Number 1: Wednesday is beautiful. Thin, dark, bewitching, perpetually sulky, with the chicken-ass mouth that teenagers (and many women) dream of, even with a few freckles, the kind that girls place on their noses with apps to retouch photos.
Number 2: Wednesday is sought after and disputed from the coolest of the bigoncio, the sly son of the town sheriff and the tormented artist of the school of outcasts.
Number 3: Wednesday is talented, enchants half the city by playing the cello, writes novels, responds in kind to anyone, knows the properties of carnivorous plants by heart, solves riddles at the speed of light.
Number 4: Wednesday is not afraid of anything, she moves like Kill Bill’s Bride but in Dario Argento’s Suspiria, she challenges the monster without a shudder, she dances wildly and proudly in the middle of the dance floor, with a crowd of adoring companions.
How can the Wednesday of the homonymous series of Tim Burton which is depopulating among Netflix subscribers to be assumed symbol of nonconformity it is an easily explained mystery: people who like it like it. It is the normalized version of the metalheads of the eighties, they are truly outside the box: ugly and dirty, greasy hair, swaying gait, anti-system by conviction, the opposite of designer sandwiches with Moncler, El Charro belt and Timberland boots. Wednesday also has nothing to do with nerds, another sociological category of outcasts then rehabilitated in the era of Silicon Valley and hi-tech geniuses.
Wednesday is Harry Potter
Wednesday is Harry Potter in rebel girls version: very intelligent, courageous, unique. Generation Z icon, as cheerleaders were to girls in the fifties. With that touch of gothic without horrorwhich becomes fashionable: see the personalized uniform for the Nevermore Academy, see the lace-up shoes with platform soles, which are already trendy.
Not that the Addams Family of the unforgettable 1960s TV series was really transgressive. Neither were the first film of 1977 nor the one of 1991 with Angelica Houston in the role of Morticia and Raul Julia in those of Gomez: only one funny parody of the typical bourgeois family, with its amusing corollary of desecration of death.
A new legend for teenagers
In “Wednesday” we smile and enjoy the story, largely signed by men (Burton shot the first four episodes, the others are by Gandja Manteiro And James Marshall; the script is the work of Alfred Gough And Miles Millarexecutive producers together with Burton) and excellently interpreted, starting from the protagonist Jenna Ortega. Teenagers and especially teenagers appreciate the shady bravado, the clouds in the relationship with the cumbersome mother who is an always magnificent Catherine Zeta Jones, the thrilling plot which is the real strong point, the hormonal storms, the effective revenge against bullies, the ability to self-determination and be respected by adults.
Everything went well, very well indeed. But don’t tell us that “Wednesday” is a transgressive series that gives voice to the least: the “strange” is by no means marginalized. IS seductive and popular. She plunges the girls who follow her back into the everlasting cage of being as “being desired”, she does not free them from those chains at all. Paradoxically, she adds others, proposing a model, the umpteenth, almost unattainable. Sure, Wednesday she doesn’t care about other people’s judgement, and this message to teenagers arrives, and how. But in the era of pathological narcissism is there really a need?
In reality
To the real outcasts or ex-outcasts among us, spotty and always on a diet, full of complexes, no mouth to heart, no French nose, no suitors ready to throw themselves into the fire, no invitations to dances and parties, shy bookworms or not at all brilliant and rather fearful female students who wear their fathers’ shirts and oversized sweaters to hide their shapes, always a little lost, without a quick joke, convinced that to be feminists it is not enough to say “I” but it is necessary to say “we” , here we go Wednesday is theBarbie effect. Bella, we play with it, we change her clothes, we put her on the shelf. And then we come back to devour Mafalda and to give away the Quino strips to all the normal little girls and all the pimply and insecure teenagers we know.
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