If—like Wanda Maximoff—you’ve been living in your own reality, distant from all things in 2021, you may not have heard about “WandaVision,” whose first and only season ended on March 5th. (If you’re planning to watch it and hate spoilers, stop reading now.) The immensely popular show, from Disney+ and Marvel Studios, follows Wanda, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, an Eastern European refugee with “chaos magic” powers, and her husband Vision, a synthezoid (android) who died in the events of the Marvel movie “Avengers: Infinity War.” Nearly all nine episodes of “WandaVision” depict the pair in what appears to be domestic suburban bliss. Nearly all take plots and visual style from one of the sitcoms that Wanda watched for solace during her bleak wartime youth, from the black and white of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to the faux-reality vibe of “The Office.”
These anachronistic, self-contained sitcom scenarios fall apart as people from the outside world break in. Wanda has created these spaces as a refuge for herself and Vision, whom she resurrected, after finding the disassembled parts of his robot body in a government research facility and using her powers (and the power of her grief) to bring him back to life. In doing so, she has brainwashed an entire town, Westview, New Jersey, and split it off from the rest of America. The U.S. government, understandably, would like to bring the town back.
As with almost all the characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vision and Wanda have parallels in the comics. Stories about the pair, especially when they’re together, tend to be stories about the impossibility of the nuclear family. The summum bonum, the point of a well-lived life, as per American popular culture, is a faithful, monogamous, sexually appealing marital partner; approximately two biological children; and security—physical, financial, and emotional—for them all. And a dog, and a lawn.
Many of us don’t want that. Most never get it. No real woman can become this version of a cheerful, loyal homemaker, keeping chaos at bay forever, and no real man can possess the patriarchal authority that the American nuclear family demands. Certainly Vision never did. Played in the M.C.U. by the impressively English Paul Bettany, the burgundy-skinned Vision can fly, make himself immaterial, fire energy beams from his body, and generally do anything the plot demands that a superhero do—anything, that is, except be a real man for the sake of his one true love, Wanda Maximoff, played in the M.C.U. by the charismatically anxious Elizabeth Olsen. (Comics Wanda is Jewish and Romani; M.C.U. Wanda, like Olsen, appears to be neither.)
The first few episodes of “WandaVision”—which grabbed a huge amount of attention—take place entirely, and later almost entirely, within Wanda’s sitcom world. As the finale approaches, questions get answered, but the answers drag the show gradually into the larger, less surprising, militarized world of the M.C.U. It turns out that the sinister Tyler Hayward, the director of the U.S. intelligence agency sword, had allowed Wanda to resurrect her husband—though not to conquer a New Jersey suburb—in order to step in and use Vision as a weapon. Within Wanda’s Westview, an equally sinister witch named Agatha Harkness wants to control Wanda’s magic, eventually taking her illusory or synthesized or wished-into-being twin children, ten-year-old Billy and Tommy, hostage.
M.C.U. Wanda, like comics Wanda, is villain and victim, a dangerous tool for older, male bad guys to use; she’s a symbol of failed (but sexy) femininity, a woman too strange and too hurt to be the sex symbol her body would otherwise yield. Her powers—illusions, vague magic that recasts the world, “probability hexes” that make unlikely outcomes certain—match the mental-health conditions that are often produced by complex childhood trauma: dissociation, denial, retreats into fantasy, refusals to live in a world that one can neither dismiss nor accept.
These same powers make “WandaVision” a useful way to think about superheroes in general, and about the M.C.U.—a collection of the world’s most prominent superheroes—in particular. Do we treat them as consolation, as power fantasies? As ways to imagine the bodies and communities that we wish we could see? Are they utopian, dangerous, frivolous? Replacements for the real world or protests against it? In one of the series’ episodes, a cable TV headline scrolling in the lobby of sword H.Q. reads “families reunite.” It’s a description of life after the events of “Avengers: Endgame,” in which half the world’s population is brought back after five years of being dead. But it also describes what Wanda wants—what many real-life families want, especially those disrupted by Trump-era immigration policies and now by the pandemic.
If “WandaVision” gets meta about its superhero genre, it also gets meta about its medium. The show is a kind of reality TV, and a rebuke to it. Wanda scripts the show’s events, or tries. And its stage sets, cameras, and broadcast schedules (the people at sword learn what’s happening in Westview because a perky, nerdy scientist named Darcy Lewis, played by Kat Dennings, learns when to tune in) reinforce the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, who argued that we all live as if we were on set, anyway. Our everyday lives have “front stage” and “backstage” areas, places where we perform for our housemates and officemates, and places where we recover and learn our lines.
This paradigm makes Wanda the showrunner, the nearly omnipotent creator by whose word plots swerve, sets rise, and supporting characters vanish or return. She defeats Agatha Harkness—a literal wicked witch—by recasting her as the nosy suburban neighbor, in Westview, that she once pretended to be. (“I’ll give you the role you chose,” Wanda tells her.) The series changes archetype from episode to episode, at Wanda’s only partly conscious whim. It’s literally, and punningly, her attempt to keep her vision in place. And—as with actual showrunners who tussle with networks, and budgets, and actors—she discovers that even she can’t make everything right.
Meanwhile, the series’ actual showrunner, Jac Schaeffer (one of the few women to helm an M.C.U. franchise), offers several surrogates for the viewer. Outside the Westview bubble, watching on TV screens, there’s Darcy, the F.B.I. agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), and the intrepid Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), once a kid in the “Captain Marvel” movie, and now a brave adult who defies the Feds and acquires her own superpowers. But Schaeffer’s weirdest, most plangent surrogate is Vision himself. He’s the one who’s present in each episode, and who has to figure out what Wanda’s done to him. He can decide—after he learns about his powers—whether the other denizens of Westview, who are caught up in Wanda’s pocket universe, stay inside her dream or learn the truth, because he can un-brainwash them with his electronic hands. And he’s the one who—after flying back and forth a lot, trying to escape from Wanda’s creation, and battling a white, murderous, humorless duplicate of himself—has to decide if he should live and be happy with Wanda or let himself die along with her made-up world.
Of course, he dies. He always dies. Fake men can’t live: the cost of the imposture proves too high, and the good fake men—the ones like Vision—will take their own lives or let themselves be killed. That’s how Vision died the first time, in “Infinity War,” persuading a younger Wanda to destroy the life-giving Mind Stone in his head. And it’s how he lets himself die again, as Wanda folds up the Westview illusion, although with an out, in case M.C.U. writers need him, since the white, re-made Vision survives. The price of maintaining the suburban illusion—an expanding bubble that threatens to engulf the rest of America—proves too high.
In this sense, Vision is every dad who discovers that patriarchy maintains itself by harming and restraining the people around him, including his own kids, even if they are boys. “I know you’ll set everything right,” he tells Wanda. “Just not for us.” He has to die for others to live: at first in the slow death of his meaningless white-collar office job, and then in his actual dissolution. And he is, too, not just a viewer surrogate, not just the impossible American everyman, but a symbol of the flimsiness with which we construct so many of the roles we take on. “I have been a voice with no body,” Vision remembers. He has been put together (in the M.C.U. universe) out of scavenged robotic material, and (in our world) out of tropes and clichés. “I do not have one single ounce of original material,” he admits to his double.
No wonder that so many readers—and so many trans readers, in particular—see ourselves in melancholy androids and self-destructive robots, a science-fiction heritage that “WandaVision” does well to recognize. (The Westview movie house is showing a film called “Tannhauser Gate,” a nod to “Blade Runner” ’s famous replicant monologue.) It’s why the preteen, pre-M.C.U. me, reading all the Marvel comics that she could get, saw herself hard in Vision, always trying and failing to be a good, kind, devoted, powerful man. I no longer see myself, much, in him. I do, however, see in the M.C.U. version of Vision—as in the earlier comic-book portrayals of the character, written by Tom King, Steve Englehart, and others—a series of relentlessly gentle, relentlessly doomed attempts to become the man he thinks he should be.
Wanda sees this, too. She not only resurrected him but taught him how to be the man for her: how to protect her, how to give her space, how to go to work and how to come home. She’s the protagonist and the antihero, and gets the most screen time by far. She can reshape the world—or at least Westview—however she likes. And yet (as Agatha complains), Wanda is using her power just to make breakfast for dinner, to maintain one synthetic husband, two artificial children, a reclining chair, a picket fence, and a dog. (Alas, the dog dies.)
The whole arc of “WandaVision,” with its meta-TV notes, its set changes, its knowingness, its parade of Easter eggs and catnip for critics, spoke to the task that not even Wanda could finish—the task of making and keeping the kind of home that “Bewitched” and “The Brady Bunch” and “Malcolm in the Middle” told her that she had to create to be happy, safe, free. And the series’ comparatively weak ending—Wanda, having said goodbye to Vision, flies off to discover her true sorcerous self in eastern Europe—speaks to the dilemmas of twenty-first-century feminism, and even of twenty-first-century life: Once we have found our way past so much grief, after so many spent and destructive illusions, what do we want? Who else can we try to be?
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