Elizabeth Olsen plays Wanda in "WandaVision".
-
Marvel Studios
While episode 6 of
Wandavision
will be uploaded this Friday on Disney +,
20 Minutes
analyzes the cameo twist of the finale of episode 5.
An appearance that breaks the fourth wall and drastically changes the rules of the MCU.
Mise en abyme, easter eggs… What if
WandaVision
was the most meta series of all time?
A cameo that has not finished turning our brains over!
The end of the fifth episode of
WandaVision
, the first Marvel series available on Disney + with one episode every Friday, has opened the door to fascinating prospects for future Marvel films and series.
“In This Very Special Episode…”, as the title suggests, broke the fourth wall and drastically changed the rules of the MCU with a cameo twist.
Since its launch,
WandaVision's
secret weapon
has been transtextuality, a concept theorized by Gérard Genette in 1982. For the theorist, the “textual transcendence of the text” is what puts the text in relation to other texts, here,
WandaVision
with other works.
Don't panic, we'll explain it in detail ...
A series linked to Marvel comics and the MCU
Like
The Mandalorian
with
Star Wars
,
WandaVision
is a series connected to everything Marvel.
The series is officially the adaptation of
The Vision
of Gabriel Walta and Tom King, a comic book in which the synthezoid Avenger moves to the suburbs, determined to start a family and lead the peaceful existence of the American middle class.
Many elements of the series also evoke
The Vision & The Witch,
a series of comics published in the 1980s and especially
House of M
, published in 2005, in which an uncontrollable Scarlet Witch, hidden by her father Magneto and her brother Quicksilver, rewrites the universe with its incredible powers.
WandaVision
is also obviously linked to
The Avengers
cinematic saga
and is set after the events of
Avengers: Endgame
.
Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany reprise their roles as superheroes.
We already know that the actress will star in
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
by Sam Raimy, due in 2022. The events of
WandaVision
are therefore
linked
in one way or another to this feature film.
This is what Gérard Genette calls intertextuality.
A series paired with American sitcoms
On a second level,
WandaVision
tells the story of the American sitcom.
The first episode entitled "Filmed in public", actually shot in public and presented in 4/3 format and in black and white, pastiche the Dick Van Dyke Show, cult sitcom of the 1960s, which tells the daily life of a screenwriter from Manhattan comedy variety show.
As on television, the episode is interrupted by an advertisement.
The latter praises the merits of a Stark Industries toaster, which produces a sound reminiscent of a countdown before a missile is fired.
Before Stark became Iron Man, one of his weapons was used to bomb Sokovia, killing Wanda's parents.
An event mentioned in
Avengers: Age of Ultron
.
“Forget the past, it's your future!
», Says the slogan at the end of the advertisement.
The end credits, in the style of
I Love Lucy
, a television landmark of the
fifties,
shows someone watching the show on a television screen.
A new mise en abyme.
WandaVision
is therefore a self-referential metafiction that reveals its own mechanisms through explicit references.
A series related to the history of television
In "Do not zap",
WandaVision
pastiche
My Beloved Witch
, and the house of our two heroes changes and copies the appearance of that of Samantha and Jean-Pierre Stevens.
And to slip an easter eggs to Marvel insiders, the couple are installed in the house 2800, in reference to Earth-2800, the official number of the parallel dimension of the MCU in the multiverse of Marvel.
The advertisement for the Strucker watch also refers to Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who gave his powers to Wanda, and the Hydra organization.
WandaVision has
fun with sitcom archetypes, like that of intrusive neighbor Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), who looks fake Kimmy Gibler (Andrea Barber) from
The Party At Home
.
The accelerated growth of Wanda's twins also echoes the sometimes too rapid evolution of children born in sitcoms from one season to another, but also the fate of child stars fired from their series because they grow up too fast. .
Life is a tv show
At a third meta level,
WandaVision
evokes the conditions for producing a television series.
When Wanda tries to hide her pregnancy from Geraldine in a large coat, then behind a fruit basket, then a large vase, it echoes the techniques used in soap operas to camouflage the fact that an actress is pregnant.
This is precisely what Gérard Genette calls metatextuality, that is to say the critical relationship that a text maintains with itself.
Episode 5, entitled “In this very special episode…”, took the series to a new level.
We are witnessing scenes from a TV set that the showrunneur Wanda seems to direct.
Little by little, the characters seem to realize that they are living in a fiction.
Agnes, who has a good chance of being the powerful witch Agatha Harkness, offers Wanda to do another take, as on a TV set.
Vision becomes more and more suspicious of the strange perfect world in which he lives.
This metafiction technique is called a metareference.
The twist that makes everything possible
"We had the idea for a long time for this classic sitcom trope with the sibling or parent coming to town and shaking up the family's everyday life," Jac Schaeffer told Marvel.com of the late-night cameo. episode 5.
On the landing appears (much to Wanda's surprise) Pietro Maximoff (aka Quicksilver, Wanda's deceased brother).
Except that the latter is not played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays this character in the MCU, but by actor Evan Peters, who plays the latter in
X-Men: Days of Future Past
and
X-Men: Apocalypse
, Fox films.
A cameo made possible by Disney's acquisition of Fox and which suggests a crossover between the MCU and the X-Men like Professor X by Patrick Stewart, Magneto by Ian McKellan, or even Wolverine by Hugh Jackman.
In the fandom, excitement is rightfully at its height.
Between the countless easter eggs and other meta winks,
WandaVision
may well drive (like its heroine?) Its fans crazy!
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