spellmynamewithabang:

Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a box-office failure when it hit theaters last year; to use the film’s parlance, it didn’t manage to create the groundswell to generate the stalkers it needed. No small part of this is due to the film’s tone, which is complicated and difficult to advertise traditionally; trailers managed to get across that it was frantic and brightly colored and about fighting for love, but couldn’t accurately display the balance between the noise and lights that the movie successfully maintains, instead showcasing what appears to be a mindless action piece that is loosely strung together by an asinine plot about evil ex-boyfriends. If the trailers are anything to go by, Scott Pilgrim is nothing more than hip for the sake of being hip and perhaps written and directed in broader, more metaphorical strokes than most action films.

            But Scott Pilgrim is quite the opposite; point of fact, it’s a film of little details. What makes it different from other films of little details, such as David Fincher’s Fight Club and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, is its genre (which, although hard to pin down, is primarily an action film, as opposed to a drama) and its manic pace. Scott Pilgrim packs the entire plot of six full-length books into under two hours, and it does it without axing nearly any of the information; to accomplish this, the movie has an exceptionally short average shot length (around one to two and a half seconds, with most shots clocking in at far less) and several inventive editing tricks (shots frequently cut to new locations halfway through a scene) that allow it to fit more plot into its first act than there is in the entirety of a usual film; less happens in the entirety of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist than in a given ten minutes of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. What’s incredible is the coherency of it all; the plot never feels confusing unless it’s supposed to be – such as is the case with the first act’s drastic (and permanent) change in the direction of the plot (and genre!) and the non-sequitur Bollywood-esque rhyming dance-fight that follows it – and the dialogue is clear and pithy without being meaningless. What’s also incredible is that all of this effort is carrying a fundamentally ridiculous (even stupid) premise, which the advertising for the film based its entire focus on: in a nutshell, the film is about Scott Pilgrim, a Canadian twentysomething who must defeat the seven evil exes of Ramona Flowers, the girl he wishes to date, in combat, lest he lose her. There are several reasons that a film based on such an absurd central idea can work as well as Scott Pilgrim often does, and all of them will be covered in time, but for now let us focus on the setting of the film, as that is the broadest container of the events the film portrays (beyond its mise en scene, which shall be saved for last).

            The movie proper opens with Bill Hader’s narration dramatically informing us that the film is set “in the mystical land of Toronto Canada,” instantaneously separating the world of the film from that of reality (which is ironic, considering that Scott Pilgrim displays Toronto very much on location and with many Toronto-based landmarks, businesses, and franchises as central to the plot; the movie doesn’t go about generalizing it as an Everycity, as Chicago or New York usually are treated in film) even if done with tongue firmly in cheek. The Toronto of Scott Pilgrim is one where everything ridiculous can and should be expected to both exist and be treated as entirely normal and down-to-earth. This is a universe where veganism grants you superpowers, people can literally roller skate through the dreams of others, and messenger bags are infinitely deep, after all, and it never apologizes to its inhabitants or to us for that. Which, in fact, is another reason Scott Pilgrim succeeds; it isn’t an exercise in smug detachment. Its events are fundamentally bizarre, but it doesn’t acknowledge that sarcastically. Yes, there are nods here and there – Scott’s inquiry of how Julie does “that with [her] mouth,” regarding her apparent ability to self-censor her swearing using those black bars one sees blocking nudity on television is notable – but they never act to point and laugh at the film. Scott Pilgrim is good natured and honest about itself. It doesn’t say “this is silly, so you should make fun of it,” but rather “this is silly, and that’s okay.” By putting that at the forefront, suspension of disbelief is maintained throughout even the craziest happenstances in the movie’s plot. Yes, someone calling himself a member of the Vegan Police might have just shown up to arrest someone for a “veganity violation,” but because it happens among a plethora of equally absurd things, it’s acceptable. It might still be funny, but it doesn’t pull you out of the film. Scott Pilgrim has created a world where things like that can happen, and they do, often represented with a remarkable level of thought and effort.

            As I said before, Scott Pilgrim is a film of little details, which in this case means that every part of its absurdist Toronto is realized with as much clarity as possible. The aforementioned Vegan Police, for example, are not just a throwaway gag, but an entire task force with their own earthen, naturally woven uniforms. They drive hybrid, earth-friendly police cars with green emergency lights and a mirrored “VEGAN POLICE” written on the hood, and they, like their fellow graduates of Vegan Academy, gain their powers by not eating dairy products, as that clears up the 90 percent of the brain usually filled with curds and whey, thus forcing you to only use 10 percent of your brain power. Most of the rest of the film is equally elaborated upon in some way, be it implied or direct; and the sets and costumes throughout are plastered with tiny details which provide backstory or enforce the film’s motifs, such as the numbering (which we shall get to soon enough) and the Xes and hearts that appear throughout the background (which are obvious enough, given the film’s plot).
            The film’s structure is that of a bildungsroman centered around the title character. Scott is immature – at the start of the film, he is dating a high schooler five years his junior (because it’s “simple,” he says) – and jobless, effectively a leech on his friends (especially his roommate, Wallace, whom he freeloads off of as much as he possibly can). The purpose of the plot isn’t, in fact, a romantic one, although at a glance it may appear that way; this was a sticking point with some of the film’s detractors, who focused on the romantic aspect and criticized it for being too low-stakes ( Yes, fighting the evil exes starts out as something Scott does because he wants Ramona, but by the end of the film he is still doing it because it has become a personal challenge that he feels he must overcome. As he responds to Gideon’s question of whether or not he is “fighting [him] for her” the second time it happens, he is, by then, “fighting [him] for [him].” It has become a personal quest, one that, when overcome at the end, has brought Scott into adulthood.

            It is obvious enough that the film’s basic premise is a metaphor for the uneasiness in getting over the realization that a relationship can be difficult; the evil exes can act as stand-ins for perceived inadequacies one may have when compared with a lover’s history; Matthew Patel has magic powers, Lucas Lee is a famous actor, Todd Ingram is a rock star, Roxy is a girl, the twins are, again, rock stars, and there are two of them, and Gideon is a famous record producer. Every one of them is this monolithic threat to Scott not only because he must physically take them down through one of the film’s many elaborate fight sequences but because they are better looking, more famous, cooler than he is. Nowhere is this more extreme than with Todd Ingram, who is, as Scott is, a bassist, and is dating the ex-lover Scott still hasn’t gotten over his heartbreak for. He is everything Scott wants to be and yet isn’t. Overcoming him marks the defining point where the film becomes primarily about Scott’s struggle with his quest than about the quest itself. Scott, at that point, questions if he really wants to do it any more; when Roxy shows up he largely stays out of her way, letting Ramona take over for him. By the time Ramona has split with Scott and gotten back with Gideon during the Katayanagi concert, he has already made up his mind that this has become his fight to fight, regardless of whether or not she is involved.

            Michael Cera plays Scott in the early going of the film with an air that appears at first to be not far removed from that of the majority of his other roles; Scott could, at a glance, easily be Arrested Development’s George Michael Bluth, or Juno’s Paulie Bleaker. But there’s an air of detached arrogance that separates Scott from those characters; while they are innocently unaware of the world around them, Scott is willfully unaware. He doesn’t really care about the people around him because he doesn’t care about anything, especially not himself; not until the end, when he “gains the power of self-respect,” does he appreciate the people who surround him as well. We don’t know if Scott was always this way or if this is the result of Natalie’s rejection – neither are unlikely – and it doesn’t matter too much if he was or not. What does matter is Cera’s casting in such a role. He got a lot of flak from critics for playing what they believed to be essentially the same character as he always portrays, but by framing a fundamentally unlikeable character inside of an actor known for playing similar characters who are fundamentally likable, Edgar Wright has commented on Cera’s filmography, not replicated it. Beyond the fact that the film is nothing like anything else Cera is in (though, to be fair, that could reasonably be said of any member of the cast), its structure allows Wright to take the character we expect Michael Cera to play and twist him into something completely different. At the start, Scott is a wimpy, cowardly slacker. By the end, he has become, through his circumstances, a confident, self-driven hero.

            Scott Pilgrim vs. the World reaches that point through a whirlwind of genres pieced together in an improbable configuration. What starts as a fairly down-to-earth, even deadpan, romantic comedy- its quippy, smartass dialogue and the gentle absurdity of the high school romance angle wouldn’t be out of place in a Wes Anderson film- quickly becomes something else entirely by the point Scott begins dreaming about Ramona. By the time fifteen minutes have gone by, the film has morphed into a light, surreal fantasy, which then gives way to a band musical, but this still provides little to no hint to the first-time viewer that at the half-hour mark it will suddenly and without warning jump headfirst into the realm of superheroics and kung-fu action films (and, mere minutes later, traditional hand-drawn animation and Bollywood dance numbers as well). The moment Matthew Patel breaks through the ceiling is one of the swiftest tonal changes I’ve ever seen in a film; in the realm of half of a second we have gone entirely from a band playing music to a one-on-one fight scene peppered with video game graphics.

These graphics are part of why the film’s unique mise en scene — an amorphous term which here shall refer specifically to the film’s visual elements — is a sticking point among film critics. Either the film is “crazy do-it-yourself pop-art relief” (Scott) or “an assault on the senses that’s numb in the heart;” (Tobias) there isn’t much of a middle ground regarding how one may feel about the havoc the film plays with traditional film narrative. The frame is dashed and dotted throughout the running time with snippets of text and graphics; dynamic Batman-esque comic book onomatopoeia appear, for example, on screen alongside their aural counterparts – bams and smaks accompanying punches and kicks, a stray ding-dong appearing behind someone’s head as a doorbell rings – and informative subtitles can show up anywhere on the screen to tell us some little quip about someone’s age, or who owns something, or the words someone is saying as they’re yelling them unheard over the roar of a concert. A counter might show up during a fight to count how many punches in a row someone has racked up, and that fight will always start with an on-screen VS and end with an on-screen KO.  

            This was, along with the ridiculous premise, the other part of what the trailers for the film decided was what was most important, but without the context behind them, they fall flat, appearing nothing more than a cheap gimmick. The reality is that they, besides being visually exciting, act in much the same way as the narration from Fight Club does to deliver character-colored humor and plot information through the outskirts of the film, rather than its events proper. These are events as filtered through Scott Pilgrim, and although he doesn’t act as a first person narrator in a traditional sense the graphics and text throughout the film provide the same effect.

This mise en scene is supported by an exceptionally creative use of sound design. Where one may expect wind and air sounds to accompany the whip-pans that appear throughout the film, there is instead guitar feedback, the punches and kicks are accentuated by highly unrealistic (but effective) 8-bit noise channels, a tap on the shoulder makes a bamboo noise that blends in with the score, and so on. The music and the sound of the film are at constant interplay with each other, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, as in the Roxy sequence, where Mae Whitman’s words echo rhythmically in the background before and after she says them, as if they were playing over the loudspeakers as part of the club music (which, admittedly, wouldn’t be unsurprising, taking the rest of the film into consideration).

            Some of these unusual production elements be attributed to the film’s nature as a comic-book adaptation; often, the text and graphics are lifted wholesale from panels in the books the movie adapts, and the flow of the editing is similar to that of the dynamic panel structure in a traditional comic book. Just as a comic artist usually will not draw the same exact view of a character during a scene (be it to keep things interesting both for the reader and the artist), Wright almost never reuses camera angles throughout the film. But to say that this sensibility is primarily a byproduct of the film’s source would be to betray Wright’s own sensibility. An examination of the source material finds that the original comics are far more traditional than their surreal subject matter would suggest; they, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, are very filmic, using wide panels and simple layouts to deliver information in a way closely related to the experience of watching a movie. But unlike Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation (of one year prior to this film) Wright “builds on Mr. O’Malley’s bold and unpretentious graphic style without slavishly duplicating it” (Scott). Wright, who is otherwise known for his genre mashups Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, has a fondness for dream sequences and bizarre asides, and in Scott Pilgrim he finds an outlet for that far more removed from reality than anything he’s worked on before. His film, in some ways, is more of a comic book than the comic it’s based on.
 
It’s also the best film of 2010, so fuck you very much, The Academy Awards. The least you could have done was give best picture to The Social Network.  I’m still bitter about that.

A really nice and really long commentary on the movie. Thanks Robert!