Scott Pilgrim

I was expecting to give my impressions of the Black Rock Shooter anime today, but it seems it will be several episodes long rather than just one, so I’ll wait til I’ve seen it all. Instead, well…if I write about manga on my animation blog, it’s not so strange to write about a comic series, especially a limited one.

I didn’t get into Scott Pilgrim early. It’s not the sort of thing that interests me – but the amazingly retro game adaptation looks extremely fun, and after all there’s a movie coming out soon from the director of Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, so it’s worth at the very least paying attention to.

On the other hand, if I’d looked a little closer I’d probably have realised I was never going to like Scott Pilgrim. Joss Whedon sang its praises, quoted on volume 6, and I’ve never liked anything he’s done except a couple of episodes of Firefly, and think the effect of Buffy on pop culture has been extremely negative. And I never did like Spaced, even though I expected to.

Scott Pilgrim does indeed fit well with Buffy and its audience – at least, the ones still keen long after the ones who were only in it because it turned them on have vanished. Other, more unkind critics have said the core audience is ‘hipster faggots’, by which they mean shallow twenty-somethings who follow the latest trends in music and entertainment and then reject them once they are perceived as too popular, all in a sheep-like fashion following online gurus and word-of-mouth trends. They like their entertainment smug, postmodern and ironic. They like it to put forward clichés and tropes and then ‘subvert’ them, by which they mean draw attention to them, but not actually use them in any way more sophisticated than the original. Essentially, they do things they know are bad, but show that they are aware of this fact, which is supposed to magically transform them into something good. It does not.

Scott Pilgrim follows the eponymous character, a hapless slacker in his mid-twenties, through a tricky relationship with a girl named Ramona Flowers. For the first half of the first volume, I was happy with this. He was a bit useless but likeable and tried his best. He made some pretty bad mistakes, being very self-centred and cheating on his young, vulnerable girlfriend, but I thought that this would all be for the sake of learning humility and life-lessons.

Yeah, it’s not. From a naturalistic start with believable, flawed and likeable characters grows the total crap that is supposed to be iconic and knowing. Scott has to defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes in video-game fashion, with lots of flying kicks, video game references and lack of consequences for murder. It’s all supposed to be clever and silly, and indeed, if this were all there were to Scott Pilgrim, it would be more tolerable. The trouble is that it’s interspersed with the soap opera of different relationships, and every time the writer finds himself with something that could actually be tricky to write and challenging, he cops out. Instead of sympathy for the jilted teenager, she becomes a nutcase first and a moronic stereotype later. Instead of Scott actually learning from anything, he is shown to be ever more of a moron until finally it’s suggested he literally doesn’t have to remember anything he did, and indeed that it’s fine for him to try to sleep around while he doesn’t know where his girlfriend is, because he’s dumb enough to just follow advice from his gay friend – and as we know, gay people are all about the sleeping around. (The gay people in these books are some of the most sympathetic, but always shallow and treated as ‘others’, while suggestions straight characters might be gay are rather a joke, even when it turns out that one of them is.)

I thought that the last volume would be a turnaround. Scott’s cheating catches up with him and he’s left alone. He’s forced to actually stop and reconsider his life. But no, we get more jokes about his dumbness (I smiled the first time the ‘memory cam’ came up, the only time in the whole volume, but then of course it got repeated three times and made unfunny) and an extremely superficial sort of sympathy passed off as ‘understanding’.

What I dislike about the hip, postmodern style is that it believes itself something better than it is. This is in any medium the thing which irks me the most. I like things that aim high and accomplish them. I like things that aim for something simple but do it well. I even like things that are rubbish but have tried hard. I don’t mind things that are like panto or Python and go, ‘Here you go, something rubbish, but we know it’s rubbish, and will make fun of it.’ But what I hate is things that go, ‘Well, you know, other less intelligent individuals would but something like this forward, aren’t they stupid? We’re doing the same thing, but we know it’s dumb, so what we’ll do is put in a lame wisecrack and exaggerate, and that will show how superior we are.’ Whedon does it a lot. The Doctor Who revival did it, especially under Russell T. Davis. Indie bands sometimes do it. And Scott Piglrim does it.

When I first started to read Scott Pilgrim, I said it was like something a board of men in suits think stoners would like. I stand by that. But it’s a triumph of marketing and media saturation. Not to mention the quite amazing feat of getting a core audience of teenagers for a book that at heart is about what it’s like to be 24 and scared to grow up.