When Stories Give Way to Corporatism
In today’s installation of revisitations to my middle school media obsessions: Marvel movies. I think if there’s any media that defined my middle school (and maybe high school, if we’re being honest) years, it’s these films. So the fact that I’m writing this post, which is in essence a superfluously wordy masterlist of the things I don’t like about Marvel’s new TV shows, is a surprise to me most of all.
Before taking a deep dive into both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (henceforth referred to as TFATWS) individually, let’s take a look at Marvel’s recent years in the cinema.
Captain America: Civil War might have marked my waning interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but Avengers: Endgame sealed the coffin. That film, for all the individual reasons I enjoy it, to me marked the MCU’s switch to focusing too much on the theatrics of the stories and the shock of them instead of genuine, heartfelt storytelling. I’ve never been a huge fan of Tony Stark as a character, but he was easy to feel for because we saw all the cracks in his supposed perfection. When he dies in Endgame the idea of him does too — we lose the idea of a hero who is far more flawed than they aren’t, whose flaws come out forefront. And this isn’t to say that the Avengers who are left are perfect examples of heroes or even just well-adjusted humans, but when Stark died, every story Marvel has told since then has felt significantly less focused on who the characters are and more on what they do and how what they do fits into each other, despite seemingly being the opposite.
The stories that used to be at the forefront of the game of heart in the superhero world have lost what makes them special. Take the various Spider-Man stories, for example. People don’t just like the Tobey McGuire Spider-Man stories because they’re just funny and awkward, people don’t just like the Andrew Garfield ones because he knew his character better than anyone else has, they like them because those stories have heart. The first McGuire trilogy and the two Garfield films are objectively not masterpieces. But they’re good for what they are and the story underneath it all feels genuine and coming from a place of truth. Tom Holland might be the youngest Spider-Man we’ve had and therefore technically the most accurate, but he doesn’t feel like Spider-Man. Spider-Man is supposed to swing between New York’s buildings fighting petty crime. He’s supposed to be followed by shouts of “hey! Spider-Man stole that guy’s pizza!” He isn’t supposed to go to space or to Europe on a private jet. He isn’t supposed to have millions of dollars of technology at his disposal. He isn’t the next Tony Stark, he’s a kid from Queens whose costume is perpetually falling apart because he made it himself. And that’s something that’s not on the actors or Jon Watts or anyone specific or individual, even, but the machine as a whole — when they tied Peter Parker and Tony Stark together they humanized Stark but stripped Parker of the idiosyncrasies that make him who he is. I mean, there’s a reason public reaction to Into the Spider-verse was so much more visceral than the live action, and it isn’t just because of the ingenious animation.
But that’s Spider-Man, and while I could write a whole blog post about that character, that’s not what this post is about. So let’s get into it. First up: WandaVision.
The first thing I thought while watching this show was that it doesn’t feel like a TV show. And listen, did I watch it all at once? Yes. But this isn’t my first binge-watching rodeo, and I’ve never felt this way about another TV show, not even shows with short seasons like Peaky Blinders or limited series like The Night Of. Part of why this show doesn’t feel like one, I think, is because of the intent going into it. Kevin Feige (president of Marvel Studios) has said that they don’t have plans for a second season of the show, and watching it, you can tell. WandaVision is slow moving but that’s not the issue — it’s not the fact that there are no definitive answers to what’s happening in the first three episodes, because as an audience member and someone invested in these characters, I’m more than willing to wait. It’s the fact that it’s slow moving to the point where personally I was bored. There were a lot of moments in the show that I knew were supposed to be funny or heartfelt but more often than not, they fell flat for my taste. Wanda’s magic as a source of humor was fun, for maybe the first five minutes. The Bohner joke at the end of the season wasn’t funny, or at least didn’t land at all for me. I loved Pietro for the brief time he was on screen but his presence felt more ominous than a moment of catharsis. The ending was good and emotional but also still felt long, and too easily fell back into the typical Marvel fight scene tropes.
I watched WandaVision a couple months after it ended so I personally didn’t witness the surge of fan theories and interaction that occurred during its airing, but knowing fans, the theories were there. And for a while, it seems like fans were actually onto something. It seemed like they were correctly predicting things on the show, that they were invested in the story and actively following it along. But apparently, as these fans reacted loudly and publicly on social media, Marvel changed character arcs and endings accordingly. I have felt for a long while that Marvel pays too much attention to certain fans’ opinions while giving the middle finger to other fans (Steve Rogers’ arc in Endgame, anyone?), but this is on another level. A lot in both WandaVision and TFATWS had to be altered for the release due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t excuse saying fans are reading too much into something when what they’re reading into was actually the original intended ending, one that was being built towards. Endings are supposed to make sense, to be cathartic. Maybe still be a shock, of course still leave an impact, but you’re supposed to look at the ending in conjunction with what preceded it and say, how did I miss it. Of course! Of course this is the ending. It’s supposed to leave you thinking, to leave you full.
The WandaVision ending felt like every middle schooler’s favorite trope: “it was all a dream.” Other than a few people being sent to jail (the director guy, amongst many others, who incidentally was so forgettable — beyond nearly shooting a child, which somehow gets glossed over — that I don’t even remember his name), the net change from the beginning to the end of the show is almost zero. Agatha being trapped doesn’t make too much sense or do anything in terms of plot, and all the character development that happens in regard to Wanda’s trauma as well as her relationship with Vision is nice to see play out but also doesn’t feel necessary to watch, which is unfortunate — I wish it felt necessary to watch. It’s really great to see Wanda process how Vision’s death affected her and how she’s reacted to it and since learned to move on, but seeing Wanda distraught at the end of the last movie and cutting straight to her (perhaps unhealthily) dealing with it in the next movie would have also been acceptable. And maybe I’ve just been a preacher of free will recently because of Supernatural, but the fact that Wanda is supposedly “destined” to be the Scarlet Witch seems wrong, and in my opinion invalidates her choice to stop working with Hydra and join the Avengers. Fate is overrated — people choosing to live a certain way, become a certain person, be good, is much more compelling.
Something that’s often cited in the things that WandaVision did right is its recreation of old TV shows. But the fact that it opens as recreations of old TV shows is the only reason it “makes sense” that it’s a TV show, and even then they don’t take advantage of the mechanics of it beyond the first few episodes. Change it to classic movies instead and the structure disappears — the fact that it’s old TV shows doesn’t do enough for the plot beyond the detail that Wanda used to watch them in Sokovia, but even then, why not movies? The show already feels like a movie anyways. It just isn’t as meta as it seems to be.
For all that WandaVision isn’t a TV show, TFATWS is even less of one. And weirdly enough, after watching the first episode, what made me think this was the credits sequence. I’m all for the people who made something getting the credit they deserve (yes I do sit and watch the credits for movies when I can) but 6 minutes of credits for every one hour weekly episode of a TV show is absurd, and further cements it as something that’s just not a TV show.
TFATWS had more at stake than WandaVision, at least, in what it needed to achieve. Where WandaVision was creating a story from scratch and therefore allowed itself to follow whatever threads it cared to, TFATWS had to deal with the massive aftermath of Endgame. The stakes were higher, which makes its emotional flatness in regard to them more severe; every episode I couldn’t help but feel that there was far too much action and not enough emotional catharsis. The characters keep mentioning Steve but his absence is still overwhelming and feels as though it hasn’t been reacted to — it feels like the world moved on really quickly (and maybe it has, and maybe that’s the point, but the characters having moved on feels wrong).
An aside: My opinions on movies and TV have purely coincidentally lined up with filmmaker Jack Howard’s for the better part of a decade, and his video on TFATWS brings up a lot of ideas that I also agree with, though he says them likely more elegantly than I currently am.
But going back to a lack of emotional resonance, we have one Bucky Barnes. The show repeatedly brings up his trauma due to his brainwashing, and brings up how he might have a hard time adjusting but we don’t get to see any of it. In what should be a pivotal scene in the final episode where Bucky speaks directly to the family of a man he killed as the Winter Soldier, we cut away from the conversation just as it starts. We’re robbed of sitting in that discomfort, in Bucky’s discomfort, something I think would have added so much to our understanding of his character. All of his emotional vulnerability in this series, in fact, feels short changed. There’s the repeated presence of his therapy but it feels less like a moment for his character to breathe and learn and get better and more like a device, a device that falls to the wayside halfway through the season.
Throughout my watching of this series, I felt a sense of emptiness, which was only underscored by the lack of a deep dive into Bucky’s character. There’s cool action sequences and the occasional funny quip but I’m emotionally detached, and that’s coming from someone who for years has proclaimed that she’s Bucky Barnes’ biggest fan, who dressed up as him for Halloween in middle school.
I wanted to make sure it’s the show that’s causing this detachment and not me — I’m fully willing to admit that I disliked so much of what happened in Endgame that I might have just removed my investment in these stories out of necessity — so I decided to go back and re-watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie I haven’t seen in years but still consider one of my favorite Marvel movies. I re-watched The Winter Soldier and sure, maybe there’s a nostalgia factor, but I think it is mostly this new era of Marvel movies and TV (not “content,” never content) that doesn’t have the same affect on me as it used to. Martin Scorsese infamously wrote what’s essentially a hot take on Marvel movies, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says (I think art is art and cinema can be cinema if we say it is — it’s both not as deep and just as deep as he suggests), I do think he’s right when he says that tension is a key piece missing in Marvel movies. It’s okay that we know that the heroes will survive the movies, at least physically, and that they’ll win, so to speak. Because as grim as it is, death isn’t the only way to harm your characters, to put them in difficult situations, or to cause growth. Pyrrhic victories are still victories. The Winter Soldier has these elements of a story unfolding, of a character going through the motions of something painful. There’s tension and emotional appeal, something to connect to — and the new stuff just doesn’t feel the same.
TFATWS was much more like a typical Marvel movie — TV shows are unique in that they allow for extended character growth. Where TV shows are about character, movies about plot — that’s not to say that those are mutually exclusive or that movies can’t be character driven and TV shows can’t have plot, but TV is extended in a way that allows for more times alone with specific characters, more time for individual storylines. This show is plot heavy but even the plot itself seemed like a waste — they set up so many points of interest for themselves and then didn’t follow the paths they paved for themselves. And I think it ties to the characters, or rather, the overtness of the plot over who the characters are.
First off: Karli Morgenthau. Karli Morgenthau is frankly a horrible main villain. She falls into the same, tired tropes of bad action movies everywhere. The show draws so much attention to the fact that Sam believes in Karli, believes in the same things that she believes, and thinks she could be a force of good. The two are basically foils of the other, the only difference being in their methods of achieving their goals and who the rest of the world believes is the “good guy.” They even echo each other’s lines:
It’s hard to feel like she’s a villain even though she’s framed to be for killing innocent people — and that thought itself seems out of character for a person in her position and with her values. She’s entirely unmemorable as well — she seems to come out of left field in terms of plot and then doesn’t really have any unique characteristics. She’s functional, and an easy target, but her presence doesn’t add much nuance.
If anyone should’ve been a central villain, it’s John Walker. He’s the antithesis to Sam, he’s what the world sees of Captain America but not who he’s supposed to be. The reason Steve worked as Captain America was because when he took off the suit, he stopped being the superhero. He was a good person, no doubt, but not the same person as the one who wielded that shield. Walker is the embodiment of the shield, a tool of the government — he checked his heart out when he put the helmet on. His costume design was also impeccable and everything from the shade of red used to the shape of his helmet’s eye holes further solidified him as a villain — he seems much more like a character who is intentionally the way he is in comparison to Karli, who in all honestly feels like a scapegoat for a much bigger issue and a symptom of a problem that she didn’t even create.
Next up: Sharon Carter. I’ll keep it brief, but at this point Sharon Carter is a function of the plot. The fact that she’s been on the run in Madripoor since helping Steve is just touched upon when really it seems to have defined who her character is now. She’s been turned into a villain because the plot demands it, because after she kills Karli the world needs a new person for the supposed good guys to fight.
One huge issue I have with TFATWS is its dealing with Isaiah Bradley’s storyline. I know him from Young Avengers so I was excited to see him, excitement that very soon wore off. He’s introduced seemingly randomly, in a way that blindsides the audience but even more than us, Sam. His justified anger at society and the government, his opposing viewpoint to the role of Captain America is the crux of the show, and it just didn’t get addressed properly. This arc, which feels barely introduced, is shown to be seemingly “wrapped up” by Sam presenting him with the statue in the museum, but that’s not a proper solution. It’s a band-aid on an institutional issue, one that the show is conveniently running circles around (and it’s not like I’m looking to Disney of all companies to be a frontrunner in the dialogue of race in film, but they started the conversation in this show, and they needed to stick the landing). The show introduced ideas of race, specifically of historical and institutional racism and inequity, but addressed it in the most corporate way possible. A statue of Bradley doesn’t undo the fact that he was imprisoned for being a super solider, and it does nothing to prevent it from happening again.
The biggest issue is that this show needed to be about Sam and it just wasn’t, at least not enough and not to the degree that was necessary. His reservations about the shield are the core of the plot, the reason the events of the story happen the way they do and the reason his entrance in the finale has such a powerful impact. I love Bucky, I really do, and maybe he hasn’t had too many lines in the past, but he’s a character we know the psyche of. We know next to nothing about Sam, other than he’s a vet and lost his partner Riley (something that was core to him in The Winter Soldier and conveniently not present at all in this show) and is generally just a good person. This show was an opportunity to explore who he is and how he as a Black man would navigate the post-snap world and the world of Captain America. Instead, you end up with these half-started plot lines and ideas that dance around the heart of his character and ultimately don’t tell us enough. I hate to say it but someone could walk out of Endgame and into the next Captain America movie with Sam holding the shield and not really have missed anything with this series.
The show is presented as having dual protagonists when it should have just been about Sam — not that Bucky’s adjustment isn’t important, but that Sam’s storyline and the societal implications of his story needed to be much more prominent. It wanted to be a dual protagonist story but was written with Sam at the helm, a dissonance that’s felt in the lack of exploration in either of their storylines. Pushing Sam more solidly to the forefront would also avoid the title reveal of Captain America and the Winter Soldier, because it’s not like that isn’t easy to confuse with Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The issues of race in this show come to a head with Sam’s speech in the last episode, something that felt both necessary and inappropriate. Necessary in that there’s no one else who could have given that speech in that moment to those people. Inappropriate in that it falls into the box of putting the burden of education about systemic issues onto the shoulders of those oppressed by that very system. Ngozi Ukazu (author of Check, Please and certified TFATWS fan) wrote essentially an episode-by-episode breakdown of what she wishes she saw in the series, including an alteration to this scene. This scene is a big moment for Sam, it’s him expressing himself for himself as much as it’s him making an argument for others, but at the same time it shouldn’t be on his shoulders to give the speech. He shouldn’t have to justify himself in that way.
Overall, though, and what it comes down to for me is the fact that after everything, it feels like there was no need for any of this. Both shows are relatively enjoyable in the moment but don’t do much in terms of overall plot. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier more than WandaVision, but I think you could probably skip both shows and jump straight to whatever the next Marvel movie is and not lose out on anything earth-shatteringly significant. These shows also had the same energy as Endgame. I think both that movie and these shows would be incredibly confusing to someone who hasn’t seen the absurd number of Marvel movies that are already out. I’m willing to excuse Endgame more because it’s technically a sequel to Infinity War in more direct a way than other Marvel movies, but I think these TV shows lack the context for a person to watch them cold. I don’t think that bodes well for the future of Marvel. These movies have always been self-referential, have always included inside jokes for the people in the know, but not so much to the point that they’re difficult to follow for a non or new fan.
I realize I’ve spent the last three thousand, seven hundred and forty words talking about everything that I don’t like about these shows, but they’re not all bad. Even though it didn’t land as well for me as it did for a lot of people, WandaVision’s re-imagination of the sitcom format is a really interesting concept. The development of Wanda and Vision’s relationship feels natural and is enjoyable to watch, as well as the dichotomy of what’s happening in their world vs. the outside world. TFATWS provides an engaging dynamic between two already beloved characters and broaches issues of racism and inequity that are ingrained in Marvel’s stories but have never been addressed so directly before. Sure, I think the show’s exploration of these issues could have been more nuanced and far more in depth, but the mere fact that they’re present is a step forward; crumbs may be what we’re given so crumbs are what I’ll take.
While I do of course have issues with a lot of story aspects of these two shows, I think most of the reason for how I feel can be ascribed to the corporate side of Marvel, as opposed to the creative side. I think every single actor, writer, producer, director, grip, and best boy put everything they had into these movies. I mean, of course they did. They’re making movies, they’re making TV shows. Those are art, they’re passion, they’re doing something you genuinely care about. I take issue with the process that leads to this creativity being stifled for the sake of profit, when the stories become so formulaic that the heart and soul of the plot and characters gets lost. The corporate aspect has to work in tandem with the creative, because ultimately that’s how funding is collected and movies are moved from scripts to screens. But it should be creative first, corporate second, and right now it feels like the opposite.
All this to say, while the idea of a Marvel TV show is appealing, I don’t think the follow through landed. These shows could have — perhaps even should have — been great, been more than twenty minutes to an hour of passive enjoyment on a Friday afternoon, but to me at least, that’s all they ended up being. Marvel isn’t making TV shows, not really. I’m fully willing to eat my words if the Loki show comes out and proves me wrong, but unfortunately for us all, I don’t think I’m going to be. ⬥
* An edit, as of July 14, 2021: I said I’d eat my words if Loki was good, so here’s me doing just that. It’s good. It’s really good. And it’s also a TV show.
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