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Elise Truchan

Professor Weixian Pan

What is New Media?

28 March 2021

Media Inciting Paracosm and Its Effect on Society

Classic American sitcoms like the 50’s The Dick Van Dyke Show, the 70’s The Brady

Bunch, and the 80’s Family Ties give adults who used to watch these shows growing up a sense

of nostalgia. When real life gets tough they wish they could pop onto the stage of the sitcom with

the live audience laughter, the witty family members, and the happy hug that comes at the end of

each episode and be part of that world. In Marvel’s WandaVision series, Wanda Maximoff was

able to do just that: create her perfect reality based off of the media she grew up watching as a

child. After losing her parents, brother, and love of her life Wanda fabricated her own paracosm

to make her reality the perfect sitcom. The media of American sitcoms incited Wanda’s break

from real life in WandaVision and caused her to be disconnected from society on a level that

made her a danger to anyone else who didn’t fit her in sitcom reality. This leads to lay the claim

that media in any form is able to incite paracosm to a degree in which the person with paracosm

disconnects from society in an unhealthy manner that can not only cause harm to that person but

to the relationships that bonds them to other people. Through formal analysis this essay will

explore how Wanda Maximoff created a network through media after her physical social network

was broken. Then by way of social critique it will investigate how this leads to creating a

paracosm and to disconnecting from society. Finally, by extension, this essay will look at other

examples of media that create paracosm and cause social strain.

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Wanda Maximoff did not know life without a physical social network constantly

surrounding her. She grew up with both of her parents and a brother, yet at the age of ten she lost

both of her parents in a bombing. This left her brother Pietro who stuck by her side the next six

years until he also died. Wanda then met Vision, a synthetic human, who she fell in love with and

learned she could not live without. Every time Wanda lost someone in her physical social

network she had someone else to rely on until she was tasked with saving half the universe and

had to lose Vision in the process. It was at that moment her network of connection was lost.

In Network Aesthetics, Patrick Jagoda discusses how a network provides the feeling of

connection and how networks developed through media provide this connected sensation. Jagoda

describes how this “connection is less an imperative than it is the infrastructural basis of

everyday life” in which the loss of that network moves people to try to replicate the feeling of

connectedness with a new network (Jagoda 1). With her parents and brother, Wanda grew up

watching American sitcoms like Bewitched and I Love Lucy. In episode eight of WandaVision, a

flashback reveals that as soon as Wanda lost her brother she rewatched these sitcoms to feel the

connection she had with her family (“Previously On”). This media was able to connect her back

to her network she needed yet also incited her paracosm.

As Wanda was reeling from her loss of her physical social network, the network she

reverted back to that was formed through media incited her paracosm. Writer Chris Evangelista

examines the series WandaVision and its connection to paracosm and trauma. He explains how a

paracosm is “a highly detailed imaginary world… that [doesn’t] actually exist but still feels

completely real, especially to the creator” (Evangelista). Out of the many causes of paracosm, “a

paracosm that sprung forth from trauma is at the center of WandaVision” (Evangelista). Using

her immense power Wanda was able to create a paracosm where she imagined a life that her and
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Vision could have had together. The trauma of her broken social network was the catalyst for her

paracosm yet her entire imagined world started from and was based off of the media she watched

growing up. Due to this Wanda’s flawless sitcom reality she inherited from media disconnected

her from society.

Everything in Wanda’s reality was controlled by her to such a degree that anything that

didn’t fit into her paracosm made her lash out. In episode five of WandaVision, an organization

that is trying to figure out what is happening to the small town Wanda is mind controlling to

create her paracosm sends a drone to Wanda to try to communicate. Instead of having a civil

conversation to try to resolve the situation Wanda threatens the organization announcing “this

will be your only warning. Stay out of my home” to which the organization’s director responds

“you’ve taken an entire town hostage” (“On A Very Special Episode…”). The paracosm became

ingrained in Wanda’s mind so much that she doesn’t even realize the harm she is causing to other

people and to the balance of society. She disconnected to everything that was not controlled by

her because she didn’t want to leave the sitcom media’s perfect reality.

Wanda’s paracosm incited by media is an extreme case that happened in a media in it of

itself, but this does not only happen to superhuman beings in a cinematic world. Cara Wallis

discusses migrant women who live in Beijing and use images on phones to “imagine a world

outside of Beijing” (Wallis 121). The media of images can also incite paracosm. These women

take “pictures of pictures” and Wallis describes this as “where the distinction between simulation

and the ‘real’ implodes and we are left with nothing but surfaces without depths and copies

without originals” or even fantasy without reality (Wallis 137). For these migrant women their

paracosm is a world where they can see these images based on reality and create a fantasy of

them being there instead of simply taking a picture of a picture and not a picture of the actual
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physical thing. Their catalyst is the feeling of being stuck in one place and not being able to

reach the places beyond their workspace and home. For these women the media of images incites

paracosm as the media of sitcoms did for Wanda.

Disconnecting from reality as Wanda and the women in Cara Wallis’ study do can easily

cause social strain when the pleasure of the mental world immersion exceeds that of actual

reality. George Janes writes about paracosm and how those with dissociative disorders like

paracosm struggle to function socially and “often [find] their experiences within the daydream

far more pleasurable than real life” (Janes). The way in which those who disconnect from society

in this manner can be stemmed back experiencing media. Watching a television show to seeing a

favorable image arouses a creativity that can grow into entire new worlds. When these worlds

become more pleasurable than real life a person is never truly satisfied with what reality has to

offer. They disconnect from real society to be a part of their paracosm. If the paracosm becomes

too extreme and interferes with others as in WandaVision then it causes social strain. Even for the

migrant women where their paracosm stems from a picture of a picture can cause mental strain

when she yearns for that fantasy too much and it pulls her out of reality. In all any media is able

to cause any one from any place to have paracosm that interferes with their daily life and society

around them.
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Works Cited

Evangelista, Chris. What We talk About When We Talk About 'WandaVision': Grief, Trauma, and

Fan Theories, 2021. SlashFilm, https://www.slashfilm.com/wandavision-fan-theories/

Jagoda, Patrick. Network Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook

Central,

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4427890.

Janes, George. Paracosm: The UNCHAINING of reality, 2019. Artefact Magazine,

https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2019/10/22/paracosm-the-unchaining-of-reality-2/

“On A Very Special Episode…”. WandaVision, directed by Matt Shakman, season 1, episode 5,

DisneyPlus, 2021.

“Previously On”. WandaVision, directed by Matt Shakman, season 1, episode 8, DisneyPlus,

2021.

Wallis, Cara. Technomobility in China : Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones, New York

University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docI

D=1100022.