happened the other day: someone had the audacity to take a dump on WandaVision and the Internet got plenty mad. Neither of these outcomes is surprising. After heaping lavish praise on the 50s and 60s stylings of the series’ first two episodes, I’ve found myself feeling empty and cheated after waiting another week for thirty minutes of, well, nothing much. The ‘community’ believes all the narrative liberties in the world, at the expense of clean story arcs, are defensible if they adhere to comic book canon. And yet Zack Synder’s horrid Watchmen tie-in — remember that? — was a success at little else besides affirming that comic book panels operate differently from film sequences.
And certainly from television episodes.
Allow me to start from somewhere. I am currently making the argument, in my day-to-day life, that advertising agencies must begin to admit the jig is up. Going forward, brands will only be able to position themselves next to consumers if they offer them relevant (ugh) content (ugh) experiences (ugh!). When I turn on FIFA, just for instance, there’s a totality of marketing to the moment I check how much for a Tottenham Hotspur jersey (UGH!), pay for the satellite television that grants me access to the Premier League, and then swear an inadvertent, distinctly masculine allegiance to NIKE. A perfect advertisement-to-sale journey has been completed. Brands and therefore agencies need to make human beings part of unique ecosystems, and the best company in the world at doing that happens to be Marvel Studios.
It’s got everything a good advertising agency, especially in 2021, should. A visionary creative director in Kevin Feige, who claims to live and die by all the source material, by the creativity, and whose finger is so on the pulse he only ever tweets about all the IP. Marvel Studios has got IP. In 2021 a good creative shop owns as much of the media asset as possible, which is why Disney (same bloody difference) worked so hard to pry back at least some of the rights to Spider-Man.
In order to justify a reputation for innovation, Marvel Studios presents itself as perpetually open to innovation. Don’t make me go down the list (okay, fine; the Russo brothers, a New Zealander literally named Taika Waititi, and Jac Shaeffer, who engineered WandaVision), but it’s great PR to build a content maker that goes out of its way to let marginalised dreamers tell such legendary stories. It’s all so carefully, patiently, and dynamically orchestrated, that you could almost miss its obedience to the machine.
I too whooped and applauded and even cried at the sight of Captain America summoning Thor’s hammer to re-engage Thanos, in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame; but only after sitting through the special effects-bloated Infinity War, and only at the expense of so many smaller movies it’s now suicidal for Hollywood to invest real money in. The essential plots to these big-screen translations come from books some of us collected in our youth. But comic books are like paintings for their static nature — you can’t just call it a day if you shoot a scene of the Mona Lisa weeping into her own hands. Repeatedly, however, fans fail to demand from tie-ins what they do from original experiences: coherent storylines, complete character arcs, a little damn substance. Why?
Because all the advertising, all the hoopla, actually works.
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It’s such perfect timing. Just as a global pandemic confines us to our bedrooms, Marvel are ready to pursue us there — making an effortless, no-expenses-spared transition from cinema to streaming. I struggle with how to say this to a neutral — “WandaVision is …?” — because the rather violent expectation here is that you have some awareness of the Avengers, the Xmen. That you, too, wept as you watched the Star-Spangled Man raise that hammer from the ground.
But yo: WandaVision is a story about grief so profound, so human, that a woman with ultra-telekinetic (and telepathic) abilities erects an entire alternate reality to assure herself that her husband is still alive. In its first couple episodes, it looks and feels fantastic. Whoever you happen to be, whatever you read, wherever you grew up, you can admire its deep dive down TV nostalgia — its hokey sense of humour, its black-and-white palette, and even (yes) it’s underlying promise that something wicked this way comes. The thing Marvel does most brilliantly, and quick and early in WandaVision, is defy physics: Cap raising the hammer, Dr. Strange sprinting between a Rubix cube of inter-dimensional malaise, Wanda Maximoff suspending all her kitchen’s crockery in mid-air. And then, if the party goes on too long, nothing else happens.
Endgame ends in a massive smorgasbord of hero war that pales in comparison, in heart, to literally any war scene Clint Eastwood ever directed. WandaVision keeps teasing and teasing, like, yes, a month-long teaser campaign for a not-so-brand new product. If it’s a story about Wanda’s trauma, neither you nor its federal operatives get anywhere near enough to actually share it — feel it. (The other day I cried at a scene in The Office, which I’m of course re-watching; I haven’t cried once during this other show, which swears it’s about trauma.)
Each episode abides by pattern. The TV homages move forth another decade, very competently. Someone temporarily snaps out of the intricate spell Wanda has rendered upon the residents of Westview, NJ, and makes us wonder whether our heroine is in fact a villain. Wanda’s husband, Vision, literally crawls towards the truth, while bureaucrats and plucky scientists squabble over what’s the right thing to do. You’re supposed to just ride with it all, because who knows what cool shit’s coming, and as long as there are no major transgressions against canon. But those aren’t the standards by which you measure art, which Feige could probably identify if it smacked him in the nose; which WandaVision’s classical salad dressing is more than sufficient evidence of. But critique, which is a good thing, has to interrogate this submission on old-fashioned truths. Do you have a relationship with the protagonist, do you think you know her, without having to project meaning onto her identity? If not, do you have a relationship with any of the show’s supporting characters? Do they have lives outside of the protagonist’s, well, bullshit, and is there a visible, meaningful ripple effect on all of them when something seismic happens?
I bet you WandaVision will end on a hell of a note, fireworks left, right and centre. I bet you roundabouts episode nine, maybe ten, Wanda will make some speech, cause some spectacle, and you will look in her eyes and really see her for the first time. And I bet you a thousand more loops are left open, to be closed by more series, more movies; because you can justify anything, sell anything, when you fuck around with time.
