[TV Review] WandaVision

This review contains spoilers.
 

There is a certain conceit when watching a film (or, in this case, a TV show) in the MCU that it is about the broad strokes, not the tiny details.  Yes, references and allusions towarads other Marvel stories and characters are littered in the background of every shot, but they hardly serve the narrative that is right in front of us.  The trick with the MCU, and why Infinity War and Endgame worked so well, is that this has always been a very macro story, about the large moving pieces from superhero history coming together into big tent pole climaxes.  It happened in the build up to The Avengers, to Civil War, and obviously to Thanos' big bad pair of films, but a lot of time this means the smaller stories get lost in the shuffle a bit.  For every Thor Ragnarock or Winter Soldier, there was a Thor Dark World or Iron Man 3.  Ant-Man couldn't really hold my attention, and everything I've seen of Captain Marvel makes me not want to watch it, though I imagine one of these days I will.  The individual stories are almost always about set up over their localized conflicts, moving heroes, villains, and magic artifacts to the proper position so that the folks over at Marvel can tell us the story they really want to tell, but which requires the proper set up first.  

I've gone on record saying this worked incredibly well with Infinity War for me, but after Endgame I'm just not so sure I'm interested in this story anymore.  Part of this comes from how long these films have been going on now.  Iron Man released in the waning years of my high school career, a time when The Dark Knight was still one of the best films I'd seen in theaters, when Christopher Nolan felt like a new visionary, and though I was moving into more ambitious (and perhaps less sufferable) territory with Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch becoming some of my favorite filmmakers, I was still incredibly green when it came to some of the more ambitious sides of the medium.  Infinity War and Endgame was the payoff my younger self has been waiting for, but now that we enter a new age of superheros in a time where even the rather great The Boys can hardly hold my attention because of its genre affiliations, I don't see how the straight faced world of the MCU is going to keep me going.  

I have a series of exceptions, of course.  Spiderman has always been a favorite of mine, and I've still yet to see Far From Home but I intend to do so, and if X-Men ever gets wrapped into the MCU, those films will definitely be something I look out for.  But outside of that little has me interested.  

But then WandaVision happened.  WandaVision took the world by storm.  It was bizarre, it was cryptic, it seemed to work along the same lines as Twin Peaks and The Leftovers in the way it played coy with audiences.  But, much like everything in the MCU, it had no faith.

WandaVision starts out well enough, co-opting the multi-camera sitcom into a cryptic look into Wanda's psyche after she lost the love of her life (twice!) in Endgame and Infinity War.  Wanda played the clever but dopey house wife, and the deceased Vision the doting, oafish husband.  The show rode a fine line, where the jokes were hammy and unfunny - threatening to be downright boring - but threading in odd, out of sync scenes here and there.  In the first episode there was a dinner scene straight out of Eraserhead, and it had me intrigued.  The MCU had never worked on this sort of level before, had never toyed with its audience in a way where they were not allowed to properly predict which story this could possibly be leading to.  There was The House of M, obviously, but this was under such different circumstances no one quite knew how this was all going to go. 

It lasted for three or so episodes.  The veneer of surrealism quickly fell apart as the MCU scrambled to explain everything.  Three weeks was enough, they decided.  Any more would threaten to challenge their audience, who was unprepared for such types of entertainment.  Suddenly, we had a government operation interested in living weapons, we had a rough track of what Wanda was up to before she disappeared behind the scarlet wall around the town of Westview.  The show continued a few coy points here and there - Geraldine not being what she seemed, the motivations of S.W.O.R.D. director Hayward in acquiring Vision and the way he manipulated security footage into implying Wanda stole Vision's body - but by and large the show was beginning to turn into a traditional MCU show. 

There were aspects, here and there, of interesting developments.  Vision quickly came to realize not all was what it seemed, and sought answers.  Wanda became quickly pregnant, and even more quickly gave birth to twin boys, one with her powers and one with the powers of her brother.  Her brother, as well, seemed to come back from the dead, albeit with a different actor than before.  Each one of these things had interesting possibilities tied to them.  Vision's search for answers showed the darker side to what Wanda had done to this town, of the suffering those imposed by her spell were going through, and of the futility of his ever leaving, lest he be destroyed.  Vision was up against a couple of potential threats: the threat that Wanda was doing something terrible, and the threat that he wasn't, strictly speaking, real.  Wanda's kids managed to force themselves to grow up to roughly the 10-12 year old range, allowing them to find their powers and question this world for themselves. Wanda's brother, QuickSilver, was most bizarre of all.  After the release of Endgame, the question on every fan's mind was: where does this go next?  The most obvious answer seemed to be into the multiverse, the concept that the MCU exists in multiple universes (or, at least, can, since most of it predominately takes place in one).  The potentialities of this mechanic could lead to the recently acquired X-Men franchise and Deadpool to be woven into the MCU without much ret-conning.  Whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen, but Marvel wasn't against teasing it.  The recasting of QuickSilver was with fan favorite Evan Peters, who played the character in the X-Men prequels.  QuckSilver was one of the few characters that seemed to be allowed between franchises, showing up in Winter Soldier and in X-men: Days of Future Past not far apart.  Scarlet Witch herself is a bit of an ambiguous figure, being both apart of the greater Avengers plotline as well as X-men (the House of M storyline WandaVision is largely based on is traditionally thought of as an X-Men story, and Wanda herself is a mutant).  Showing the other QuickSilver in an MCU property brought about a lot of speculation. 

WandaVision, by its midpoint, had lost its most interesting edge, but had brought up questions about self with Vision, built up potential plotlines by introducing Wanda's kids (who have quite a lot of stories in the comics), and by creating a bridge between the defunct X-men franchise and the MCU.  But, as is Marvel's passion it would seem, none of this went everywhere, and the show quickly fell apart.  QuickSilver, it turns out, was just a brainwashed actor, an insincere tease at what everyone wants but without commitment.  S.W.O.R.D. director Hayward rebuilt Vision using some of Wanda's powers, allowing for Vision to come back sometime later, probably in a movie, so Vision's third fucking death doesn't have to matter, and Vision doesn't have to wrestle very much with the ethical quandary of Wanda's actions.  Wanda's kids where destroyed with the rest of her vision of Westview (although we do get teased they could exist somewhere, potentially in the multiverse, during the post-credits scene, which may be the only exciting thing to come from this finale).  Worst of all, somehow, is that Wanda's obvious atrocity in her holding hostage and torturing - whether to her knowledge or not - of a whole town gets swept under the rug with a shrug, "you were grieving.  We get it."  This being the MCU, repercussions could come somewhere down the road - potentially leading to Civil War 2, which believe it or not I think would actually be a relatively good idea - but it could just as easily ignore the whole affair.  

The show died for me, in particular, on the eighth episode.  Now that the big bad guy (who really did very little up to this point, when you really think about it, as most of it was still Wanda) was out and about, Wanda was walked through her past where she was able to see where all of this came from.  Some Hydra experiments involving her powers, and her powers coming forth during the bombing of her home were all fine, but the MCU, unable to let anything just be inferred, decided to explain away why she chose sitcoms.  It couldn't be that they were simply a source of comfort, simply an idealistic American viewpoint that this country uses to standardize its beliefs and work through its least controversial troubles (some outlier episodes notwithstanding), no, it turns out Wanda's dad had a collection of American sitcom DVDs.  My complaints range from the insulting implication to the nit-picky.  On the latter end, Wanda isn't that young.  These DVDs did not exist when she was a child, anywhere.  On the former end, who cares?  She didn't need an explanation, because we have all seen and fallen into sitcoms before.  We know why we watch them.  We know why they are a source of comfort, at least on the level WandaVision is willing to work on.  It's bloat at best, condescending at worst.  The fact a show that attracted viewers in part on its mysterious execution went on to explain even that which needed no explanation is profoundly disappointing.  The MCU's attempt at something ambitious ended in one of the most traditional MCU outings yet, and I just can't care anymore. 

 

      

 

5.0

[TV Review] Fargo - Season 1

 

Fargo as a TV show seemed like a hard sale from the get-go.  Though not to all, the idea of adapting some version of the Cohen Brothers' classic 1996 film seemed at best a cash in, at worst blasphemy.  There were a few that thought of the potential of such a thing, sure, but for the rest of us this looked like another creative dead end in an industry that had long since given up on original ideas.  It's old hat now, but the show worked, and worked magnificently.  Fargo doesn't follow the film's plot, nor does it take place in the same location, but it does find itself threaded through some of that film's loose ends.  Instead, Fargo takes place in 2006, in Bemidji, Minnesota, where one Lester Nygaard finds himself in a hospital with a broken nose after being harassed by his old high school bully.  

The Cohens' always seemed to be operating in the periphery of American folklore.  America as a nation is incredibly young, missing a lot of that deep (though retaining the horrific) history that has been smashed and reassembled into myth and slivers of storytelling.  But that doesn't mean it isn't without its own folk tales.  Fargo, the film, was more closely related to parables about greed than the crime genre it espoused to be inspired by.  But even there, a quaint and modern paradigm acted as the foundation to what Fargo had to say.  It was about a man struggling with his used car business, who needed money and chose the wrong path in order to get it.  He invited evil into the world, but his reasoning was understandable and empathizing even as it was disagreeable.  

Likewise, Fargo the show has an element of folklore to it.  Lester Nygaard, in the hospital and feeling pathetic, talks to the man sitting beside him in the waiting room.  The man beside him happens to be Lorne Malvo, a hitman for hire who has more in common with the manifestation of evil than he does any human soul.  The yarn Fargo spins here has to do with a man who has been pushed over one too many times, a sociopath that is more a force of nature than a man, and the quaint, small town cops caught in the midst of something they cannot understand.  But Fargo the film isn't the only Cohen Brother's film the show takes from.  Most notably, elements from No Country For Old Men have found a welcome counterpoint to some of Fargo's more amusing and humbling aspects.  Lorne Malvo is so obviously a mirror of Anton Chigurh (down to full scenes stolen wholesale from No Country) it is almost embarrassing, but a stellar performance from Billy Bob Thorton saves the entire thing and makes the character one of the defining aspects of the show.  Where the combination shines, however, is in its themes.  

No Country For Old Men is cut from a similar cloth as Fargo, a fact more notable if you've seen the Cohens' first film, Bloodsimple, which feels like a natural melding of the two.  Both are films that involve greed allowing for greater violence to infect the world around them.  Their most notable thread, however, is in their sense of nature.  No Country For Old Men is a somewhat ironic title, because it isn't that the world has moved on from the peace of old folks' past, it is that human nature is simply not being obscured any longer.  The great threat of Anton Chigurh isn't some new form, exactly.  Violence and cruelty has always existed, it was just that we thought that was behind us now.  For Fargo, the force of nature is chance, more than anything else.  Chance has brought coincidence into an already unhinged situation, where plans have gone awry and bodies are beginning to pile up.  The kidnapping doesn't go as planned, the ransom finds itself with a few more, irreconcilable kinks in the wires.  It is no coincidence, however, that chance also plays a part in Anton Chigurh's character.  Chance, chaos, and all that may entail is the natural state of the universe.  It is empathy and kindness that allow us to carry on through it.

Nature is evil in so far as it allows horrible things to happen, not that it is inherently something to be fought against.  In a Cohen Brothers' film, nature and evil are things to withstand, to survive your way through, and part of that has to do with letting go of lofty ideas and careless gambles.  People, when they do not heed their own limits and the value of others, allow for nature to intervene.  Fargo's Lester is not a good man.  He may be immediately empathetic by being meek and spineless, but his character is one of selfishness.  Lester's invitation towards nature to come blowing through is an act of chance.  He meets Lorn Malvo because he is weak.  Just because he doesn't fight back doesn't mean he doesn't have resentments, and is the harboring of those resentments that prevents him from saying "no" outright to Malvo when asked if he wants Malvo to "handle" his ex-bully.  It was the slightest of nudges, but it led to a torrential downfall.  Malvo is the evil of nature, but Lester is the evil of men who have lost their empathy.     

 

 

 

9.0