The battle for Wanda’s soul, when she is forced to look at the torment she’s inflicted on the people of Westview, takes place in front of a gigantic billboard advertisement for Squeaky Shine cleaner, an “All Natural Formula Using the Power of Mother Earth.” Squeaky Shine isn’t just the power to be a good housewife, it’s also the power to be the teller of stories, the maker and destroyer of worlds: in other words, the ultimate #girlboss. Wanda casts herself as a woman, doing women’s work, in a women’s genre, with the power of the Ur-Woman herself. In any case, Wanda’s happy homemaking masks a sleight of hand at the heart of the show’s questions about power and accountability, because what is homemaking, if not world-building?
And here you are, using it to make breakfast for dinner.” It sounds inspiring until you remember that Agatha’s power play amounts to shriveling Wanda to a gray and desiccated husk. “You have no idea how dangerous you are,” she gripes.
Agatha will have none of this post-feminist nonsense. On the MCU show, by contrast, Wanda’s power is a gendered one, not of hysteria, but of homemaking.
The show seems aware of this, and this insight didn’t come from the comics on the page, Wanda doesn’t wield her power so much as she becomes a hysterical victim of her own uncontrollable rage. Those familiar with the superhero mythology may have seen this reveal coming, but anyone who has been called a bitch-witch might have predicted the show’s other big twist: that there is absolutely no right way to wield your power. In Wanda’s alternative world of alternative facts, her happiness and the well-being of those around her constitute a Dark Knight-style zero-sum game-unless the situation is a lot more nuanced than that? Wanda is not the villain in her own story, or, at least, she can’t be when it turns out her wacky neighbor, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn), is the Baddest Bitch-Witch in Westview All Along, having manipulated Wanda at every turn in an attempt to steal all the magic for herself. Again, in a year of colossal harms done or enabled by those with power, the question of accountability for Wanda-who is traumatized, but also traumatizing-felt at times like a frustrated surrogate for all the justice that remains unavailable in the real world. The question of whether WandaVision takes that cost seriously occupied much of its final reception. Some even beg her for death, rather than continue to play extras and bit parts in this network sitcom. Wanda’s escape into this fictional refuge of marital bliss with Vision (Paul Bettany) and well-timed studio laughter, however, comes at a grave cost to the people around her. Its portrayal of one woman’s attempt to cope with grief through bingeing classic American television felt shockingly timely, in a moment when many had reason to cling both to our streaming services and to a line like, “What is grief if not love persevering?” The show premiered in January 2021, in the midst of a devastating post-holiday surge in COVID deaths in America. WandaVision follows Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), a refugee and second-tier Avenger, hiding out from her own loss and grief in Westview, a magical sitcom town she has inadvertently invoked through sorcery. And the Twitter answer, so it seems, is that impact trumps intent, so anyone with an opinion and a social media account can sit in judgment of Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch. The earnest answer is that good witches seek to help, while bad witches aim to do harm. So, what is the difference? The funny answer is that good witches apologize profusely for their power. In Disney+’s WandaVision, both good witches and bad wield power, and hurt the defenseless. Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Welcome to Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a scheme that turns moral ambiguity into franchised profit: bad characters turn good, good characters turn mischievous, and everybody gets a spin-off.
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