The Interplay of Genre in WandaVision by Daphne Baker

The Interplay of Genre in WandaVision 

By: Daphne Baker 
🔺 Warning - Spoilers Ahead 🔺

Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow was one of the first main-stream directors to began really playing with genres and how they could work together to create something new, starting with her first major film Near Dark. In this film Bigelow drew from the mythology of classic Western movies, and combined it with vampire horror and romance. This allowed Bigelow to create a movie that was distinctly different, both in content and message, from almost any other movie before it. And Disney+, with their first ever Marvel series, was able to do the same thing and bring something new to the table in WandaVision, a brand new show starring beloved heroes Vision and Wanda Maximoff.

When WandaVision premiered in 2021, fans were expecting this same genres- comics and action- that they had come to expect from their favorite cinematic universe. So many were taken by surprise when the first episode was anything but that; instead they saw a 1950's sitcom, complete in black and white, 4:3 cinematography with a laugh track from a "live studio audience." It seemed for a moment almost an absurdist work; drawing from Martin Esslin's- a journalist and scholar who studied the theatre of the absurd- interpretation of absurdity, the dialogue of characters in the first few episodes did not in and of themselves hold meaning. Here were two of the most powerful heroes, one who is dead, playing house in a decade they were not alive for. But the audience knew that beyond what they were saying, the fact that they were in a small town, going through this events, must mean something.

However, WandaVision did not even stay in the 1950's, or entirely as a sitcom, for long. Every week the show jumped to a new decade, exploring how sitcoms have changed over the years. And in the fourth episode action returned, as the show jumped to modern day, meaning there was now action, sitcom, drama, comedy, and even mystery all mixed into one show. This allowed WandaVision to take on characteristics, such as absurdism, that Marvel movies never have before, and this captivated the audience.

Even the formatting of WandaVision- as a series released on a weekly basis- helped the show escape the confines of television and perhaps even had it cross over, in some senses, into the genre of live theatre. In many reviews of the series, viewers gushed over the act of watching the show, and then talking with others and guessing what was actually going on in the show (Did Wanda make this fake world, or was she being held captive by some super villain? And who was this villain: was it her fake brother Pietro, the evil demon Mephisto from the comics, or someone else?). Returning to absurdism, Esslin states that part of what makes absurdism so enticing is that audiences feel suspense about what is happening, rather than what is going to happen next. Throughout WandaVision, a major plot point is Vision himself trying to figure out what is the truth behind this weird, absurd town that he's living in; he is continually staring uneasily, into the camera, almost in the style of The Twilight Zone, or being perplexed by oddities such as his neighbor cutting through his wall with a chainsaw in a trance. The audience truly did not know what was happening in the show in the beginning, and all the details were not revealed into the very last episode, making the experience of watching and guessing just as enjoyable as the content itself.  

WandaVision uses different genres to play off of each other and create a new, exciting, and captivating show, unlike anything else we have seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and has lead many, myself included, to look forward to the ways Marvel will continue to experiment in this next phase of the universe.