Water Cooler-ing With WANDAVISION (Patreon)

I miss the water cooler.

You know, that horribly outdated idea that office workers gather together and gab about what was on tv last night? In reality, it was always a bit awkward, what with Gil from accounting talking about what happened on Survivor, no matter how many times you’ve said you’ve never seen it. But behind the water cooler is the importance of the “cultural moment.” Part of the reason I liked writing about The Mandalorian so much is that it got us talking about *something* every week, even if some of us were lukewarm about that something. These kind of dialogues are important because most of us are inherently communal beings. And a conversation about The Thing is often just as important as The Thing itself. It’s what brings The Thing into the real world instead of just being left to ruminate in our heads (and it’s part of the reason I love writing about this stuff). And as much as some people may not like the following fact, the water cooler means that popularity in and of itself is a trait of genuine worth.

And it’s becoming increasingly harder to find.

Sure, our ability to gang up on mass social media can amass tens of thousands of vague non-spoilery tweets like OMG, but it’s take away from the honeycombing effect of discussion on message boards or whatever else it may be. More than that, the cultural moment of stories is just harder to achieve in a streaming world, even when it shouldn’t be as tough as it is. I’m honestly still shocked Netflix isn’t picking up on the long-term problem with their business approach. All their shows peter off despite initial success and they wonder “why that is???” Well, full season dumps are great for a first seasons and the process of discovery. It’s always “oMg hAvE yOu seen Emily in Paris, it’s ridiculous!” and then people get in on the bit.

But, despite what many may assume, it’s horrible for sustaining / growing your audience once the core base is established. Because a season two or three will arrive and the conversation will disappear in a weekend. You lose your best possible ongoing marketing of ongoing conversation. And yes, community is 100% drives long term interest. Imagine LOST without the conjecture during the week to week wait. No one would be postulating and deep diving because you’d have a lot of those answers by seasons end (sort of). In essence, a full season dump starts and ends its own conversation. And discussion worthy moments get lost in the sea of ten to thirteen hours. No, Disney Plus at least seems to understand that our biggest established works tend to thrive on the developments of week to week conversation.

And few things are more established than the MCU.

It’s arguably the most popular thing on the planet. Where Star Wars seems to spur endless argumentation, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the warm, uncomplicated blanket by comparison. Sure, I’ve talked my problems with it on thematic levels and the complete lack of dramatic ambition, but I would never begrudge the way their simple formula charms and delights millions. They’re like that dependable player that always grabs 10 boards and never misses their 15 foot jumper. That consistency is a real skill. And because the MCU been going on so, so, SO long at this point, much of its audience is invested to the point that it’s almost impossible to back out. If you’re in for a pound, what’s a few more pennies? Which also means we’ll pretty much follow the MCU anywhere it goes. Which brings us to the here and now. Behold! The MCU’s first Disney Plus foray!

And they are bringing it somewhere… interesting.

EPISODE ONE

Yes, in one way, Wandavision is an obvious departure from the marvel formula, which has been pretty set in stone for years now (the fact I’m NOT watching something with a washed out blue-gray color palate is reason alone to celebrate). It’s genuinely different from all those previous offerings. And yet, when you look at the breadth of cinematic offerings, the sitcom dreamworld thing has been well-mined territory from Pleasantville, to Stay Tuned, to Mulaney, to the work of David Lynch, to even the (grossness) of films like Natural Born Killers. We know the language and the tropes of sitcom so firmly and thus we get the meta of their use pretty quickly. Which means the real question is what you do with it.

Here, WandaVision takes the somewhat underserved couple form the MCU, that would be Scarlet Witch and Vision, and… well, we suddenly we simply find that they are living Bewitched-style black and white sitcom world. The obvious driving question” is “why?”

The problem is the two characters don’t know why and they don’t seem to be in a position to know that something is even wrong, either. Despite little cracks in the surface, they carry on with their 1950’s sitcom world because… well, because they do. The probable answer is because the writers need them to go along with it because that’s the fun of it. And the ending motivations can just come out as part of the mystery (yes, we’re mystery box-ing this shit, which we’ll come back to). Meanwhile, the storytellers can just play in the space of their Bewitched style world. But once again, my question is why? What are they after in doing so? Because right now it seems the only real goal from the first episode is to cake their story in irony and make fun of sitcoms past. The problem, at least in the first episode, is that it wants to do that while mostly *being* a sitcom. Which also reveals a very simple problem with the plan.

Making sitcoms is really, really, really hard.

People love to dunk on the form like they’re the the dumb punchlines of comedy or something. I get it. What with forced laugh tracks and all the like, but all the classics work like fucking gangbusters for a reason (and the fact they’re still incredibly popular in steaming says a lot). The writing on shows from Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, The Office, Parks & Rec, etc. is downright impeccable. I know many with the modern jaded eye look will at it and go, “It’s so safe!” And I’m like “Uh, Taxi was making better at making hard drug jokes then anything I see in popular culture now, but fine, mistake the artifice for the art.” Books and covers and what not. And the problem with sitcoms is they have to be really good for the form to work right, often firing on every single cylinder of plotting, timing, and craft. When the do, there are few things better.

So my problem with the first episode of Wandavision is that settles for making fun of the thing it actually needs to be. Here, you get five minutes in and the joke is stale. Worse, you feel like the makers of the show are only getting by on the lark and hopes we will, too. Sure, it is fun to see these dramatic actors cut loose (and both Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are both great actors), but having fun in the process of imitation isn’t really enough. Shows like I LOVE LUCY slay because Lucille Ball has killer timing and expression. Without that, you’re just doing pantomime sitcom. You’re missing the most crucial part. And so much so should be evident.

But more troubling is the fact that the show has a “baseline reality” problem right now. Because none of this has a reality we care about, it’s hard to care about what actually happens, even if its a sitcom lark. If nothing matters then nothing matters. And if we’re playing with dreamland, well, the abstract storytelling has to be visceral and character driven work to make it work. Which reveals that beneath that, we have a basic character motive problem.

Because Wanda and Vision are going through the motions of this dream world. Their sitcom stories are fun, but ultimately unimportant to us, and certainly not all that pressing to them either. Especially when we know the real story at their core. In the “real world,” Vision is dead, killed by Thanos. And Wanda is alone. As such, We can fill all sorts of conjecture about what this dream world is really about and who is behind it. But the characters are not in on that conjecture, either. Which means the two of them are passengers in their own story. Larks are fun, but a crippling lack of agency can be just that, crippling.

And to a viewer, yes, it can feel boring.

Unfortunately, thanks to good old fashioned tangible details, the conversation online seems to be about the show’s “pace.” But the issue is not about pace. It just feels “slow,” because of the aforementioned motivation issue and us sitting around waiting on our heels for them to catch up with us (instead of us leaning into the story). But the feeling is already disappearing into the wrong argument and counter-arguments. I don’t wanna single anyone’s tweet and link to it like like I’m dunking, because I’m really not here, but someone wrote something that I think summarized the sentiment so clearly that I want to quote it: “Studio Executives / Powers that be #WandaVision is not slow paced. It’s wonderfully paced. Do not take these notes/tweets seriously. Not everything should move at a frenetic fever pitch’d pace. Sincerely, someone that wants variety in his content.” Yeah, I agree, it’s not slow pace. But again, that has nothing to do what with what I *think* is bothering people (and I really like don’t like the smugness of that last part of that statement about variety). The reason I think people were saying they were bored was because it’s delaying the characters from engaging in the core driving forces of their own show.

Ultimately, every show needs something it’s after. Twin Peaks, for all it’s tangential weirdness and absurd soap operatics, had a central driving question that wasn’t based in curiosity, but empathy. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” wasn’t just about conjecture, or even really the whodunnit. It was about how much the loss hit everyone in the town n a deeply emotional way. It was a grief and the holes in our hearts and motived EVERYTHING we saw. And here, the lack of having something you’re actually after is even more troubling because the show seems to be outright running from itself, too. Our characters are not actively trying to understand “the Pleasantville-ness” of their situation. Thus it is a disconnect on a disconnect on a disconnect. And all we have left is curiosity…. and curiosity only gets you so far.

Of course, milage may vary.

The lark might be fun enough for some of you. And the curiosity, too. Again, my job is try and look at at this kind of thing and assess why a lot of people might feel a lot of different ways. And I’ll agree that the best possible sign for the show comes at the end when the camera starts to come in close to the actors faces durning the choking scene and things star to wig out. Here, we can wonder a bit about what’s really happening as the sitcom world is starting to come down. But in true MCU fashion, it’s largely a tease. And the question of all teasing, is that can it sustain on what it offers in between? That’s the whole thing. Week to week is harder, but infinitely more rewarding. It just can’t be weak to weaker.

And you have to know what you’re really after.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

-Since this is trying to do sitcom, I want to track the actual good sitcom lines that show up. My favorite in this episode was: [defeated] “… I wore a turtleneck.”

-“SY ABELMAN!?!?!”

-Speaking of needing great sitcom talent to function, bringing in That 70’s Show alum Debra Jo Rupp is just the ticket. She was the kind of actress who could make every line work on that show. But that’s because there was a real understanding of her character, not just her timing and look. And please note how much of her character here is just stand in artifice, here. Take lessons from the background players of The Office. Everyone needs a baseline characterization to really work.

-Give us our daily thanks for Katheryn Hahn. God, she’s the best. But I’ll get more into why as the show evolves.

-It’s just so lovely to see Paul Bettany’s face.

-Was anyone else reminded of Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell? Anyone? Just me? Maybe it’s because I once saw a production of it with Booger, Dauber from Coach, and Bryan Cranston pre-Breaking Bad days. It was directed by Jason Alexander… the LA theater scene is bananas fun.

Okay, onto the next one!

EPISODE TWO

This is better!

While it’s still clearly playing in sitcom world and tropes, it’s also throwing out a lot of the imitations that were holding back the first episode. Like, it throws out a lot of the traditional sitcom cinematography in favor of over the shoulder mid shots and closeups. Which not only lessens the pantomime it allows the characters to actually emote. More importantly, it’s just finally getting a lot more weird (that was actually a note in my first episode “for as weird as the conceit of this is, this actually needs to be weirder.”) This delivered on that promise. From the over Pleasantville-ness of the colored objects, to The Stepford Wives-esque talent show planning, to the just loosening up having the moment where Katherine Hahn checks out the postman’s ass. This is the kind of needed visceral stuff I was talking about last episode, because it takes away from the imitation. And it fits right in with “drunk” Vision and what happens when you just let it run wild.

One interesting thing of note is the way the show plays with dated cultural 1950’s-ness. Sure, there’s jokes about commies, but also doing the traditional MCU thing where it’s mostly pretending that race and racism doesn’t exist (the obvious outlier being Black Panther, which handles the subject so damn thoughtfully). I’m utterly unsuited to really diving into the topic for obvious reasons, but I’m curious to see where it goes and what people think of it in this show. Because this strategy, of course, has a benefit of allowing actors of color to actually have fun in the dated sitcom world instead of being saddled with the same sad tropes.

But at this point, I don’t have a whole lot to say aside from some conjecture I’ll speak to at the end of the piece. So I”ll put the random thoughts section right here in the middle.

RANDOM THOUGHTS!

-It is now officially canon that Wanda and Vision fuck.

-Dawn from Madmen! Dawn from Madmen! Dawn from Madmen!

-I genuinely thought Dottie was Lana Del Rey for a second.

-I wrote “they literally gummed up the works, that’s cute” in my notes and then they make that joke… all I have to offer is bad puns, I’m sorry.

-Actual good sitcom line: “That was my grandmother’s piano.”

-I remembered Strucker from the comics and I was thinking the “he’ll make time for you” line was some new plot thing and then I totally forgot he WAS in the movies already as some HYDRA guy. Alas.

-Bettany gets to have A LOT of drunk fun, but his little delivery of “haha, no.” is what got the actual laugh from me.

-I like that 7 minutes of credits in these eps is TOTALLY throwing me off when I look at the runtimes and am like “how does this have 10 minutes left!?!??!”

-“What’s in box!!!!!” Ah yes, the much loved and completely not challenging mystery box approach! *throws confetti.* How will this go? Well, it actually brings us to the quasi-Lynchian ending.

The second they emerged onto the street at night I as like “Oooh i hope this show gets more noir,” and then beekeeper man shows up out of the sewer and you appropriately get just enough of those Lynchian vibes where it’s like “teh fuq?” But what’s telling is that, in an abstract way, the show immediately gives away a huge part of the game. Wanda doesn’t like this so rather than investigate, she basically rewinds time, goes back into sitcom world and in another Pleasantville-ian stroke, it no becomes a color world.

Look, we could have a lot of conversations about the specifics of this and how this is clearly a Mulholland Drive type situation, but I’ll cut to the chase: it’s hard to be interested in characters who are actievely avoiding their own story. Meaning it’s more fun to want characters to dive into the issues with Beeman from the sewer. In Lynch’s work, the characters are actively trying to solve the mystery. Instead, we’re running away. Sure, we at least understand “the bigger picture” of Wanda’s operative role in this universe, but I genuinely don’t know how much more pantomime we’ll have to keep going through just to come back to the SAME EXACT spot the audience’s mind is now. And more importantly, we’re even more unsure what we are rooting for or what we want the characters to be doing in the meantime. It’s the MCU so I know they’ll be having fun. But mysteries can drown in these circumstances. And as the end of the show keeps telling us:

“Please stand by.”

Admittedly, we will.

What can I say? I like water cooler talk.

<3HULK