CNN —
Wednesday Addams doesn’t do anything by mistake. As the most stoic and thoughtful member of the Addams Family, she rarely makes unnecessary movements, including smiling and blinking.
When the spirit of dancing took hold of the typically grumpy teenager at her school dance in the new Netflix series that bears her name, it immediately caused a stir, on and off screen.
The brief scene accounts for less than three minutes of the entire series, but has quickly become “Wednesday’s” most iconic moment for how free our wacky protagonist seems to feel. Her eyes betray a rare, creepy passion. Her limbs, usually taped to her side, are flung around freely. The dance is her, sure – lots of rigorous, stilted moves and cues from decades past. Surely no one could mistake Wednesday dance for the latest TikTok trend, right?
Something about that quirky dance sparked something strange in all of us, and it started faster than a fire at Camp Chippewa. Clips of the choreography inspired viewers to watch the series, making it one of the streamer’s most-watched shows of all time (“Stranger Things,” who?). Its online popularity propelled Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” back up the charts more than a decade after the song’s release, and it’s only been featured on fan-made TikToks, not the show itself! “Wednesday” star Jenna Ortega’s admission that she choreographed the choreography herself invited new fans – including celebrities – to try it out and even infuse the routine with moves from their own culture.
Wednesday Addams would probably be embarrassed knowing her moves have gone mainstream, shudder, but her dance just won’t die — and she might just enjoy it. This gives the “Wednesday” dance its supernatural staying power.
The “Wednesday” dance scene only made its debut a month ago, but it already has a certain “mythology,” said Jenna Drenten, an associate professor of marketing at Loyola University Chicago, who studies how users of TikTok and other digital platforms interact express their identity.
Most of the scene’s lore was developed off-screen. Ortega, who plays a teenage wednesday with her pitch black humor, said she choreographed the routine herself. she counted among her influences were Bob Fosse, Siouxsie Sioux and ’80s goth dance clubs (she probably snuck in some references to the ’60s TV series The Addams Family, too).
Additionally, Ortega has admitted that she’s not a trained dancer, which perhaps makes her routine even more inviting to non-dancers who found the routine on TikTok, Drenten said.
“I’m not a dancer and I’m sure that’s obvious,” Ortega told NME.
But Ortega’s involvement has also sparked outrage – she told NME she filmed part of the dance while awaiting Covid-19 test results, which later came back positive. This prompted some to condemn the production for not following proper on-set Covid-19 prevention protocols – but ‘Wednesday’ continued to make waves.
The viral trends that stay in the cultural conversation the longest don’t usually just stay on their platform of origin, Drenten said. Check out the Corn Kid: He appeared on a YouTube series singing the praises of the corn on the cob, then clips of his performance went viral on TikTok and he’s continued to work with him ever since chipotleGreen Giant and the State of South Dakota promoting corn offline.
“To achieve longer shelf life, TikTok trends need to make the leap into a cultural trend beyond the confines of TikTok,” she said. “The ‘Wednesday’ dance had an advantage in that sense because the dance and the legacy of ‘The Addams Family’ have been outside of TikTok since the beginning.”
There is something else about the “Wednesday” dance – the human tendency to learn a dance for social currency.
Think electric slide, macarena, cupid shuffle—bat mitzvah and wedding standards, moves many of us know so well we can do them without thinking. Performing them en masse at such an event might feel like a Pavlovian reaction to a DJ’s song choices, but it’s also a shared ritual that encourages “a sense of solidarity and belonging,” Drenten said.
“Every gesture and movement inherently allows the person performing it to say, ‘I understand, I know, we have this shared experience,'” Drenten said.
It’s one of the reasons dance routines, from “Renegade” to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” so often dominate TikTok. But bucking those trends, the “Wednesday” dance wasn’t set to a popular song, though The Cramps’ punk anthem “Goo Goo Muck” has since garnered some new fans. The moves were easy to learn, said Drenten, “simple but unique.”
But it took Lady Gaga to take the “Wednesday” dance to the stratosphere. The version that has gone viral on TikTok is a sort of “fancam,” or mashup of clips, to match Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” a biblical ode to uninhibited dancing. Even Mother Monster herself performed a version of the “Wednesday” dance, sporting two long pigtails.
Millions of users have since put their own spin on Wednesday’s school dance solo, with some users incorporating Polynesian or Indian dance styles into their versions or creating their own Wednesday looks (Thing, the disembodied hand, included!).
Belonging, of course, contrasts with Wednesday’s ethos, which has never bothered to fit in. She’s perfectly content on an island of her own, where the sun never shines and old-fashioned tools of torture abound. Wednesday’s idiosyncratic moves, copied so widely, may diminish her status as the patron saint of the mad — except that Wednesday’s style and demeanor has been copied for decades.
Wednesday Addams has existed in some form since the late 1930s — first as an unnamed comic book character, then as a tiny child on a TV sitcom, then, in its most famous iteration before the premiere of “Wednesday,” as the dead-eyed Christina Ricci. And Wednesday fans have dressed up like her for decades, Drenten said, often inspired by Ricci’s portrayal. The eldest Addams child is no longer a secret for her biggest fans to hide from mainstream pop culture.
Since debuting on Wednesday, her uncompromising commitment to the macabre has made her an idiosyncratic icon for loners and goth aficionados alike. Yet she is still an “outlier” among the women and girls of fiction, wrote Emily Alford for Longreads, because she has never softened or committed to particular story tropes. She is what she is and she doesn’t change.
“She brought to screen a morbid self-acceptance that set her apart and became a crucial blueprint for a generation of girls to develop their own gallows humor,” wrote Alford.
And now many of these girls and other users can be found on TikTok, where niche communities can flourish (or reach mainstream users). The app is a “space for people to find out who they are and, more importantly, to find other people who share the same interests,” Drenten said, although those interests include cosplaying as certain dispassionate teenagers.
“TikTok arguably encourages a lot of reproduction and users may feel pressure to act, appear and look a certain way,” Drenten said. “But Wednesday reminds people that being themselves in this sea of equality is liberating.”