You Deserve Better Than WandaVision
By Jakob Johns | Misfit Media Columnist
There’s a world where I adore WandaVision. If you pitched the show to me without telling me any names, I’d be ecstatic. A witch creates a perfect lover, only to trap him within a manufactured reality resembling sitcom television? The ingredients to Black Mirror’s Be Right Back contrasted with the sweet icing of I Dream of Jeannie? Wonderful, jam it down my throat all you want.
This kind of thing is pretty effective in niche horror – the juxtaposition between a horrible concept and a cute world. Popular web-series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared comes to mind for many pretty quickly, as does Too Many Cooks. Both start quite innocuously, depicting a nice, safe reality – until things go wrong, and abhorrence seeps in through cracks you noticed too late.
“Wonderful,” my alternate-reality-self says. “Gimme.”
WandaVision holds its breath and sucks in its gut for the first episode, and actually manages to pull off a convincing “safe” episode with very few clues to what is really happening. “Stop it,” the old woman tells her husband, tears trailblazing through her makeup. “Keep going,” my alternate-self says in response. But. a few episodes in, WandaVision’s gut starts to show. It continues to do somewhat decently with its first subtle clues, such as the show literally stopping and stepping back to undo something with no warning or effect, making you question whether or not it even happened. But then, we step out of “The Hex”, and all of your questions are answered.
For some reason.
WandaVision eludes genre, but often for the worse. This is because its genre is non-existent, and in fact substituted for something else: the MCU. But, for the purposes of discussion, we’ll call the show a fantasy thriller/horror. Whether you’re making a thriller or a horror, tension is incredibly important. You must torture your characters. Trap them, and boil them, without telling us or them why quite yet. This tension exists for a time, but it snaps practically instantly as soon as the show starts running out of sitcom ideas.
On the other hand, you have something like I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s actually quite similar in a lot of ways, right down to a woman in red being trapped in a bizarre reality, unsure of how to cope with the inconsistencies of both her world and her mind. Watching the mystery of the film unravel is interesting, tense, and eventually heartbreaking. Now, we come to WandaVision’s problem. The creepy answers that hide behind the safety of genre in other stories are truths that you don’t always want to know. Creating good answers is incredibly difficult, but when done effectively, they can grant a story so much more depth and satisfaction than they would have had otherwise. But for this to work, the story must exist in a vacuum. WandaVision is enveloped in the weight of an entire cinematic universe – rather than being an adaptation of a single book.
Don’t pretend you aren’t smarter than you are. Don’t pretend you didn’t know exactly how it was going to end. If you went into this show knowing it wouldn’t be more than Marvel, good for you. I’m glad you enjoyed it. But if you thought otherwise, you’ve been fooled. When SWORD was introduced, WandaVision turned back into a Marvel product, and it was at that moment that it stopped being worth your time. You’ve practically seen this show twenty times. You might as well binge-watch The Office again if you want the same thing over and over.
If you want something special, don’t pretend you’re gonna get it out of this. Just because Sam Raimi is directing Doctor Strange 2 doesn’t mean that it’ll be unique either. Go find a gem. If you want something surreal, start with something different, like I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly what my current-reality-self is enjoying.