This has been brought up a lot in discussion posts for this course, so my interest was piqued. I finally watched Wanda Vision, and I loved it. Generally speaking, I am not a big Marvel fan. I have watched a few Marvel movies with friends in the past, but nothing really drew me in the way Wanda Vision has.
One of my favorite things about the show, is the way in which Wanda Vision evokes the idea of trauma and its connection to television. During our reality TV session, my group discussed the notion of trauma framed in the context of reality TV exploitation and manipulation. However, a narrative series like Wanda Vision frames the idea of trauma not only within the content itself, but as being rooted within the very nature of television. Much like Wanda in the show, I think many people feel drawn to television as a way of coping with everyday pain and sadness. Wether on a personal level when we seek to distract ourselves with sitcoms or childhood nostalgia, or in the context of national trauma, such as watching the latest US election unfold, where we turn to CNN anchors to calm our anxieties. There is a soothing nature to the television that we access inside our homes that allows for a processing of trauma to take place.
Wanda's processing of grief matches our own relationship to television. In the show, she is able to construct a reality for herself within which she can establish a semblance of normality that helps soothe her pain. Anything that threatens to disrupt the comfort of this televised reality is to be eliminated immediately, in a kind of extreme coping mechanism. In some ways, the lengthy and unending nature of television is somewhat dissociative. Time passes and emotions are filtered, and before you know it a season has passed. Of course this dissociative state cannot last, but Wanda is able to create a space and a time for herself to shield herself from the traumatic state of affairs in her real life.
While television's content can sometimes misrepresent trauma or evoke it gratuitously, I think that the inherent form of television in its use of temporality and formulations allows it to function as a powerful tool for coping with real life trauma. The medium is the message!
Supplemental Response #1
ReplyDeleteJulia, I really love this post because I had a very similar experience with WandaVision. I’m not a huge fan of Marvel films, and I struggled with this show’s more Marvel-y bits (the superhero battles, the government investigation, the “villains”, etc.). However, I was really engrossed in the show’s relationship to trauma and its commitment to telling a story about grief and processing/coping with grief.
As you say, Julia, WandaVision reveals the way that we use television as a form of escapism during traumatic realities, which Wanda does herself more literally by embodying the “comfort shows” that she watched as a child to escape the reality of her war-torn childhood, literally living within them again to escape the reality of her partner’s death. Your point that Wanda’s “television fantasy” removes her from her grief to a dissociative state from which she must eventually return, in turn reflecting television’s dissociative “flow” is excellent. I think Williams’s “flow” is really interesting here, especially as Wanda experiences momentary ruptures in her “flow” state throughout the show, when something goes not according to plan or when a non-period costume or set piece reveals itself briefly.
I’d also like to expand a little by noting that Wanda uses sitcoms in particular to form her escapist television fantasy. Sitcoms, and especially the ones that WandaVision draws inspiration from, are usually centered on a nuclear family—even ones that are not centered on a nuclear family use a kind of found family (friends, roommates, a workplace cohort). Wanda’s desire to have a family with Vision is lost with his death, and through this sitcom fantasy she is able to live out this lost reality.
Further, while television might serve as a dissociative state from which we must eventually emerge in order to cope with traumatic realities, I think the show also hypothesizes (however successfully) that television might be used as a real coping mechanism through which we may be able to process our trauma, and not just as an escapism. Through living in a sitcom-like fantasy with her partner and raising a family with him, something she is no longer able to have with him, I think Wanda is able to process this as a fantasy and come to terms with the loss of this reality—and thus of her partner himself.