Scott Pilgrim vs. Peter Terp

I read through the final volume of the Scott Pilgrim saga today.

Overall, it is a very witty comic, and it does a very sharp job of capturing the transitional phase from twenties into thirties in Western, anglophone culture. In that sense, it is a kind of "arrested development" late-bildungsroman tale that I believe crystalized with Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright's Spaced series and their more internationally-received film Shaun of the Dead. Perhaps this is why Wright was the man to make the film adaptation of Scott Pilgrim. Anyway, it seems like every other story being pumped out of media is about arrested development these days.

I'll try to avoid major spoilers, but the general plot of the comic book is that a fairly shiftless, aimless, and amnesiac 23-year old, Scott Pilgrim, encounters the girl of his dreams, Ramona...literally, in his dreams. He then finds out she is real and embarks on an epic quest to woo her. When I say "epic," I mean epic in terms of the only epics that modern young men really understand: video game RPG adventures. In fact, the main gimmick of the entire comic is a kind of magic realism where the video games that so absorb Pilgrim's life are manifest in the reality surrounding him. They become a kind of literal metaphor as Scott Pilgrim discovers he must vanquish Ramona's previous "evil ex-boyfriends", each of whom is increasingly more powerful and difficult to battle than the previous one.

Gone is the age of Homeric allusion. Forgotten are Olympus and Xanadu. These are the days of the Mushroom Kingdom, Hyrule, and whatever strange setting Final Fantasy uses.

Gone are the sonnet and the epithalamion.

This is the era of fan fiction and sprite comics.

This leads to "Family Guy"-style rewards for the reader who feels a geeky cleverness for catching the sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle pop culture allusions.

Don't be mistaken by the Super Mario references and the big-eyed cartoon characters, though. This is not an appropriate series for kids or even teenagers. The comic's juvenile form reflects the painfully immature nature and psychologically malnourished nature of its characters.

Still, there is a heart to Scott Pilgrim that redeems it from being merely a collage of pop culture references and tropes.

But I'm afraid it is a heart that might suffer from a congenital disease.

Scott Pilgrim is ultimately a love story -- almost soap opera in nature -- wrapped in a sweet, crunchy, geeky shell. I'm worried, though, what else might be in there...or rather...what else might not be in there.

I was just complaining in an e-mail yesterday that the Scott Pilgrim comics largely fail to sustain any kind of internal morality. This was before I had gotten to volume five, in which Scott Pilgrim learns he might be a "bad person." I'm not sure that Pilgrim takes this to mean much more than he might be a "bad guy" -- that is a "villain" in only the crudest, WB cartoon sense of the word.

Morality seems to be the morality of video games -- the protagonist is the "good guy", everyone else is either an NPC or an obstacle to be overcome. Perhaps the author, Bryan Lee O'Malley, intends the comic to be a commentary on the shallowness of modern life. I don't know.

The only redeeming thing left is love, and in this there might be hope for the tale. Deus est caritas.

Scott Pilgrim is willing to sacrifice for love. He is willing to suffer for love. He is willing...at times...to forgive for love. Those are all good things.

But love is often reduced to its erotic components in the tale. Pretty much every major character -- and even many of the minor characters -- has an unqualified homosexual experience over the course of the saga. That's a lot of gay cartooning. One gets the sense that 85% of the Canadian population is bisexual or has at least made out with someone of the same sex in a moment of drunkenness. No questioning the morality or implications. Just lots of girl on girl and guy on guy action.

While I've never really jumped through a warp door or actually battled Japanese robots, but I actually found those moments in the story to be more believable and recognizable than the gay moments. There just seemed so much gayness.

Maybe I just never got out much as a twenty-year old. Maybe all of my friends will anonymously comment on the blog and tell me that they've been secretly having gay make out sessions behind my back and I never knew.

I suppose I'm dwelling quite a bit on the gay parts, which I guess might make me sound like one of those homophobic rightwing nutjobs, but it did seem to me like there was an agenda going on to desensitize readers. "It's all just love," the comic seems to say. "It's all the same. It's all equivalent. what's the big deal?"

It makes me think the comic itself doesn't have a very mature view on love.

It's never even particularly clear what is motivating Scott Pilgrim's love other than the fact Ramona was in his dreams. That is authentic enough -- the emotional component of love doesn't really need an explanation. But when we encounter Volume 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, we discover that, for Canadians at least, getting it together seems to involve getting a day job so you can bring something to the table when you move in with your girlfriend. To me, that would be a very ironic way to "get it together." Maybe I'm a lone voice in the wilderness.

Love in Scott Pilgrim is almost always romance. It is almost always a nearly instinctive appetite for an ineffable emotion. It is the closest thing to God that the characters have...but the love in this comic is incomplete.

In the end, my assessment of Scott Pilgrim is that it does a very effective job of capturing the world of the modern young materialist. Without a deep, religious mythology, the characters are pretty much left to their own devices. They sense very little that is bigger than themselves. They have no sense of real otherworldliness...except in love. For the most part, love in Scott Pilgrim becomes an idle pastime...high school crushes and gossip that spills over into the early twenties and makes one feel like they did more with their day than play video games. Maybe, just maybe, Scott Pilgrim gets a glimpse of the divine through love -- but if he does, he doesn't seem to realize it.

Comments

[angelicid.livejournal.com]

Elegant review. I've seen the trailers for the film version a lot over the past few weeks, and I am definitely intrigued. North America doesn't seem to be host to much magical realism, so it'll be interesting to compare Scott Pilgrim's journey to, say, Borges.

--Lindsay

P.S. I *want* to like being able to sign in with my Google account (or, in this case, LJ), but TypePad is the only Google account-enabled site I've seen that wants to post my last name (which I avoid doing). Is there a way around that?

[Peter Terp]

Thanks for the reply, Lindsay...I've noticed a sudden lack of comment activity on the blog and was worried I was going to have to post something really provocative to get a reaction.
I think Albertus switched our comment format in an effort to block out the spambots that were taking over some of the older posts. I'll have to check with him on options (although he might be a little preoccupied with his neophyte at the moment).