WandaVision as an immigrant experience

Another experience of being in tune with the Disney/Marvel watching world. I am watching WandaVision as it is being streamed for the first time. Overall impression, five episodes in, is of being underwhelmed and fascinated at the same time. Fine with not binging, but still feel not enough of the story. And then I stumbled upon the thought that frame the story into a lot of sense for me: Wanda Vision is a reflection of an immigrant experience. Wanda Maximoff is a young woman who was forced to leave her home country due to tragic events, and now is trying to construct a perfect American life using scraps of knowledge she got of old American tv.

I can relate to that - everything I know about a US high school came from 90s teen comedies and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (oh, no! My son is starting high school the nest year, and I am terrified) And I looked with great suspicion at small American towns, because look at the Twin Peaks! And every time agent Dana Scully visited a small town, she was made to suffer rather creatively...

I have much more spotted knowledge of old sitcoms – I know them more by osmosis than by actually watching. Even though for some reason I watched Get Smart in both Russian and Ukrainian in 90s. And I love Third Rock from the Sun much more that all other 90s sitcoms that I did watch, at least in parts.

Anyway. I got my first glimpses of life in USA from action movies, weird sitcoms, teen comedies and romance novels. And so many other people all over the world.

And strangely enough, reading many US-Russian communities in FB or similar places, I feel that we are still trying to create what we think is a proper US life by all those media sources we consumed when they became available 20-30 years ago.

And so does Wanda. I haven’t read her comics, but in MCU, her life is really terrible. It is no wonder she tries to make it bearable using the bits of knowledge how happy life in America should look like.