Agatha, It's Been Too Long
Agatha, It's Been Too Long
The new Marvel Disney+ show is entertaining, but it also highlights one of the studio's larger problems.
I’d like to think I’ve been a Kathryn Hahn fan longer than most, but the truth of the matter is that we all likely got on board with her scene-stealing performance in Step Brothers. From there, her career has only become more exhilarating as she’s deftly managed not only comedy but also done outstanding dramatic work like her turn in 2018’s Private Life. So it was no surprise that when 2021’s WandaVision rolled around, Hahn had no trouble going toe-to-toe with Avengers. The show revealed that Hahn’s “nosy neighbor” Agnes was Agatha Harkness, a powerful witch seeking to steal Wanda’s power for her own.
Beyond that, my memories of Agatha’s role in WandaVision became fuzzy because it’s been over three years since the Disney+ show aired, and we haven’t seen the character since. As I started up my Agatha All Along screeners (Disney sent out the first four episodes of the nine-episode series), I kept trying to jog my memory about this character. I knew that Wanda’s punishment was to trap Agatha in a TV-like reality (basically what Agatha had done to Wanda). Still, I couldn’t remember why exactly Agatha was “evil,” why she had bothered with Wanda in the first place, and what the clear stakes here would be.
A trip to Wikipedia helped clear some things up (Agatha is a witch who kills other witches and steals their power, and her somewhat tragic backstory is her mother tried to kill her for practicing dark magic), and after a fun first episode that’s in the mold of WandaVision, we see that Agatha’s journey is to walk the Witches’ Road to reclaim the power she lost.
As a standalone show, Agatha All Along is, through its first four episodes, an entertaining watch. Hahn is a blast; she’s surrounded by a cast that’s equally adept at comedy and drama (there’s a sense that any of the women in the cast could have landed the role of Agatha), and the plot stakes are easy to grasp. The road is treacherous, but every member of Agatha’s makeshift coven needs the reward it promises at the end. These witches don’t trust each other, but they have to work together. And in the first four episodes, it’s fun sending them into different settings, which retains a bit of the WandaVision vibe without a complete redo of “Which TV show are they parodying?”
The problem is time. Agatha sat on a shelf for over three years (and three years have passed in the show’s timeline as well). I keep thinking back to how frequently we saw the original Avengers during The Infinity Saga. Tony Stark was never off-screen for more than two years. Even Bruce Banner/Hulk, who was largely kept to Avengers movies (there’s a rights issue with Universal where Hulk can’t be in a standalone picture), found his way into Thor: Ragnarok.
But as the Marvel Cinematic Universe balloons, there’s little time to hang with new characters or old characters. It seems unlikely we’ll ever hear from the surviving Eternals again. Shang-Chi and She-Hulk are MIA. When we see Riri Williams in next year’s series Ironheart, it will have been over two years since she debuted in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It’s a world full of superheroes, but the time between appearances keeps getting longer as we take time to introduce new people. When Thanos snapped away half the population in Avengers: Infinity War, audiences were shocked to see their favorites get dusted. Now, a snap seems welcome if only to allow us to focus in on who’s worth caring about.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe only works if you give audiences a chance to build affection towards its characters. My enjoyment of Agatha All Along is because of my affection towards Kathryn Hahn rather than Agatha Harkness.
Recommendations
It’s Spooky Season, so I’m just going to keep throwing horror recommendations your way through October 31st. First up is Arrow’s new 4K release of 2009’s Friday the 13th. The reboot is easily one of the best Jason movies, and it’s a shame that it’s also the last movie in the franchise for the time being (the rights are locked up in litigation, so no one can move forward on another outing for the iconic slasher). At least Arrow did right by the film for its 15th anniversary.
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What I’m Watching
If you want to keep up with the horror movies and thrillers I’m watching throughout Spooky Season, I’ve created a special Letterboxd tag for those movies. Let me know what horror movies you’re making time for in the comments section! My watchlist is already overwhelming me, so clearly, I need more titles.
What I’m Reading
I finally finished reading Brian Raftery’s Best. Movie. Year. Ever. about the films of 1999, and I had to greet it with a shrug. It doesn’t quite read like a book to me. It reads more like a series of magazine articles around a similar idea. If the idea is strong enough, you can work that into a book (e.g., Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point), but you can see Raftery grasping for a thesis the book doesn’t convey. There are lots of ideas swirling around about American culture at the turn of the century, but the book lacks the breadth to examine a connection between all the titles beyond, “Wow, look at all these great movies.” And that’s fine, but I think if you want to talk about the culture, you need to also look at bad movies and forgotten movies. Instead, the book is a bunch of anecdotes about the making of some beloved films and will surely be nice for bulking up their respective IMDb trivia pages.
In other reads:
A Great Year for Movies. The Best Year to Start Writing About Them. by Wesley Morris [The New York Times] - Speaking of 1999, Wesley Morris, the two-time Pulitzer-winning critic, also reflected on that year and what it meant both in terms of Hollywood at large and in terms of his development as a young, 23-year-old critic working at the San Francisco Examiner. Morris is an exemplary talent, and it’s great to read his thoughts on his origins. He’s also the kind of critic that can sling out terms like “breathlessly chummy” when referring to Raftery’s book or calling Hugh Grant a “superhuman cardigan,” and it comes right up to the edge of being catty without losing any respectability. He’s very, very good.
The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined by Mark Harris [WIRED] - I don’t know why the Titan disaster has captured my imagination. Perhaps it’s my obsession with disaster-at-sea nonfiction or my fascination with submarines. But I also feel like this particular story captures our current moment of oligarchic hubris where regulations serve only to impede the self-proclaimed Great Man. And hey, if it only blew up in The Great Man’s face, then so be it, but it never does. Stockton Rush died in the Titan implosion but so did four other people whose greatest mistake was trusting a man in a culture where wealth is too often equated with brilliance. They didn’t know about all the corners he cut, and they shouldn’t have had to pay for his negligence with their lives.
How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak [The New York Times] - Chief Justice John Roberts has tried to style himself as a moderate. After all, he cast the deciding vote in saving the Affordable Care Act. But this article feels like the end of John Roberts: The Moderate and the beginning of understanding him as John Roberts: MAGA. Roberts may not be as openly corrupt as Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, but as this article shows, he’s no less craven in making sure that Republicans, and especially the Republican executive, have all the power they want. This is not the “calling balls and strikes” umpiring he mentioned at his confirmation hearing; this is shaping political outcomes for his party, and it’s yet another reason to reform the Supreme Court.
The Man Who Made Nike Uncool by Kim Bhasin and Lily Meier [Bloomberg] - This is a great bit of business reporting on how Nike’s new CEO, John Donahoe, had a brief flush of success running the company, but when it all unraveled, he resorted to mass layoffs, and now the company is struggling. It’s an interesting story because it’s not so much that Fortune 500 CEOs don’t do anything but also that they’re not some sainted geniuses who merit their massive salaries. Donahoe had decades of experience (although not in athletic wear) and all the business connections and it didn’t prevent him from tanking an iconic brand.
The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump’ by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig [The New York Times] - This reporting comes from Buettner and Craig’s upcoming book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, which feels like a fun read. While James Poniewozik explores how The Apprentice influenced attitudes towards Trump in his great book Audience of One, Buettner and Craig get into the nuts-and-bolts of taking a punchline and turning him into a star.
What I’m Hearing
Ever since watching Agatha All Along, I’ve had “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” stuck in my head. You’ve been warned.
Also, as a huge fan of Okkervil River’s 2007 album The Stage Names, I don’t know how I never got around to listening to their acclaimed 2005 work Black Sheep Boy, but I finally gave it a listen and loved it.
What I’m Playing
I’m fully wrapped on Astro Bot, and it’s without question one of the best games of the year. When so many games are aiming for hundreds of hours of middling experiences, there’s something refreshing about a 16-hour game with perfect controls and perfect design. Very much a quality-over-quantity argument in the face of AAA bloat.
Now, I’ve turned my focus to Hi-Fi Rush, and I’m a little mixed on it. In terms of the art design and writing, it’s incredible. If this were an animated series, we’d all watch it. Its gameplay of action-meets-rhythm is thoughtful and innovative, but I struggle with its execution. Because everything is done on the beat, there’s a frequent stiffness where your movements feel constrained. Or maybe my frustration stems from knowing that I have no rhythm and thus will never get an S-ranking on any of the battles.