WandaVision and the America we’ve lost

The initial episodes are shot in the style of a 1950s sitcom (think I Love Lucy), complete with a live studio audience. Over the course of the first season, the show’s style evolves with the decades, dosing viewers with waves of nostalgia as we’re delivered programming that pokes fun at different tropes from different periods of U.S. history.

For example, Wanda and Vision, happily married in this alternative universe, sleep in two separate beds, a nod to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who, despite being married both on-screen and in real life, did the same on TV.

We aren’t immediately told why Wanda and Vision happen to be the protagonists of this particular world, at least in the three episodes that have premiered as of this writing. After all, when we last saw these two in the Marvel films, Vision met his end at the hands of the villain Thanos; Wanda, who loved him, was grieving his passing.

But in this tale, the two are not only happily alive but tasked with projecting an image of a normal married couple to their nosy neighbors and Vision’s overbearing boss. This reputation management is done through a variety of amusing segments, including when the pair of superheroes utilize their powers to impress their friends during a magic show.

Vision is just as socially awkward here as anywhere else, bluntly telling the audience, “Today, we will lie to you, and yet, you will believe our little deceptions because human beings are easily fooled due to their limited understandings of the inner workings of the universe!”

Occasionally, our two protagonists remember bits or pieces of the reality we know them from, the Marvel films, but then quickly snap back to the world they are living in, none the wiser. It is apparent that we will eventually be told why these two heroes are living features of some kind of alternative reality sitcom.

Whether that explanation ends up being satisfying or not remains to be seen, but what is clear is that executive producer and head writer Jac Schaeffer, who wrote and directed 2009’s criminally underrated rom-com Timer, has created a show format that offers a lot of fun for the audience. Superheroes living several decades of television sitcom tropes: What’s not to like?

But to return to the first line of this review, it’s worth examining what exactly makes this setup so attractive. Many viewers are likely watching the series laughing along at the now foreign-looking social mores of midcentury America.

For instance, in the series premiere, it is quickly made apparent to us that Wanda and Vision are living the most traditional of American lives, with the former playing the role of a homemaker and the latter busying himself in a stuffy office. In much of the country today, these gender roles are seen as somewhere between odd and offensive. In one somewhat ham-fisted scene, Wanda’s neighbor informs her about a magazine article called “How to treat your husband to keep your husband.”

There’s no doubt that the 1950s was a decade full of stuffy social norms that often constrained individual freedom and self-expression. The idea that a woman’s place is at home and a man’s place is at work is rightly seen as outdated because we’ve come to understand that people don’t always fit into such neat, socially prescribed boxes.

But in looking back at those years, we often make the mistake of failing to understand why so many people sat around their televisions and gleefully took in programming that featured such cookie-cutter lives.

The decade that preceded the ’50s featured some of the worst chaos and violence in human history. A generation of men were shipped overseas to battle fascist war machines shortly after much of the country plunged into desperate poverty due to the Great Depression.

It’s easy, in 2021, for us to look back and wonder why so many men and women consigned themselves to a boring and often stifling suburban life. But following the death and desperation of the first half of the 20th century, owning a home, raising a family on one salary, and having a predictable life were practically idyllic.

Yes, the past was deeply flawed, but there’s also a reason Schaeffer was able to get this bizarre plot greenlit. The public is attracted to the years when our country appeared to be more prosperous and less polarized. We don’t have to accept the ugly parts, such as legalized racial segregation, to appreciate the qualities of these bygone eras.

Even Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, today a leading liberal culture warrior, once acknowledged as much in her book The Two-Income Trap, in which she noted that during the period in which WandaVision begins, “Strong, robust markets and hardworking families created wealth, and government helped make sure that opportunities were widely shared. Little by little, the middle class got better educated, more stable, wealthier — and bigger.”

In a perhaps even more heretical section, Warren also warned that economic pressures took “women out of the home and away from their children and simultaneously made family life less, not more financially secure. Today’s middle-class mother is trapped: She can’t afford to work, and she can’t afford not to.”

So, if you decide to watch WandaVision, you’ll surely laugh at some of the cultural norms that we’ve left behind. But don’t be afraid to admit that you might find yourself liking some aspects of the life presented in the series. It’s a window into a world that we needn’t leave completely behind.

Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist.