I dunno - I don't think things have to be a 1:1 allegory to work artistically

Wanda's shtick FEELS very resonant to me even if the moral links are all hazy and fudged https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1380993534300459010

Are there many people in the world with a situation that specifically mirrors Wanda's? No of course not

Are there a lot of marginalized people who long for the "problematic" image of white picket fence domestic life? Absolutely

It's not a direct 1:1 connection planned from the beginning - the sitcom thing is a retcon about her character, there's no "sitcom stuff" in her backstory from the movies explaining her trauma, they don't have much to do with each other

But like, so what

It works

Like here's the hot take -- it's a common metaphor for the American postwar experience that the whole 1950s culture of "safety" and "stability" was a PTSD response

A reaction to the trauma of the Great Depression followed by the existential crisis of World War II

An oversimplification, surely, but a resonant one -- the overwhelming message of postwar politics and media was "bringing the GIs back home", creating an idyllic utopia to justify everything people had endured during the war

An echo of Warren Harding's "return to normalcy" after the Great War and the flu pandemic in the 1920s

Everything people dunk on quiet suburbs for as cringey and conformist now was an explicit selling point back then -- comforting rows of houses, all the same

And, like, I've mentioned in threads before the immigrant side of this narrative -- the advertisers and propagandists sold this really hard to American citizens at home but they sold it EXTRA hard to people abroad whose skills they wanted to exploit

People who were in a really shitty situation in the place where they grew up who were sold this tantalizing vision of The Good Life through American TV and music and movies

And some of them actually got it

The dude from Passion Pit (Michael Angelakos, who is Greek-American) said his viral hit song "Take a Walk" (the dance-pop version of Death of a Salesman's critique of the capitalist American Dream) was very much about the immigrant experience

That especially if you hung out with the older men in his family -- a lot of them very culturally Greek, still speaking with accents, still rolling their eyes at a lot of garbage about American politics and culture, very socially liberal and anti-xenophobia and so on

But they were all capitalist *as fuck*

It was the one part of their politics that was unshakable

It was the whole damn reason they were here

They never stopped believing in *that part* of the American Dream -- anyone can get rich if they work hard, if they deserve it

Beyond "Greek culture" or "American culture", beneath everything else, this was a core value that their whole identity revolved around they would not let go of until they fucking died

Fuck the socialists, fuck the taxmen, fuck the regulators, I'm still waiting for my come up

(This is... *extremely* resonant with my experience with older Asian-American guys

Like eerily so)

(It's also very reminiscent of Walter Lee's arc in A Raisin in the Sun, a play that revolves around the desperate struggle of one family to move out to the suburbs and everything the suburbs represent)

It's the theme of one of my favorite plays I've ever read in my entire life that I've never actually seen in performance (and am afraid to in case it ruins my memory of reading it), Chay Yew's Wonderland

Seek it out if you can, it's a gut punch

To me that's like the core thing WandaVision is about

Knowing that the American Dream is a bullshit dream that hurts people

It's never really paid out what it advertised

Those white picket fences hide a whole legacy of repression and abuse and suffering and pain

The rich families who Had It All back in the Good Old Days had tons of alcoholism and drug addiction and kids running away from home and couples eventually messily divorcing and people hitting midlife crises and writing long screeds about how Everything Is Bullshit

People hated the '50s IN THE '50s, the whole "beatnik" movement was about people who hated the whole "stable house and job and family" thing so much they sold all their possessions and drove around the country doing nothing but fucking around and getting high

And yet holy shit

Even when you know it's a poison, that drug gives a powerful high

People resent it and dunk on it and hate it so much because it's got its hooks so damn deep in their soul

Under the skin of most cynics beats the heart of a wounded believer

Especially those of us who *can't* have it, and never will

A lot of this Boomer vs. Millennial Discourse is classic Freudian reaction-formation sour grapes shit

"You will never, ever be able to buy a house"

Fine, houses are bullshit anyway, only drones live in houses

I *like* my tiny apartment, I *like* eating out all the time and never being able to save money because I've never had the energy to cook

My life is *so cool*, I'm not *boring* like my parents

(I know I'm owning myself here and yet)

Houses are bullshit, lawns are ridiculous social signaling garbage, office jobs were always filled with ass-kissing and bullshitting time-wasting bilge, the nuclear family was filled with dysfunction and abuse

And yet, and yet, and yet

Every day some Millennial who can recite at will the litany of why all the Boomers who lived this life helped destroy the world with car culture and climate change and sucked the life out of American cities and turned into a smug stupid piece of shit

Lies awake and wonders

After a day of the petty humiliations of modern gig work even at the upper echelons of the modern service economy

In a lonely apartment filled with screens

Thinking about mowing the lawn and the smell of fresh-cut grass as the sun sets through the trees

The nice job with the comfy office you've worked at for the past ten years and will continue to work at for the next twenty

The boss clapping you on the shoulder over drinks, "You're an asset to the company, son"

The pretty wife and the adorable kids, the big friendly dog

The feeling of being safe, of being content, of *knowing where you're supposed to be* at all times

Being a stupid dumb complacent shithead, but *having no reason not to be* one

Being happy in your ignorance

That smug Boomer confidence that the "OK Boomer" meme is about

How many wins do you have to rack up, again and again, every goddamn day, to feel *that good about yourself*

Sleeping soundly on a warm bed of accumulated handshakes and smiles and pats on the back and promotions

Would it be so fucking bad? Is it so fucking bad to just *want* that? To want a *taste* of it?

They drank deeply of that well their whole damn lives and I can't even have a *drop*

Is it really a blessing to see the world more clearly, with fewer illusions? Is it "moral luck"?

To have to live like this every damn day? The world with the focus and contrast turned up so you can see every goddamn wrinkle, crack and stain?

I dunno man

One thing that hits hard about this show is that it's very, very much a retcon

Nobody when they were creating MCU Wanda Maximoff thought "Oh she's a throwback fan-of-the-past tradwife type, she dreams of being June Cleaver"

Like they designed her to be the total opposite of that

She rocks the lowkey punk look, she's a cool alternative radicalized anti-American Euro-teen

Red leather jacket over a black dress with black fingerless gloves and whatnot

Joined HYDRA

But that's why the reveal works so well, I think

It's the repressed, achingly earnest little-girl version of herself that she's been trying to hide and built a wall around for years since the bombs fell

Something she never showed anyone, not even her brother, until Vision

Like I absolutely headcanon that from the age of ten until the age of thirty Wanda would've angrily denied it if you accused her of ever having been a fan of black-and-white cheesy US dom-coms

Even when she's chilling in the Avengers compound whiling away the hours watching TV by herself she's switched to watching Malcolm in the Middle, which is much more subversive and less embarrassing than being a fan of Dick van Dyke

It's something she's in denial about

I mean, isn't everyone?

The 1950s American Dream is the most worn-out dunk target in, like, all of pop culture and academia

It's cringe af to say you actually want that shit

"I can't move to the suburbs, my soul would wither and die there", etc

She doesn't admit it until she's completely broken down, eroded all the way to her exposed core, till she's lost absolutely everything real in her life and has nothing at all remaining but her dreams, her oldest dream, her last dream

The last thing that changes in that scene is *herself*, after everything around her changes

This defiant 21st-century badass rebel lady finally stepping into the empty hole in the picture and assuming the role of a Laura Petrie housewife

And I really do think the subtext is there, especially with the jokes in the commercials about rubbing in the over-the-top sexism of the era

"Yes, I know it's problematic

Yes, I know it's demeaning

Yes, I know I'm throwing other women under the bus

LET ME FUCKING HAVE THIS"

Wanda blasting Monica out of her fantasy world is like if the "Shh, let people enjoy things comic" came back armed with a shotgun and filled with intense feral rage

Now that I think about it I dunno if this meta angle could possibly be intentional but it's definitely there

This is absolutely a meta show about Enjoying Problematic Media

About the sheer intensity of the emotion behind people who get ultra-fucking-defensive about their faves

Like, that's my response to @nberlat's thing about the moral links being muddled -- how almost no one who has a Problematic Life in the Suburbs is problematic in a way that you can point to them and say "These are the specific people you horribly victimized"

A lot of people's moral critiques *are* very hard to make literal and concrete, especially about "messages" and "attitudes" and "media"

"This music is sending harmful messages about women, it's part of a larger social problem, and by playing it you're contributing to harm"

And the obvious response is "Who the fuck am I specifically harming

I'm not fucking 'brainwashing' anybody into thinking anything by listening to this music *myself*

If I'm the one being brainwashed, I have the right to do that

And I like it"

And like

They're right

But their critics are also right

If media never had any impact on anything then the world wouldn't be the way it is, and yet it's asking a whole fucking lot sometimes to ask people to give up something that gives them joy over seemingly abstract concerns

I dunno, I think that as shallow as the writing may have been forced to be by being an MCU product there's absolutely something potent that resonated with a lot of people here

Dreams don't die easy

We don't *change* from our childhood selves so much as just add layers on top

I dunno if this is intentional on the WandaVision writers' part

I *do* know the FaWS writers were thinking about this stuff, hence the one Flag-Smasher who sheepishly admits he was a fan of Captain America as a kid (setting him up for his ironic fate)

But like that one shot from the WandaVision penultimate episode (the true finest hour of the show) will stick with me a long, long time

More than the "Love persevering" line

That shot of the unexploded Stark Industries shell in the rubble, right next to the still-playing TV

The blinking red light telling Wanda and Pietro they're going to die at any moment, while the Dick van Dyke show still merrily plays Wanda's favorite episode -- the one where Dick has a silly nightmare of his world falling apart but he wakes up and everything's fine

The American Dream and the American Reality, side-by-side

America's broken promise, in one shot

These are the two things America gave the world

They literally give you *both of them* at the same time, served on the same tray

And you wonder why people's attitudes about this country are so fucked up? You wonder why people have no chill?

I don't fully stand by everything I said when I wrote this years ago

But I will stand by the hot take that I don't think "native-born" Americans will ever understand the "American Dream" the way many immigrants do

Some things are only defined in negative space

The American Dream is everything the American Reality isn't, after all

By definition

It's what Martin Luther King called an "uncashed check", the accounting discrepancy between what is owed and what has been paid, accruing interest through the generations

And goddamn is that one hell of a yawning gap

Maybe some of you are so used to hearing it as background noise it doesn't register anymore

But those are some wild fucking promises to make people if you never intend to keep them

There's consequences for doing that

From the high-minded abstractions -- freedom, dignity, equality, opportunity -- to those saturated colorful images of the concrete life they're supposed to represent beamed onto everyone's TVs

Those beautiful homes, those clean, safe streets

A decent job with a fair wage for an honest day's work

A new land and a fresh start where anyone can decide who they want to be and make themselves into it

Forty acres and a goddamn mule

A fucking chicken in every fucking pot

And the conservative politicians look at our changing world full of resentment and conflict and anger and think that means "the American Dream is dead"?

All that negativity is because the Dream *didn't die*

That crimson rage is the Dream still pulsing hard beneath the skin of every radicalized "anti-American"

It's having a vision of how life could be -- of how you were *promised* life *would* be if you put in your hours and took your lumps -- that *didn't* die

No matter how many bland, polite men in business suits looked at you from across your desk and told you it was never yours to begin with

Something they tried to bury but *would not die*

That play about the desperate, possibly doomed struggle for a working-class Black family to get the damn house in the suburbs, A Raisin in the Sun, is named for a line from Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem", whose first line is "What happens to a dream deferred?"

It's that whole galaxy-brain thing Foucauldian thing about how every seemingly subversive text has a reading where it upholds the status quo and yet also every conservative text invites a subversive reading

The cheesy commercial propaganda they try to feed you to tell you everything is okay and no war needs to be fought refutes itself

The contrast between the lie and the reality awakens a greater rage than before the lie was told

The cheesy sitcoms that were intended (insofar as there was any coherent intention behind moneymaking media moguls pumping this shit out) to make good happy prolefed citizens awakened the Scarlet Witch

You know what Langston Hughes said about what happens to dreams deferred, and all...

"What is a revolution, if not a dream persevering?"