The super power of the couple

This article is published in issue 2-3 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 19, 2021

“I remember everything,” says Scarlet Witch proudly, in the registry of superheroes Wanda Maximoff: but we’ll get there. We also remember everything. We remember that era of television made up of sitcoms with houses built in large studios; of jokes naive followed by laughter from the audience. Thus begins, like the series of the old television era, the series that promises to inaugurate a new age of the small screen.

Certainly new is the medium: the characters of the big movies who took the whole pre-Covid box office (2.8 billion dollars the global collection of Avengers: Endgame) arrive on the platform that multiplies numbers like the counter of a lottery (86 million subscribers in less than a year is the figure communicated before last Christmas). Translated: the first Marvel Studios original series lands on Disney +.

Revolution? A little bit yes. The (mini) series is, in fact, WandaVision, available from January 15, 2021, a true union of classic and contemporary, analogue and digital, old-fashioned productions and the Marvel universe. It begins like those family comedies immersed in the impeccable American suburbia, turned in the same aesthetic and existential way: the apparently happy suburban home life is in black and white, the “other” world is in color.

And we come to the biographical notes. Wanda Maximoff was born, on the comic strips of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in March 1964. So under the sign of Pisces, we could also define her as a fish named Wanda, but we will not.

We will say instead that, before becoming an Avenger, she was an opponent of the X-Men, and in fact that is where her adventures begin. Then, contacted by Tony Stark / Iron Man, she moves on to the handful of heroes who would pulverize the cinema of the new millennium. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll be an Avenger!” She told her rivals. And that was enough to sign its (new) identity. He also has a twin brother (Quick-silver) and, above all, a great love. That is to say Vision, from us Vision, an android with which he has been paired since May 1965. “I felt that a love story would help the development of the character,” said the screenwriter Roy Thomas. “Vision was a great candidate, because it appeared in that same comic. They became a couple like that, for simple practical considerations ». But the marriage lasted a long time, and as much as proof of a mixture of yesteryear and modern, and also the team behind the project is rightly matched: the showrunner and main screenwriter is Jac Shaeffer, already author of the feminist cinecomic scripts Captain Marvel with Brie Larson, released in 2019, and Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson, postponed to 2021 due to a pandemic; the director of the pilot episode is Matt Shakman, a curriculum that includes Game of Thrones, Fargo, the recent The Great. E Mad Men, another evident reference of the imagination of WandaVision. You have seen the protagonists at the cinema, they are both actors who would have deserved perhaps more over the years and who now take the whole scene. Paul Bettany, that is Vision, everyone knows him, and yet many never remember his name: look at the very recent Uncle Frank (on Amazon Prime Video) to confirm the superfine interpreter of truly superhero love. Here is the point of Wanda-Vision: la married couple as a team, a team that fights adversity together, an institution that overcomes the turmoil and dangers of society. Not surprisingly, the series begins like those old living room pictures, with the bagatelle and family quarrels: a little Bewitched.

Then – without spoiling too much – comes the “other”. Color. The danger. Wanda finds herself with long, red, vaguely hippie hair (the mess of the bourgeois order is also in the look). Scarlet Witch returns, that is, the second identity, or perhaps the original one. The place where the two live is perhaps a prison, the smiling neighbors could be enemies, the peace of the hearth turns into a scenario of war.

After a decade of film giants, the intuition for the launch of the first Marvel / Disney series is to make it a true television product. You can breathe that atmosphere that is. Elizabeth Olsen, that is Wanda / Scarlet, that is the sister of the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley, has done a lot of indie cinema: we report a drama (La fuga di Martha) and a comedy (Ingrid goes west), to recover. In WandaVision they can both bring out, no longer in a few scenes, their funny, action, tender strings.

Jac Shaeffer confirms our impression: “This series is a love letter to the golden age of TV,” he said. “We pay our homage to the incredible series that came before us, but at the same time we try to chart new territory.” Yesterday and today, past and future, Disney and Marvel. And our children’s TV games that meet adult movie and streaming games. Or who said we are: we know very well, that underneath what we call life there is always something else.

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