WandaVision and The Social Contract
Superheroes really would be scary in real life.
The first MCU show from Disney was WandaVision, which came out in January 2021, when everyone had been in quarantines for months, with no Marvel content for almost a year. The population was starving for anything MCU, thus came Wandavision.
It revolves around Wanda and Vision, two superhumans trying to fit in suburbia. The only problem is, that nothing is as it seems.
A lot of Wandavision’s themes have been praised, including grief, managing expectations while theorizing, and domestic abuse. I wish to discuss the repercussions of super-powered beings existing in a society with non-powered individuals, i.e., the social contract.
As explained by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the social contract represents an agreement between the ruled and the rulers defining their respective rights and duties in order to form a functioning society.
When Wanda moves to Westview and forces everyone to reenact sitcoms from her childhood, she breaks the social contract.
A person who has complete and total control over people who are incapable of fighting back is a terrifying prospect. Wanda imprisons thousands of people, denying them access to the outside world, and making them work for free because she grieves and is in such pain after all the trauma she experienced.
After she sets them free, they stare at her in scorn and anger, the showrunner wants us to feel sorry for her because she had to give up three people she really loved ( her husband and her kids). When one person’s grief (something that everyone experiences at some point) leads to the imprisonment of thousands, what does that mean for the social contract? Should those without superpowers accept that they will be collateral damage?
We all escape into fantasy to avoid dealing with our problems, but it is rarely at the expense of other people’s physical safety and lives. The possibility of superpower individuals abusing and hurting the general population is extremely high, and that is even when they are not knowingly doing it, as we saw with Wanda. That is a problem with superpowers.
We’ve seen this same problem with a number of heroes, Omniman ( Invincible), Homelander (The Boys), Superman ( Man of Steel), and even John Walker ( Falcon and The Winter Soldier). This is just one small thing I wanted to mention. You know, food for thoughts.
