In the final minutes of WandaVision Episode Four, Wanda Maximoff briefly sees a glimpse of reality: Vision's grey, lifeless corpse – a hole in his head from which Thanos ripped The Mind Stone. "What's wrong," the Vision corpse asks. Suddenly, Vision is back in full colour, he's alive, telling Wanda, "We don't have to stay here. We can go wherever we want."
"No we can't," she tells him. "This is our home... don't worry darling. I have everything under control." This final scene seems to reveal what fans have speculated about WandaVision for weeks: that she's created this alternate reality in which she can live with Vision forever, escaping the truth of his death and her pain. It's a plot that seems to be adapted from the popular House of M comics, in which Wanda manipulates space and time in order to cope with loss.
She's in control. She can go wherever she wants, but she chooses to live in the comfort of a nostalgic television world where Vision is alive and everything is perfect – even if it's all a fantasy.
That this show debuted during a time in which we are collectively escaping to nostalgia to cope with a pandemic and the general chaos of the real world, is truly incredible timing. Because as we're enjoying the nostalgia of the vintage TV references in WandaVision, studies have shown that people are doing, in the real world, exactly what Wanda is doing in the MCU. Since March of last year, much has been written about how we've used '90s movies, vintage TV shows, comfort culture to get a respite from the onslaught of terrible news.
As Hal McDonald Ph.D. wrote in Psychology Today early in the pandemic:
When hourly reports of global, national, and local death tolls from the pandemic confront us with the mortal threat that surrounds us on every side, nostalgia can help us cope with the mortality awareness triggered by this confrontation. While recalling pleasant memories of our past cannot make us any less aware of the inevitability of death, the sense of meaning with which these memories invest our lives can help us to be “insulated from the cognitive, emotional, and attitudinal effects of heightened death-awareness.” In other words, “nostalgia prevents death thoughts from becoming death fears.”
Of course, this is nothing new or unique to the pandemic. Experts have been trying to understand the nature of nostalgia since at least the late 17th century when it was used to describe troops longing for home during the Thirty Years’ War. Today psychologists note that nostalgia "acts as a buffer against existential threats. Nostalgia is a way of offering ourselves hope and inspiration."
That's what makes WandaVision such an incredible, meta experience right now. As I noted after the first two episodes, this show appears to be commenting on the very nature and purpose of consuming comic book entertainment—holding a mirror up to us, the viewer. Superhero stories are a multibillion dollar industry of nostalgia. There has possibly never been a time in human history where nostalgia has occupied such a dominant force in global pop culture. Marvel and DC have both dominated the box office over the last decade with characters whose origins date back to the Thirties, and that's not even including the return of Star Wars, and our cultural landscape of reboots and adaptations.
So, in a way, WandaVision is an analysis of its own existence in popular culture. Like Wanda, we have wrapped ourselves in a comfort blanket of familiarity. And WandaVision not only offers the pleasure of visual storytelling from the 20th century, it offers familiar superhero characters (who first appeared in the Sixties) and twists that recognisable formula into a new genre all together. Unlike other Marvel films or, say, Wonder Woman 1984, which seem to exist just to commodify our need for nostalgia, WandaVision makes the brilliant (and rare for this genre) choice to comment on that very psychological human desire and its place in popular culture.
But, at the end of WandaVision Episode Four, it seems to hint that perhaps hiding from reality in a bubble of nostalgia isn’t the most healthy choice. Monica Rambeau wakes up after being expelled from this alternate reality and says, “It’s all Wanda.” Cut back into Seventies sitcom fantasy land. Wanda picks up her baby, looks at Vision, and asks: “Well what should we watch tonight?” Vision complies, even though the look on his face shows some serious concern for where this is heading. Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" starts playing over the credits.
And while nostalgia can help us feel better in the moment, one researcher warns that “a person who is clinically depressed or is challenged by an anxiety disorder might be more likely to ‘get lost’ in nostalgia, becoming trapped in nostalgic reverie as an escape.”
That certainly could describe Wanda or the greater IRL moment that we find ourselves in.
Another article in Psychology Today, synthesising a number of early 2020 studies says that nostalgia is a “double-edged sword”:
If we try to look back at the past for events that make us feel nostalgic, we often think about positive things from our past that can lead to feelings of contentment and happiness. However, when life events trigger a feeling about the past, we often think about things that are not as positive, and that can have a negative impact on our sense of well-being that can last for a few days.
So far in WandaVision there has been no clear villain. In that sense, it's unlike any other superhero property that we’ve seen during the genre’s explosion in the 2000s. The only evil that is lurking behind the white picket fences and studio audience laughter is Wanda’s own trauma. Mental health, and our own survival mechanisms, are perhaps the most real and terrifying antagonists that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever faced. Unless you take Thanos's snap as an allegory for climate change (it's not), there has never been a more urgent and relatable conflict in a superhero story outside of HBO’s brilliant Watchmen. And at this point, it does seem that WandaVision could reach the heights of Watchmen as an elevated superhero series. Where Watchmen’s villain was systemic racism, WandaVision’s is anxiety and trauma.
Can Wanda escape this bubble of nostalgia in which she’s sheltered herself? That is the question the remainder of this series has set itself up to answer. And, if she can, maybe we can too.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
