In 2019, Martin Scorsese described Marvel Cinematic Universe movies in a way that made the final “WandaVision” true. “The closest I can think of them are just as good as they are, and with actors doing the best under the circumstances are theme parks,” the filmmaker told Empire. “It’s not the cinema of people who want to transfer emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
In the end, “WandaVision” proved that much of Scorsese’s summary is true – but not all. About 30 of the final 50 minutes were one of the rides. This distraction happened to coincide with star witches throwing balls of energy at each other as they floated in the air. The curious neighbor Agnes, who is apparently a centuries-old wizard Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), lets go of her glamor to tackle Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) while Wanda’s Vision (Paul Bettany) faces his twins out of sight man raised as a government weapon.
Cars fly through houses; heroes are beaten by asphalt. A recent superpower Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) defeats an obsessed mystery man who pretends to be Wanda’s brother Pietro, but who turns out to be an anonymous man whose surname sounds like ‘boner’. And, spoiler warning, Wanda triumphs by losing everything. She created a sitcom version of Westview, and her most loving version of Vision, to escape in the face of her sadness. The only way it could end up was painful – not the kind that physically bruises or draws blood. The kind that jerks your heart.
Does not matter. It’s an MCU creation, and eventually everything’s blowing. . . and explosions, screams and flames. Amusement park excitement, just like the man said, and not a particularly pulse-pounding version of such.
However, once the battles end, Scorsese’s assumptions about superhero titles return and return to the features that make “WandaVision” so amazing. To save the people of Westview, she ends her perfect world and includes Agatha in her supporting “curious neighbor” role as Agnes. And in her last heartbreaking moments with Visoin, Wanda does her best to convey the emotional, psychological experience of her being human to the synthetic being she loves.
“Wanda, I know we can not stay that way,” Vision said softly as his doom crept closer. “Before I go, I feel I need to know: what am I?”
“You, Vision, are the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in me. You are a body of threads and blood and bone that I created,” she tells him. “You are my sadness and my hope. But mostly you are my love.”
He shed a tear, kissed her hand and remarked, “I was a voice with no body.” A body, but not a human being. And now, a real memory. Who knows what I might be next? … We said goodbye before, so it goes without saying – “
She finishes, “- we will say hello again.”
It was not a simple dialogue about the roller coaster. It was a romantic film magic, as Scorsese defines it in a subsequent piece published in the New York Times. If cinema, as he puts it, ‘expresses the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt each other and love each other and suddenly come face to face with each other,’ then ‘WandaVision’ is the first MCU title to meet Scorsese’s qualification.
And the only way to do that was as a TV series.
‘WandaVision’ should not be rejected because they have walked away from the genre’s standard canvas to work creatively through his feelings, not to mention who Wanda is, and not just, who Vision is and who Monica Rambeau has always had at heart.
Admittedly, Wanda’s outing has the miserable effect of torturing a city full of innocent bystanders, leaving us with the feeling that her despair is permanently affecting their psyches and her reputation. None of the most interesting supers are upright all the time. Fans of the comics get it, just like people who love soap during the day and for the first time.
That’s why Marvel put the story of Wanda Maximoff on TV, a medium whose larger networks are female – certainly on ABC for the best part of recent history. Presumably, Disney, a brand built on princesses and brides, is forever.
Since “WandaVision” is a bridge between Disney + and theaters, and between TV and movies, why not build the bridge with the story of a woman who is also a witch, wife and mother, and whose only task is to keep the world running and happy and stable? After all, the best TV versions of superhero stories have been about women. This was true of ‘Wonder Woman’, and certainly of ‘Agent Carter’. Even ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ became necessary to see once the woman took over the leader of the team.
This woman simply asks us to step away from the roller coaster of deadly lasers and fist fights so that we can better appreciate the sweet anguish in thoughts like, “What is sadness, if it is not love to persevere?”
Bettany delivered the line with all the contemplative softness it deserves and in a tranquil setting free of threats or even loud noises.
“WandaVision” has introduced numerous mindsets because there are countless ways to think about them. But the end of it proves that someone at Marvel took to heart what the great filmmaker said.
The frustrating part for movie lovers may be that the result was a beautiful, thought-provoking TV series as opposed to a revealing but concise superhero feature. But all the artistic dimensions that the filmmaker cherishes come down to a single concept, intimacy, that no franchise action movie can channel with any depth.
Television can. Therefore, ‘WandaVision’ worked best when the battles were psychological and emotional, as opposed to relying on a VFX-heavy approach to brutal conflicts. This is also the reason why such a story could only stare and deal with a woman who did not have superhuman strength, extraordinary fighting skills or bulletproof skin, and who was not entirely a hero or a villain. Wanda is simply a person paralyzed by sadness.
Whether this is the advantage of the series or the disadvantage of it depends on what you expect from a Marvel title, or one from DC or any other comics.
Common complaints among people who do not like “WandaVision” often amount to the lack of fight scenes. My husband, who only watched it because he did not want to miss any narrative threads being transferred to future films, wrote it off as a soap opera.
But all comics are soap operas. What is soap if not stories informed by loss, psychological trauma, despair, tortured love relationships and revenge? If you regretted the death of Iron Man at the end of ‘Avengers: Endgame’, it’s probably because the MCU spent nine functions building Tony Stark’s emotional profile, including three ‘Iron Man’ movies, which the bare bones of a romantic relationship between Stark built. and Pepper Potts along the way.
His great love is threatened, kidnapped, seems to be dying and is born again. Sorry to burst bubbling people, but this is premium sudser material.
And on TV, by using playful imagery and using a spoken dialogue instead of putting the wild front and center, we get a sense of the human complexity and paradoxical nature that Scorsese was talking about. In his silence, the show gave us the story of these two people as we brought ourselves face to face with a part of ourselves.
Unfortunately, there will be no “WandaVision” sequel, only the following chapters of the stories born there and realized within another character’s plot line – specifically “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and the next Spider-Man film, each guaranteed with striking visual effects and digital destruction.
Just as unfortunate enough, at least from the point of view of a filmmaker, it means that it, like the other Marvel series being followed, is the following: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is likely to influence their related theatrical releases to strives for the level of psychological or emotional complexity that Olsen, Bettany and Parris bring to the fore here. Instead, they will further blur the line between TV and movies, between the need for streaming services and the singularity of the theater experience.
If we’m lucky, we get more shows like “WandaVision” in the bargain, stories that work with the emotional danger that Scorsese faces, instead of devising new ways to break impossible muscular creatures’ legs. Stories from the heart and about sadness lie more permanently in our memories than a thousand artificial fireballs and outbursts of anger, and we can use much more of them.
TV and comic books share something else that theme parks do not, which is the idea that successful narratives will possibly end, but the stories about its birth are not entirely dead. The finale of “WandaVision” is therefore perhaps not a firm farewell to everything he has tried to achieve. Maybe it’s just a sad ‘So long, honey.’
All episodes of “WandaVision” stream on Disney +.