Constructed Worlds by Nico Riordan

As I found myself lounging on the couch in aimless, endless couch-surfing like so many of us during this second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself watching the flagship Disney+ television show WandaVision and was fascinated to find that it had an interesting number of parallels with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Both are relatively loose adaptations of pre-existing literature (the former as an adaptation of a few different Marvel Comic runs, the latter of the Steven King book of the same name), and deal with worlds and locations that are not quite what they seem. 

WandaVision begins in a fantasy world built from the tropes, aesthetic, and general structure of famous television sitcoms, chronologically moving through the decades beginning in the 1950s. As the series progresses, we come to find out that it has been constructed by one of its titular characters as a coping mechanism for her grief over the loss of the other. Wanda is a witch, able to manipulate the very fabric of reality, and she does so, making a number of people from the real world forcibly complicit in her fantasy reality. Eventually, the world devolves as meddling from the outside and from within breaks down Wanda and her hold over those within. The show wains in quality as the facade inside it begins to crumble, but it made for a welcome breath of fresh, new air in a time where most high-budget content had been postponed until the end of the pandemic.

One could argue that The Shining plays with somewhat similar tools in its proverbial sandbox.  Kubrick's protagonist Jack Torrance deals with isolation, alcoholism, and writer's block while moonlighting as a hotel caretaker and writing his novel. Throughout the film, Jack descends further into delusion and madness, and while this is happening the world of the Overlook Hotel begins to come alive. More of the Overlook's patrons make themselves known to the audience, and Kubrick shows that whilst their world might not be entirely real, it is certainly present, and directly affects both Jack and his family. 

These two worlds running juxtaposed to each other represent the mind and its own madness, with Wanda's world deteriorating as she comes to terms with her issues, and Jack's becoming worse and worse as he succumbs to his.