I know the aesthetic and source material are very different but I feel like the themes and ideas in WandaVision, especially after the last episode, remind me very powerfully of a Miyazaki film
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The 2010s episode made this point even better, I think It captures the tone of a Michael Schur sitcom so well This bizarre double consciousness that the things they're talking about are objectively deeply troubling but the way the show is shot puts it all at an ironic remove
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It's "not that kind of show", it's a sleepy small town like Pawnee where bad things happen but nothing is ever TOO serious, no matter what drama is going on inside outside it's always a beautiful day
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(Vision trying to "wake himself up" being like "Why am I still sitting here talking to you people?" and storming out of the mockumentary was so good)
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Anyway I also think it's really really important that, like in Miyazaki's best films, the horror and the trauma and the suffering are given room to really hit the viewer It doesn't hold back on it, it doesn't let you judge Wanda for "overreacting"
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I dunno, the most obvious antecedent for this show is the movie Pleasantville - starring the original cinematic Spider-Man! - and like Pleasantville's message was just way too fucking glib, is the thing
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They pioneered the gimmick and they played the gimmick really well but it didn't transcend the gimmick feeling like a gimmick and it's because they set it up as such an easy dunk on 1950s conservatism and whatnot
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The ending of Pleasantville is obviously inevitable because the preachy moral is a carefully rigged strawman "The real world is better than TV! TV isn't real!" Yeah no shit Dad I know that
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It just did not establish the motivation nearly hard enough for Tobey Maguire's character It was so casually dismissive of the idea of escapism and "comfort characters" and enabling delusions and all of that mess It just summarized it all as calling him weak
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Tobey has a rough life the way all of us have rough lives and he just wants to sit in his safe monochrome universe posting uwu chats for eternity but his sister, whose life is just as rough, wants him to WAKE UP TO REALITY and she ends up 100% correct
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And that's boring, and it's smug, and it's forgoing the chance at actual drama Did you ever think that maybe the people so desperate for escapism actually do know what they're escaping from? They're not all naive, stupid kids
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They've been in the real world and they've seen that gritty harsh reality you're so enamored of - they've seen some real af shit you've never fucking imagined - and they want to escape it and hide from it BECAUSE IT FUCKING SUCKS
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