WandaVision and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

WandaVision has had a lot to say about grief.

"What is grief but love persisting?" has already become a meme, less than a week after Vision first used the phrase to attempt to comfort Wanda after her brother's death. It's a poignant sentiment, made more so by the fact that it was a true memory and not Wanda's recreation of Vision—but it was also the most blatant message on grief in the show. A little more subtle was the way Wanda's arc on was structured as a progression through the stages of grief. Her denial keeps her from realizing what it is she's done; her anger sends Monica flying back through the hex; she bargains with Vision as he begins to realize something is not right; she's depressed after Vision attempts to leave the hex; and finally she finds her acceptance as she lets the hex come down.

But Wanda's life has been filled with grief, and it's not only her mourning of Vision that we get a glimpse of in the show. Her first major grief, the one shared with her brother, is revealed a little more fully in WandaVision than it had been in Age of Ultron. We had been told that Wanda and Pietro Maximoff were 'radicalized' after their parents were killed—but in WandaVision we got to see not only the last moments of their parent's lives, but also the bleak image of two young children staring down a missile emblazoned with the Stark Industries logo.

Media portrayals of radicalization don't tend to be very subtle. If the character is meant to be at all sympathetic, like the Maximoff twins are, then the tipping point at which they 'convert' is so obviously life changing that we can't help but say, "Well, that's a dumb decision but I understand why you made it." Hey, Wanda and Pietro, letting Hydra experiment on you was not a smart thing to do; but I can't say I blame you after you spent two days trapped under a table waiting to be blown up.

But the portrayal of Wanda's grief in the rest of the show gives us an alternative way to think about the power of the stories we tell ourselves, and a much subtler view of how radicalization could happen.

The versions of grief we see on screen are more varied than the versions we get of radicalization, but not by much. We're used to characters falling into a pit of depression and despair, or self-destructing, or giving into violent rage. But Wanda's grief is generative. It creates an alternative reality so powerful that it hides the truth from Wanda herself—telling her a story where not only is everything ok, but she has a future where she is happy and fulfilled and no longer in pain.

Grief breaks us open. It shatters the day to day functioning of our worlds, and makes us face the truth that we're not ultimately in control, and our lives can no longer continue in the same way. But Wanda's creation of the hex also tells us that sometimes the most destructive thing we can do in the face of grief isn't fail to get out of bed, or vent our anger on a loved one—instead the most dangerous thing might be the story we tell ourselves to make sense of our changed world.

Sociologist Kathleen Blee has spent most of her career studying women in white nationalist hate groups. In a series of interviews documented in her article "Becoming A Racist: Women in Contemporary Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi Groups," Blee notes two findings that can be directly related to Wanda's story. The first is that nearly all of Blee's interviewees talked about a story of "conversion" to their ideology of hate that pivoted around a transformative life event—often a near-death experience or the death of a loved one. The second is that this story they tell of their conversion is what she calls a learned narrative—the way they view their loss, the way they make sense of what has happened to them, has been retrospectively changed by the hate-group's ideology. In short, hate groups helped these women, who were struggling to make sense of the pain they had suffered, to tell themselves a story in which all their pain and suffering made sense (and, because they are hate groups, gave them someone to blame.)

Wanda and Pietro's radicalization fits this narrative easily, as it's meant to. The loss of their parents changed their life; they found a story that told them who they could blame and just how far they could go to right that wrong. But Wanda's loss of Vision and unconscious creation of the hex also seem to fit this narrative. Wanda's grief breaks her down completely, and her subconscious gives her exactly the story she needs to make sense of her life again. But the story isn't true. It's comforting, but false—and it has the consequence of taking an entire town hostage.

We like to believe that radicalization could never happen to us. That extremists are crazy, or broken, or that they always rationally choose their narratives of hate. But our grief makes us vulnerable. And sometimes the story we tell ourselves in an attempt to make it stop hurting isn't the true one—sometimes it's the easy one, sometimes it's just the one that's within reach. In her article, Blee notes that while the women she interviewed talked about their conversion as 'coming to the truth' or 'seeing the light,' in reality, three-fourths of them were brought into the hate group by a friend, family member, or acquaintance. Someone who was there to see their pain offered an easy story with an easy target to rationalize their suffering. Wanda sits in the middle of the property Vision bought for them, and her subconscious uses that foundation to build a house and a family for them to grow old together in.

The stories we tell ourselves have a lot of power. They shape the way we see (or, in Wanda's case, don't see) the world, and they help us to live with pain and suffering that is often simply random and meaningless. But thinking of radicalization as a version of a story we tell ourselves should make us pause. The women in Blee's hate groups were looking for a way to make sense of their lives; they ended up doing so by oppressing others. Wanda just wanted her life to go the way it should have if not for Vision's death; an entire town was held prisoner in their own minds as a result. Grief and pain can make it hard for us to face the truth—but failing to do so, settling for an easy answer, can have consequences far beyond ourselves.