Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Redux)

It's an accident that my second attempt at writing about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is so near the one year anniversary of its theatrical release (my first, dated 8/14/10). Last night I watched Scott Pilgrim, which I don't like very much, for the fourth time (w/trivia track), which must mean that I like this movie very much. It's a compliment when I say that in my opinion Edgar Wright's films are the easiest popcorn films to watch - I've seen all of them multiple times and have written about Shaun of the Dead multiple times as well.

"You broke the heart that broke mine. Now get ready to Chau down." - Knives Chau (Ellen Wong)

But still I struggle over what it is exactly that I get out of them. They're infectious, they're fun, perhaps the acme of modern escapist fantasies, but they haven't stimulated me on deeper levels. His films haven't rattled my insides, and I can't find a reason why they should. For me it's telling that reshoots were required for Scott Pilgrim's ending and that focus groups and O'Malley's final volume were necessary for Wright to find the film's emotional denouement. Here is a filmmaker who, largely through self exhibition, is well-known to be meticulous, but it may be that he holds his microscope to dramatic and filmic design, and struggles to give his characters more than a filmic depth.

(Michael Cera) Scott's fight sequences are best considered from a symbolic pov, as allegorical treatments of what would be emotional confrontations in real life. He's not The Bride, and he's not really killing; he conquers the idea of evil exes. The duels to death, as called by Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha) through e-mail, involve no real deaths, but page-turning moments of maturity. Edgar Wright says he "tried to make it so that [Scott's] emotional story is consistent throughout [the film] and even the way he fights the exes is, in some ways, a reflection of his emotions." Most viewers probably make this switch without putting it into words. If the battles are taken as literal, Scott is a murderer, kind of, or whatever people who turn other people into coins are called.

Either way I don't understand why Scott Pilgrim reserves judgment for boy on girl violence, and I continue to see the implication as being that some forms of violence are acceptable. Wright has said that when Scott "gets to ex number four [Roxy Richter] he doesn’t really even want to play anymore and tries to opt out of fighting because he’s just had it," and it's true that Scott and Ramona are in conflict when this fight occurs. What we hear from Scott is "I don't think I can hit a girl. They're soft," and Ramona's response, "You don't have a choice." Other instances of boy on girl violence are given specifically negative contexts (all except the [accidental] boob punch), and are singled out from other violent acts committed in the film. The first time is when Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh) punches the highlights out of Chau's hair, and it's meant to be an example of how Todd is a rockstar asshole. The last time comes after Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) utters "let's both be girls" before kneeing Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman) in the balls. Gideon backhands (double checked in slow-mo) Ramona, and as he does a BAD!! graphic flashes on screen, and as he kicks her down the pyramid's stairs more BAD!! graphics flash on screen.

If the film wanted to express an ethical point it might have considered violence charged personalities from a more objective pov, but instead it makes the easy, obvious comment that girls should not be hit by boys, and chooses not to explore the complexity of the problem of boys hitting boys, or violence in general. The film behaves like Scott Pilgrim. All instances of this moral judgment, against boy on girl violence, which contradict the phantasmagorical circumstances, are clouded by narrative material - Scott is tired, Todd is an asshole, Gideon shows his teeth - but the fact is that not a single instance of boy on boy violence is given this type of treatment.

Scott Pilgrim's double standard on violence has also always bothered me, it's present there in my first response to the film. It's lame that the film would draw one line and not other, harder to draw lines; it's lame that Scott would. To me it indicates that the film's focus is not on philosophical or fundamental inquiries, and only considers essential questions from its narrative and temporal pov. Scott's pov, during the early 2000s or whenever the film is set. And Scott is a purposefully imperfect character, he's: immature, selfish, insouciant, and nearsighted. At least. A damaged protagonist can be more interesting than Edgar's Scott Pilgrim (I've never read the comic books, I should mention). Scott is a dull, limited lead for a movie. Worse, Edgar hopes both to give Scott flaws and to forgive them, which ideology I don't traffic in, because it seems contradictory to the point of having flawed characters.

The fear of female sexuality by males is very real. Though I think the film fails to offer rich expressions of intimacy between Scott and Ramona. Why she loves him is a complete fucking mystery to me. It's not that I doubt that a person could fall in love for no good reason, it's simply that I think the good reasons, and bad reasons, are way more interesting to explore than no reason. In the interview I keep quoting, Edgar laughs about this, laughs, saying "man, I’ve told girls I’ve loved them without knowing anything about them (laughs)." Okay, he's told a girl he's in love too early, but does he know the difference between telling a girl you love her and really loving a girl? I can't tell by the film.

This may be why Edgar didn't know how to end the film - he didn't know why anyone cared about anyone else, and he wasn't sure how seriously to treat their feelings. Emotional satisfaction is like sexual satisfaction in the Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman) battle, a matter of opportunity. Edgar may have been unsure of their final moment because he hadn't asked himself vital questions about his characters.

Scott's confrontation with the lesbian character Roxy is handled by Ramona herself fighting (battle hammer vs. razor belt), then puppet fighting for Scott. How she is defeated, though, is by Scott touching her erogenous hotspot, a place below one of her knees. She explodes in an orgasm, or something. What bothers me is the fact that this transgresses the simplest principle of lesbian intimacy, namely that a woman is stimulated by other women and not men. It makes sexual pleasure a matter of purely physical logic, activated by anyone given the knowledge and opportunity, and not a matter of more meaningful emotional intimacies and loyalties. I call bullshit. I too have an erogenous hotspot, located between my legs, but I don't explode in orgasms when anyone touches it. I explode when the right person touches it. That's because my penis is romantic (as love should be, please?).

The final fight, between Scott and others vs Gideon, is a process that is exactly the same as all the others + w/more people. If Scott had really gained the sword of self respect he might have immediately put the sword on the ground and realized his fights against other people were misguided and the real fight existed in an interior realm. I think one fight is with ourselves, one fight is authentically personal; and either Scott was wrong about the final fight with Gideon, or he was wrong about all the previous ones. Scott shouldn't have to destroy the hipsters or Gideon in these battles. When the real battle arrives, the one with Nega Scott, a joke about french toast is made (foreshadowed when Knives and Scott play Ninja Ninja Revolution and Nega Ninja appears: "I can never get past that guy," Scott says, to which Knives replies "Don't beat yourself up about it." I see this as more implicational evidence that Scott views everyone else as the problem).

It's knights and damsels programming, ("about him trying to win the heart of this fair maiden"), the same cultural wiring as always. The film's reluctance to probe violence from a fundamental level is for me symptomatic of a larger problem of emphasis on the superficial. All the worse that the violence is PG-13 neutered by a lack of bloodshed and profuse videogame flourishes. It's violence for kids, and it's glorified. All the worse that it echoes the most dramatically pleasing aspects of violence, without considering the reasons behind violence's dramatic dominance.

Edgar's Shampoo joke holds no water for me. It may be that Universal wouldn't have allowed the downbeat ending, in which Scott ends up with neither girl, but this undermines the gravity of Scott's flaws and his need to face them. It makes the dirtiest Hollywood lie there is: that the process of personal growth fits neatly into some manufactured narrative. I hate the way Edgar emphasizes how the film's end is a question mark, "a symbol to the audience that you gotta figure the rest of it all out," because he really means it's a question of who Scott will be with. That's the major riddle. Will Scott become an evil ex? To me that's an ambivalence that sidesteps harder questions about Scott's hubris.

The "hidden" elements in Scott Pilgrim, many of which I know better thanks to the trivia track, are unimpressive and reveal little more about the characters. Most things are simply complimentary on an aesthetic level; for example the inclusion of numerical clues to the exes (practical ones around ex number one, twos around ex number two, etc.), and heart shaped lights for Scott in relation to Ramona, and ex shaped lights and objects in relation to Scott in relation to Ramona's exes. That's information already available in the narrative. The film's surface and subsurface are so simple and smooth that the film can be watched and rewatched ad infinitum. It's designed that way, and "the essential love triangle should be easy."