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Why ‘WandaVision’ Hits So Hard During The Isolated Grief Of A Pandemic

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Episode 8 of Wandavision “Previously On” sees Agatha Harkness lift the veil that’s enveloped Westview, as Harkness confronts Maximoff about the nature of her powers and attempts to understand how Wanda can be  possibly practicing magic on the scale that she has without both her own knowledge or any formal training in witchcraft.

Joan Didion called it magical thinking. Often, the inconceivability of the loss causes a grieving mind to spin illogical alternate realities and narratives rather than face such an unimaginable truth. Magical thinking is why Didion refuses to throw away her dead husband’s shoes, because he’ll need them when he comes back. It’s what gives Wanda the power to create a whole new Vision (the most sophisticated sentient AI ever) along with the house they’ll grow old in together, despite seeing incontrovertible proof that he is actually a lifeless pile of metal and exposed wires with her own eyes.

In mourning, we create in order to fill the void of absence, that total loss of meaning that comes with the death of a loved one or an end to life as we knew it.

(L-R): Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness in Marvel Studios’ WANDAVISION exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.

Mashable: In the latest episode of Marvel’s WandaVision, we finally got answers to exactly how Wanda Maximoff birthed an entire universe of illusions that exist under her control. Turns out it was through nothing more and nothing less than the uncontrollable power of her own loss, isolation, rage, (literal) magical thinking, and will to survive.

After the singular, unprecedented experiences of spending the past year in varying degrees of COVID isolation, I understand the emotional mechanics of how and why Wanda did what she did.

Everything from home improvements, baking bread, or just making it through the day, “Maybe, like Wanda, you found yourself escaping more into other people’s creations instead, the TV serving as a window into other worlds where the imminent, unknowable, uncontrollable threats of our own reality were not allowed to exist. Likely, one of those TV shows is WandaVision itself, inviting a delectable layer of meta relatability to the conceit of the show, as we watch Wanda cope with her grief by watching TV that’s as grounding as it is devoid of her actual reality.”

This is what the isolation of mourning does to a person’s psyche.

 

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