The media convergence in WandaVision: revisionism and contamination of the genre

Abstract

This paper analyzes the media convergences in the miniseries WandaVision (2021) and its media contaminations. After building up a shared universe, Marvel seems to reach what Brogan Morris (2021) calls the “end of the super-hero movies” and a “revisionist trend”, that after its exhaustion, the genre starts exploring new possibilities, leading to its maturation and revisionism. Among the new approaches, we find in WandaVision, which is an unfolding of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the streaming, its contamination by the short story’s structure according to Ricardo Piglia’s (2004) thesis about the genre, which specifies that it tells two stories – a simple story, and “a secret story, told in a fragmented and elliptic way” (2004, p.90). Although structured according to Piglia’s definition, the miniseries breaks with other conventions of the short story, such as that it should “be read at one sitting” (POE, s/d, p. 135), as its episodes were dropped on a weekly basis, preventing the viewers from binge-watching the whole season, leading them to inquire about it and discuss about the clues left on the episodes to find what was really happening in the story, expanding what Jenking (2013) calls “participatory culture”. Due to these ruptures, we consider this miniseries an example of “contamination”, as Baetens (2018) suggests in his novelization studies, not in a “damaging” sense, but as innovation – contaminated, but not transformed or remediated, in Rajewski’s words (2005). Initially, we discuss the concept of contamination, then we analyze scenes from different moments of the show. These hint, initially with the commercials and then with the addition of elements that are strange to the environment, at the existence of another story. Thereby, we aim to show how these short story’s structures of telling “a different story” work in the miniseries.