The Right’s Missed WandaVision Moment
Warning: The following contains major spoilers for the recently finished Disney+ show WandaVision.
Americans of all stripes have opinions on why Donald Trump lost the election. In my mind, most of them are garbage. One I think that does stick is the idea that Trump (and the American Right) lost is because they were way too online. When one says that one is too online, that doesn’t mean that they spend their time online. Being online is a fact of life for 99% of Americans. It is how we consume our news, how we keep in touch with friends, etc. Very few people are like my father, who still has a flip phone, doesn’t know how to use a computer, and only gets his news from nightly networks or discussions with friends.
The problem with being too online is that one is spends too much time in online discussion about how to interpret and understand things. Social media isn’t very representative of America. It is dramatically to the left of the average American, and overrepresented with academics and those with college degrees. It also is very focused on a 24/7 news cycle in a way others are not. If a story is not readily available, one will be manufactured. Finally, online discourse is pretty terrible at saying what they believe, but really good at saying what the other person believes is horrible. You see this all the time when sociopaths spend hours a day looking through someone’s past tweets for something to stoke outrage about.
We see both of these things in the American Right today. The first problem exists, but I don’t want to spend too much time about it. Just a quick example is when it was noted at CPAC that “regular people” spend their time in diners talking about “The Tenth Amendment.” Regular people almost certainly do not talk about the tenth amendment over a burger or salad.
The second one is a greater problem. Conservatives have made a veritable cottage industry about the left’s attempt to cancel various authors, celebrities, and their fights in the culture war against traditional values. These are important, but how often are they able to articular what a conservative culture would look like? Are we really fighting for the right for Gina Carano to be an online edgelord and right-leaning troll? While we were focused on that or what prefix goes in front of a plastic potato toy, we genuinely missed a moment where the culture put forth something pretty socially conservative: a love story between a superhero and her robot husband.
I speak of course of WandaVision, the 9 episode mini series on Disney+ that just concluded. (Repeating the standard warning that there are major spoilers for the show discussed below!) Set in the world of Marvel’s superheroes, WandaVision is centered around Wanda Maximoff, a master of telekinesis and illusion, and her AI partner turned husband Vision. When we last saw them in Avengers: Endgame, Vision was very much dead, and Wanda was in mourning. Now we see them magically appearing in what looks like a television sitcom set in the 50’s, where they are now newlyweds living in comfortable American suburbia. As the story unfolds (paying homage to a new era of television every episode) we learn the truth long suspected: none of this is “real.” In the penultimate episode, we learn what has happened. Depressed and consumed by a life of constant loss (first her parents, then her brother, then Vision), Wanda unleashes her power and creates an alternative reality where she is a wife to a now alive Vision (created in her memories) and her two children. Her grappling with this truth (and the depression surrounding so much loss) helps transform her from Wanda Maximoff (already a very powerful individual) to the Scarlet Witch, a being of tremendous power who can be, often in the same moment, humanities greatest hope and greatest threat. What on earth is socially conservative about this? Quite a lot actually, and seeing that unfold is one of the joys of the show.
What drives Wanda? Your standard narrative of a female superhero is that she’s a girl boss: she is super powerful because of course she’s superpowerful, girls rock and can do anything men can do. There are plenty of moments in her life where she is precisely that girl boss: in her rage, she overpowers Thanos, a man who had just wiped out half of the unvierse with the snap of his fingers. For Wanda (and this is the conservative message!), this isn’t fulfilling in and of itself. She never wanted to be the hero, she didn’t want to be an icon of empowerment. What she always wanted to be was something far simpler: a devoted spouse and parent, a reflection of her own parents, killed at a very young age by war. Her fulfillment doesn’t come in saving the galaxy, but in the promise of growing old with a husband and having two children. Even the girl boss character of the show Monica Rambeau is not an icon of empowerment because of some ideology or slogan: she becomes who she is precisely because of a deep connection she forms with Wanda. What is the root of that connection? Her own sense of loss as her mother died of cancer, and she wasn’t even around to watch her die. We’re a long way from the libertarian/capitalist manifesto that is Iron Man, where Tony Stark becomes a superhero in between womanizing and partying because why shouldn’t a billionaire playboy with a taste for vengeance with military hardware become a superhero?
Not only is there something deeply conservative about this vision (appeals to family, marriage, and stability), that’s a vision that continues to resonate with America, no matter how much the powerful try to say otherwise. Recently, the conservative organization American Compass commissioned a survey about the attitudes of American families. The results were quite surprising. One of the realities of American life is that both women and men work in the household. This is presented as a blow for both feminism (women finding their fulfillment in the workplace) and the economy (two incomes means a higher income to consume). A funny thing happened as this was built: it was extraordinarily unpopular. Over half of working mothers think this arrangement is bad. When given a choice, they would much rather stay home. Among every group of Americans but the professional upper class, a majority of men and women desire that at least one parent stay home to help raise the children. Fulfillment doesn’t come through the workplace for these individuals: work is a means to an end, and that end is providing financial support for children and the family. Furthermore, these families want government structured to support forming and raising families, ones larger than they feel society allows them to competently raise.
None of this is to say that WandaVision is a show with Republican talking points, or that socially conservative impulses necessarily lead to voting GOP. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t. Yet if we want to avoid endless discussion about toy potatoes and how TV shows only sell on HBO if you flash a pair of breasts, we have to be able to seize moments where a piece of media speaks to a larger reality that we social conservatives have been saying all along: the family is the building block of society, and true fulfillment is found through others, marriage and family are two of the strongest examples of that fulfillment.
