I'm going to be talking about the end of Wandavision here, so spoiler alert.
Wandavision ended just a couple days ago. Opinions on the finale are mixed - there are some who wanted all manner of crazy reveal, establishing mutants, Mephisto, "the multiverse" (as if that were something that would be created rather than already existing?) bringing in Reed Richards, or Magneto, or whatever.
There are others who felt disappointed that what had begun as a formal experiment in genre pastiche with a lurking mystery beneath it devolved into people flinging CGI special effects at one another.
But that's not to say that everyone's disappointed, either. A lot of people loved the series from start to finish, and I am, frankly, still trying to decide which of those two latter camps I'm in.
Marvel has this odd conundrum with the MCU - it needs its pieces to fit together so that the Avengers-style crossovers can happen. With the exception of the underwhelming Age of Ultron, the Avengers series-within-a-series has been the massive, unmissable event. It's fan-service, sure, but it's also deeply satisfying fan-service - the final battle scene of Avengers: Endgame was rousing and shockingly felt like it earned its gravity and stakes, and felt big in the way that superheroes are supposed to feel big.
Setting up all those infinity stones took a lot of movies, and sometimes meant tacking things on, like the weird cave scene for Thor in Age of Ultron.
But while that big crossover event is the unique thing that something like the MCU can do (and despite the imitators, at this point there's nothing else like the MCU) just as crucial is the ability to focus in on the story of a particular movie (or show, in this case) protagonist.
Wanda has been in the MCU since Age of Ultron, then appearing in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and very briefly in Avengers: Endgame. She has always been a supporting player in these - the foe-turned-ally in Age of Ultron, then the tragically inciting incident for Civil War, and then the star-crossed lover in Infinity War (actually, one can read her and Vision as the protagonists of their leg of Infinity War.)
Wandavision then, allowed us to focus on her as the real main character of the series.
Wandavision's themes are not terribly hard to figure out - at the center of the story is the theme of trauma. Wanda has lost her parents, her brother, and her lover. The anguish of that loss is what led to her creation of this false reality in which she literally escapes into the comforts of American sitcoms. The desire to live in a world without any real pain is naturally an appealing one. Indeed, the superhero genre is itself usually an escapist fantasy - we imagine that good people are empowered to do good in the world. Recall that figures like Superman and Captain America were created by Jews who were watching our people being systematically murdered by a juggernaut-like regime that looked poised to take over the world. What better escape from the indifference of great evil than to imagine someone with superpowers to fight that evil?
In theory, the story is about Wanda stepping away from her denial, leaving the escapist fantasy behind, and acknowledging her grief in order to take steps to move on and make something else of her life.
And that is fucking tough. Wanda's life is totally unfair, to have lost so many important people in such horrific ways. I lost my Mom to cancer almost four years ago and I still find myself entertaining fantasies of going back in time and ensuring she got surgery to prevent it before it had metastasized.
But therein lies some of the challenge of telling a story like that. As far as I know, time travel is impossible, and even if it isn't, I sure don't have the genius understanding of physics or the equipment to make a time machine. And some of the way that Wandavision ends undercuts the themes.
While Wanda is battling Agatha in a witch duel, the Vision we've seen the whole series is fighting what is, actually, the body of Vision that we've seen since Age of Ultron. In a moment some people found silly but I found fantastic, Red Vision ends the fight not by beating the crap out of his old body, but by discussing their philosophical position. He cites the famous Ship of Theseus problem, and ends up more or less uploading all of his memories to the old body, which had previously been purged of them.
We don't really know what that means for the White Vision. One would think, though, that with a real and not illusory body along with all of Vision's memories, that makes him, well, Vision.
But rather than staying and helping, White Vision leaves and we don't know where he goes.
Now, sure, we could get into the comic book mechanics of things and say that because Vision no longer has the Mind Stone, there's no actual sentience there, making him at best a Philosophical Zombie, but if not, then have we just erased the reason for Wanda's grief in the interest of keeping Vision around for future movies and such?
Yes, logically if there's a way to bring him back, there's no reason that people in the MCU shouldn't try to, but doesn't this just open the potential for Wanda to ignore the meaning of her grief?
There's another thematic inconsistency to the show as well, though: when Agnes reveals herself as Agatha Harkness, we're introduced to the notion that this is all magic, rather than some sci-fi phenomenon. While the early MCU explained away magic as just sufficiently advanced science, even explaining away Thor in that way, more recently we've had explicit use of magic-magic with folks like Doctor Strange (granted, as someone who has thought a lot about the philosophical difference between fantasy and science fiction, I actually think that any consistently-behaving magic would ultimately just be incorporated into the laws of physics) but more importantly for Wanda, we're introduced to the idea that there is far greater mastery that Wanda might achieve over her power.
Wanda's use of magic runes to defeat Agatha does work as a sort of character-growth set-up/pay-off, but that pay off feels like it's paying off an entirely different theme - rather than the story of a woman learning to accept the truth of her grief, this is more the classic hero's journey story of the protagonist incorporating the lessons they've learned to display a new level of power.
As a climax, then, it feels weird.
Now, if we want to get into serious Joseph Campbell mythos stuff here, the Hero's Journey tends to end not with the final confrontation, but with the "Return with the Elixir," a moment of healing after the big battle is waged. This, then, I suppose, is Wanda's decision to end the Hex, allowing it to collapse and take her sons and husband with it. Given the harm that she's inflicted on the other people of Westview, it's the only moral thing to do. And it's the most satisfying of the "endings" here.
Vision does suggest a bit of hope, saying that they've said their final goodbyes before, so there might be a chance to see one another again after all (he also knows there's another him out there.) I can't decide if I think this is undercutting the finality of the moment or if it's more akin to the kind of hope that we in the real world have - hope that there's some sort of afterlife in which we can see the loved ones we've lost again. A hardcore atheist-materialist might think that such a hope is another escape into fantasy, and they might not be wrong, but it's a rather popular coping mechanism for grief nonetheless.
Now, when it comes to post-credits scenes, I don't mind them being full fan-service and continuity-based. That's what they're there for, as a bit of a tease for what's coming next, ever since Nick Fury showed up talking to Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative. Wanda hearing her sons through the magic of the Darkhold is something I'm happy to just let sit there as a tease of future stuff (presumably the next Doctor Strange movie,) even if it again suggests that Wanda's not really letting go of her grief as we had hoped she would by the end of this story.
So, now, I think we should talk about the SWORD stuff.
Monica Rambeau is all well and good as a character. She's got cool superpowers and she served as an aid to Wanda by pushing her to confront her grief. And while I'm certainly happy to have her show up in the next Captain Marvel movie (having a badass black female superhero is something that the MCU definitely needs) I don't know that she really fit with this particular story.
Frankly, I think SWORD, along with Monica, Jimmy Woo, and Darcy, probably could have all sat this one out. It seemed like they were there really just to establish that White Vision and "Photon" are both now in the MCU, but I don't love that they pulled focus away from Wanda and her struggles. Don't get me wrong: tons of great performances all around, and I also think that at the least Wanda's experience seeing Vision's body laid out in the SWORD headquarters was a big part of what set this all off.
But I also think that all the SWORD stuff also crowded the reveal of Agatha Harkness and Wanda's magical power, such that it felt like this out-of-left-field thing that came in in the last couple episodes. I wanted Monica's story and her transformation to serve Wandavision, not Captain Marvel 2, given that what we were watching was Wandavision.
It's not that you can't have superhero crossovers within solo films, but it works best when there's a thematic connection. The Winter Soldier had Black Widow come to team up with Captain America, but that made perfect sense, as she was used to the morally ambiguous cloak-and-dagger stuff that Steve Rogers had never dealt with before, and provided a different perspective that was still very relevant to the plot. Thor Ragnarok's incorporation of the Planet Hulk storyline earned it not so much thematically but by just doing so in a really fun way (ok, so maybe that's a bad example.)
The worry I'd have for the Disney Plus shows is that they're more concerned with setting up other stories than telling their own. I began to feel that worry in the second season of the Mandalorian, and I think the MCU has mostly been pretty good about allowing each of its constituent pieces work on its own. Wandavision, at times, felt like it was burdened with things that weighed down its genuinely genre-bending formalistic weirdness.
I, for one, am glad that the show didn't wind up being used to set up Reed Rirchards or Mutants. I think casting Evan Peters as replacement-Quicksilver was a sort of audience-spiteful trolling that I could have really done without. I mean, other than making the audience question whether the X-Men movies were being incorporated into the canon, what other purpose did he serve being there?
With Deadpool coming to the MCU, let's leave all the meta stuff like that to him, and maintain the narrative integrity of the other stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment