Wandas Fake Reality Highlights A Modern Problem With TV Addiction
Wanda’s Fake Reality Highlights A Modern Problem With TV Addiction
Contents
The social allegory of WandaVision is a brutal deconstruction of everything wrong with TV addiction and, particularly, escapism in entertainment.
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The escapist fare of TV magic has a dark side, and Disney+’s WandaVision, while certainly a product of superhero fantasy, has managed the impossible in crafting a nuanced meditation on the potentially harmful nature of escapism through TV addiction. TV can be a gateway to many things: discovery, laughter, new perspectives, and paradigms that bring enlightenment, but in the case of Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch, it can be demonstratively said to bring nothing but suffering and chaos. That is, Wanda’s journey from superheroine to psychic terrorist provides a bit of a cautionary tale on the state of TV entertainment in the culture at large; that when TV is used as a form of escapism from the daily lives of the viewers, it can easily turn into a damaging addiction, with horrifically serious costs to the overall well-being of those so afflicted and everyone else around them.
This tragedy began when Wanda was struggling to cope with grief. Following the events of Avengers: Endgame, Wanda journeyed to Westview, NJ, to visit an empty plot of land her deceased lover, Vision, had purchased for them to live in together. Overcome with anguish, Wanda inadvertently unleashed her powers to create a fantasy world based on the sitcoms she used to watch as a child, sitcoms which portrayed the often inaccurate, yet still idyllic, image of the ideal American life. In the process, she ended up transforming the entire town, including all the unwitting people who lived there, into an extension of her fantasy. In many respects, Wanda’s dream, made reality through her magic, is representative of some members of the audience’s desires as well; people who yearn for a simpler, more entertaining life devoid of the negative consequences that often arise from real interpersonal relationships and situations. The only difference is she had the power to actually make it real, for herself at least.
In plainest terms, WandaVision is a story that warns against allowing one’s private fantasy world to overtake the reality everyone else lives in starring a woman who, while a great hero, has begun using her reality-warping powers to enslave everyone around her to her most capricious desires. Taking a few tips from the 2005 Marvel crossover House of M, WandaVision kicked off as an era-skipping pastiche of the traditional American sitcom, secretly hiding the revelation that Wanda, an Avenger and supervillain-destroying warrior, has created this false reality by forcibly reducing an entire town of people into bit-players in order to perform shenanigan-laden foibles of the kind of life she desperately wanted, but could never have. Ostensibly a woman alone in the world with no family and an uncertain future, Wanda’s story is a parable that demonstrates the tragic consequences of living vicariously through an existence defined by escapist entertainment. It is an existence revealed to be devoid of substance, compassion, or truth. And it is becoming more common in the modern age of binge-watching television.
Wanda’s Sitcom World
In the penultimate episode of the season, “Previously On”, viewers are shown Wanda’s life as a parade of horrors, the cruelty of which has driven her to her current depravities. It is no secret why Wanda has committed this atrocity: her life is riddled with seemingly never-ending tragedies and heartache, beginning with the deaths of her parents in a Cold War-era conflict and continuing through the death of her brother, and finally the death of her synthezoid lover, Vision. Even the strongest of individuals would find it difficult to cope with this kind of repeated, grievous loss over time, and unfortunately, Wanda finally breaks completely when she is forced to witness Vision’s dismantling at the hands of S.W.O.R.D.’s acting director, Tyler Hayward. Having no life left to return to, Wanda uses her vast powers to find solace in the only place that ever seemed safe to her: a world made in the likeness of the American sitcoms she would watch with her family.
What emerges is a poignant allegory on the nature of identity and reality in the modern media age, and a scathing commentary on the detrimental effects of TV addiction to the culture at large. Wanda proceeds to cast her unwitting mind-slaves as one-dimensional archetypes similar to those found on the television programs she once found a safe place in, a place she could reliably escape into without consequence whenever she needed to. This time, however, there are consequences because she is playing with peoples’ lives. And perhaps the most damning aspect of Wanda’s character is that she doesn’t seem to care for the majority of the series. As a television sitcom heroine, she’s always right anyway.
This evolving world of her own making, complete with forced laugh-tracks for jokes which continuously fail to land and rife with contemporary prejudices that populated many sitcoms across the decades, ends up delivering the true moral of this story in brutally honest fashion, despite the backdrop of deception. These worlds found on TV were never really wholesome, they were simply lighthearted but ultimately dark reflections of the more banal aspects of life spun into escapist fare with the aid of gorgeous actors in far-fetched, unrealistic situations. Again and again, WandaVision’s sitcom stories introduce the unsavory trends found within these eras, such as the casual sexism of the 1950s, acceptable misanthropy of the 1990s, and apathy toward mental illness of the 2000s, and challenges the viewer to look at these issues for what they are even as they’re being played for comedy and amusement: part of an undercurrent of societal indifference which enslaves people into inescapable roles in the real world just as Wanda has enslaved the people of Westview in her own fantasy.
The Harsh Reality of Wanda’s Fake Westview
That is not to say that Wanda is completely without sympathy. It is hinted that she doesn’t quite know what she’s done, an immensely powerful young woman having finally succumbed to unadulterated grief. However, Wanda is not exactly a hero in this story, no matter how it’s looked at. In the WandaVision finale, “Series Finale”, the people of Westview beg Wanda to allow them to return to their lives free of her influence. At first, Wanda denies that she acted out of cruelty, exclaiming that she has “kept them safe” and put them “at peace.” However, unable to deny the truth, she breaks down and painfully lashes out at them by telekinetically choking them in a moment of terrifying recognition. She realizes she has become as cruel as any of the supervillains she’s gone up against. Even if it were not her intention, her lack of consideration for other people, and their right to live free of the kind of fantasy that only exists in television, has turned her into a monster.
This is the most biting commentary of the series: Wanda’s monstrousness is the same kind of underlying cruelty many people exercise when they begin associating television families and friends with their own realities. By and large, people in the real world have no real similarity to the fictional characters who exist on television shows no matter how quirky they are. However, when the audience becomes enthralled with these fictional realities and transfers the logic found within these characters onto people in their own lives there is a dehumanizing effect that results, one which is increasingly prevalent in the modern age.
How WandaVision Represents the Dark Side of TV Escapism
What WandaVision portrays in its surprisingly bleak ending is the clear and present danger TV presents as an escape from everyday reality. For many in the modern age, television programming has become an acceptable obsession, with binge-watching and plot theorizing serving as a substitute for many aspects of what they might associate with a real community. While the art of fiction has long been celebrated for its positive effects, positing and highlighting emerging social problems and difficult personal circumstances, the age of streaming services has brought the pervasiveness of fictional worlds within the lives of the audience to a new level: a level which can have dangerous ramifications if left unquestioned.
Like many who indulge in TV after a long day’s toil, Wanda enjoyed television because of the humor and perceived innocence of the experience, learning to identify with the protagonists of bygone sitcoms such as The Dick Van Dyke Show. These were heroes who always wound up okay even after whatever misadventures befell them, quite unlike Wanda. The happy ending she so desired never materialized for her, she was always left with emptiness and loneliness. With her takeover of Westview, Wanda finally found the power to enact this happy life she wanted, a world she had near complete control over, even though she knew it wasn’t real.
When the audience of a TV program uses it as an escape from their own personal bereavements, and begin to identify more with the characters of said fiction than with the very real pitfalls of modern life, it overtime can create a bubble effect in which they begin to view the real people in their lives as little more than tools, means to an end, for their own sense of identity. Beyond that, in this age when television programs can be binged for hours on end with the click of a button, attachment to these fictional creations can manifest in a resentment towards the real world, which seldom plays out as cleanly or humorously as the worlds on television do. Escapist entertainment by its very nature is populated with easy relationships and relatively simple conclusions to problems no matter how complex they are. Expecting the real world to deliver this kind of experience does a disservice not only to the people around oneself, but also to the audience’s inborne ability to cope with these kinds of issues.
Ultimately, the message of WandaVision is to resist retreating into escapism as a means to cope with disappointment and sadness in one’s life, as it can have a terrible cost. WandaVision will likely go down as the “art-house” MCU installment, and high-minded though it may be, perhaps this is not such a bad thing. After all, exploring a permeating social condition is one of the purposes of popular culture. Even if it’s about discussing television addiction through a superhero TV drama.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/wandavision-westview-fake-reality-tv-addiction-escapism/
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