Like Twlight, whose protagonist (Bella Swan) is a complete cipher with no personality, no goals and no aspirations other than bedding a cute boy, Scott Pilgrim, the eponymous ‘hero’ of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is a worthless sad sack only interested in thinking and talking about his love life. Also like Bella, Scott must choose between two equally appealing potential mates. Whereas Bella has to decide between two female fantasies made flesh (the dark, passionate Jacob and the calm, unfailingly elegant Edward), Scott must decide between two hipster nerd fantasies come to life: the manic pixie dream girl (think Zooey Deschanel) and the cute Asian. In either case, it doesn’t get more cliché than that.
What sets Scott Pilgrim apart from Twilight is the different ways the respective films’ target audiences’ react to seeing themselves reflected on screen. The tween fans of Twilight easily identify with Bella and find themselves enraptured by her struggles, such as they are. They want to be in her shoes, choosing between two beautiful guys and following them on their adventures. Hipsters, on the other hand, never really think of themselves as hipsters. Even though they dress just like Scott (ironic t-shirts, wristbands, shaggy hair, ripped jeans), act just like Scott (playing guitar in shitty garage bands, pouring over the liner notes of their favorite albums) and are obsessed with the same music, movies and videogames as Scott, they don’t see themselves reflected in the character because they’re far too cool and unique to ever be summed up so easily. Hipsters always maintain just enough ironic distance to prevent them from being absorbed in a film made exclusively for them. And the failure of Scott Pilgrim at the box office is a direct result of this conundrum.
The basic set-up of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a videogame come to life. In order to date Ramona Flowers (the manic pixie dream girl with ever changing neon-colored hair), Scott must defeat her seven evil exes in combat (said combat ranging from martial arts duels to guitar shred-offs). The battles involve all sorts of lifted-straight-from-videogames nonsense like 64-hit combos and glowing white eyes that shoot laser beams. Upon being defeated, the exes burst into coins and Scott earns points and extra lives.
While Scott is engaged in this epic Mortal Kombat-style fighting tournament to earn the right to date the manic pixie dream girl, he’s also dating the cute Asian who has quickly become his garage band’s number one fan. (The band, by the way, is named after a minor character in a Super Mario Bros. videogame, of course). Not only does Scott get to choose between the two biggest hipster nerd fantasy girls, he gets to date them both at the same time. Awesome.
The outcome of Scott’s Street Fighter tournament is, of course, never in doubt. Even from the very first fight, there’s no other way this could go than with Scott defeating all seven exes. And while I’ll give the film credit for staging some elaborate and occasionally interesting battles, when the eventual outcome is never in doubt, it makes the whole thing rather boring. Two fights in and you’re already thinking, ‘Do I really have to sit through five more of these?’ Thankfully two of the exes are twins so the total number of battles is six, but still. As quickly-paced and manically edited as this film is, there’s just no way to make it interesting when the eventual outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Also preventing the audience from being caught up in the film is the lack of any clear rules of this strange videogame world. Obviously, in real life vegans don’t have telekinetic powers and people don’t pull flaming swords out of their chests when they level up. But film isn’t real life, so I’m perfectly fine with fantastical things happening in Scott Pilgrim. But if all manner of crazy shit is going to happen, there needs to be some rules that govern this thing. What happens to the people Scott defeats? None of them are ever seen in the film after they lose a battle. Obviously they don’t die, so are they just not allowed to come near Ramona anymore? What would happen if Scott loses? Would he really have to stop seeing Ramona?
Without establishing any sort of rules by which to make sense of the strange world of Scott Pilgrim, the whole thing starts to feel arbitrary and nonsensical. Suddenly, after five fights, Scott gets a 1-UP. Then, in the last fight, out of nowhere, he gets the power of love power-up. I’m not asking that this all make complete sense but some semblance of order is urgently required. By the end of the film, if a wall came crashing down and a dinosaur started rampaging through the place, it would have made just as much sense as anything else that happened in the film. When there are no rules and no order, nothing and everything is possible. And in that case, there’s no reason to care about anything, no sense of anything being at stake and no reason for the audience to give a shit about any of it.
The critics who’ve heaped praise all over the film will say that none of that really matters because the whole movie is just an elaborate metaphor for confronting and coming to terms with the romantic past of a person you care about. And yes, of course that’s what the film is about. But that’s abundantly clear after the first fight. Are they really making the argument that Scott coming to terms with the fact that Ramona’s had sex with seven other people is fertile enough emotional territory to spend two whole hours on? And even if it were, the five subsequent battles are just a collection of ‘cool’ images and random references that have little to no impact on the emotional conflict that is supposedly going on within Scott. I’ll grant that it would be possible to make a film where the protagonist spends the entire running time learning to accept his new girlfriend’s sexual past (not one I’d want to see necessarily, but it’s possible). But there’d better be more to it than, ‘You and that guy? Really?’ before a massive sword fight erupts.
Scott’s the hipster nerd fantasy of hipster nerds. He has two girlfriends who adore him (along with an ex (the lead singer of a successful band, of course) who is suddenly interested in him again) and a band that’s getting some attention from labels, while at the same time also possessing the ability to beat the shit out of anyone (even big time celebrity actors) who looks at him wrong. He’s everything a hipster nerd ever dreamed he could be. Of course, if you’re not a hipster nerd, Scott just comes across as a douchebag stringing along two vulnerable women acting far cooler than he has any right to. And you’d probably want to punch the asshole square in the face.
At the same time, it’s undeniable that director Edgar Wright has visual style to burn. The film is expertly shot and inventively edited; so much so that the filmmaking skill on display provides Scott Pilgrim’s only real enjoyment. That’s because, while it’s occasionally fun to trainspot the thousands of references in the film (to videogames, movies, bands, etc. such as the introduction of Ramona being scored to the instrumental bridge of Frank Black’s ‘I Heard Ramona Sing’), they don’t ever mean anything. The references don’t deepen the film in any way; they just pat the audience on the back for being able to recognize them. It’s like when someone laughs at a Dennis Miller joke not because it’s funny but because they want everyone else in the room to know they got the reference.
In the end, what really kills Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it’s clearly trying too hard. The one thing a hipster never wants to be seen doing is trying. Even though it takes hours to get his hair just the right kind of disheveled, a hipster would die before admitting he even looked in a mirror. But it’s clear from the first minute of Scott Pilgrim that everyone involved with the film is really really trying to do something special, to create something that’s unlike anything else that’s ever been done before. And while deep down every hipster nerd might think that’s admirable, they can’t respect you if they can see you trying. So all Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ends up proving is just how impossible it is to try to satisfy an audience that’s only happy when it looks like you don’t give a shit.
1 comment:
you left out the fact that scott refused to sign to a (presumably) major label owned by an asshole executive. he clearly has too much hipster cred to do such a thing.
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