Hight schools in five years… It was starting to feel like a lot when Wednesday Addams, at the dawn of her 16th birthday, was once again excluded from her high school. The reason ? She threw two large bags full of hungry piranhas into the swimming pool where the athletes who had bothered her brother Pugsley were training. “I am the only one who has the right to torture my brother”, she complains. This scene, shown in the trailer for the series Wednesday (Netflix, 2022) gives a taste of the archetype of weirdo 2.0.
Originally, The Addams Family appears in the pages of the newspaper The New Yorker in 1938, in comic strip form. This famous Gothic tribe, imagined by Charles Addams, has since been the subject of numerous adaptations.
In the series produced and directed by Tim Burton, we follow the arrival of Wednesday (played by the promising Jenna Ortega), the daughter of Morticia and Gomez Addams, in the Nevermore school for weird people, located in the American state from Vermont. It was in this murky and fantastical universe, where vampires, mermaids and werewolves abound, that her parents fell in love a few years earlier.
There, the weirdos (pronounced “ouirdos”) are legion. In English, this informal term deriving from the word weird refers to a person whose strange behavior does not fit the mold. Rather used to humiliate someone, this insult now increasingly takes on a new meaning, more flattering and a symbol of difference.
In Jenna Ortega’s portrayal, Wednesday is a teenage girl with long raven black hair, divided into two braids, with curtain bangs over her eyes. Always dressed in dark clothing, Wednesday favors period pieces, such as the black dresses with white pie collars, which we now see at every Halloween party.
Macabre and viral choreography
Allergic to colors but also to social networks, which she finds futile, she prefers to spend her free time reading, writing or playing the violin in the dark. Very intelligent, this black sheep of the playgrounds says everything she thinks, without filter.
Enter social conventions and dance properly? Very little for her. The macabre choreography she performs in episode 4 of the first season goes viral. And for good reason: this unconscious feminist icon praises the abnormal.
Weird in the city as on the screen, actress Jenna Ortega claims her resemblance to the morbid and unusual character she plays. Like Wednesday, she makes no apologies for anything and uses black humor to destabilize her detractors, fully assuming her particularities. To the media Wired, Jenna confides the sinister passion she had when she was younger, when she conducted autopsies on dead animals. In its own way, a little out of the ordinary, the weirdo gives hope to all young people in distress, sidelined because of a difference, whether physical, mental, linked to sexual orientation, gender, origins… The revenge of the outcasts and others left behind, in short.
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