Wednesday, Paris, and the Morbid Realities of Life, Part I
Jenna Ortega portraying Wednesday Addams in the Netflix show Wednesday. I pulled the image from this article.
There is something about Wednesday Addams and Paris Geller. These two characters are driven, intelligent, and rationally-minded more than emotionally. They are not held back by the morbid realities of life, they are further driven by them.
Why?
Both characters also like others to stay out of their way. They only bother forming connections with people when it benefits them in some way. The emotional bond follows after the initial connection, and sometimes that emotional bond is not one of friendship or understanding. Neither are very nice, yet I find myself rooting for both characters.
Let’s start with Wednesday. Throughout Wednesday, directed by Tim Burton, she is constantly praised for not caring what others think about her. The viewer knows she cares what some people think after she has formed some bond with them, but love and friendship (or lack thereof) do not stop her from achieving her personal goals. She is also not driven by hatred, though she admits she secretly takes pleasure in knowing others disapprove of her. I believe in her mind, these are irrational things, and in her hyperrational mind, love and friendship are nothing but dead ends (emphasis on the “dead”).
Wednesday is instead driven by the morbid realities of life. She is completely unphased by blood and torture, and finds crime scenes intriguing mysteries to solve. She takes pride in the harm she causes others, and comfort in the fact that she will die one day. Wednesday also appears to be completely desensitized to death, and only shows remorse when it is someone she cares about, like Thing or Eugene.
A mental health professional might say Wednesday Addams exhibits traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder. I am not a mental health professional and I’m saying it. Some of the traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder are: lie or trick others for personal gain, disregard rules or the safety of others, act impulsively or aggressively, act coldly toward others, and have few, if any, close relationships.
Wednesday does not quite meet the criteria of sociopath or psychopath from my understanding of both of those disorders, and she does feel remorse when Thing is killed and Eugene falls into a coma because she feels responsible for those things happening, and she cares about the people they happened to. I wouldn’t call her manipulative or abusive, but she does use others to achieve her ultimate goal–finding the truth.
She is driven by these morbid realities: danger, murder, history, etc. These are the things most people don’t want to talk about and can become very depressed over, but not Wednesday. She becomes more curious the more she knows about the world and the way it operates. And for me, someone who can go down rabbit holes of hopelessness every time I hear about the environmental crisis or another school shooting, Wednesday Addams’ way of looking at the world is quite intriguing.
These realities haunt us all, but what if they didn’t? What if we weren’t ashamed of them? What if we decided that these things we fear, these morbid realities, are something that drive us to make things better. I’m not saying anyone should let their curiosity get in the way of their relationships with others (since let’s face it, nobody would watch Wednesday on Netflix if it didn’t appeal to our interests, and love and friendship are a lot of peoples’ interests). However, I am saying to be curious, let the realities of life be just that, don’t reject them just because you don’t want to deal with them.
Believe me, I don’t want to think about getting murdered either, and I certainly don’t want to be someone’s murder victim, but I also don’t want to spend my life being afraid, which is something I have been wrestling with for years. But I think one of the major themes Wednesday gets at is embracing the person you are, and though we do not want to admit it, we are connected by the mundane, morbid, horrible realities of life.
Join me next week for part two: Paris Geller, one of my personal favorite Gilmore Girls characters.
WebMD articles on Antisocial Personality Disorder: Antisocial Personality Disorder, How Sociopaths and Psychopaths are Different