Scott Pilgrim vs. Video Game Logic

If there is one thing that should be in more movies, it is 8-bit sound effects. While likely less realistic, they are strangely effective at communicating abstract sounds. That said, here is my review of the movie.

Scott Pilgrim is not a movie about a guy trying to win over a girl. It is about a relationship between the guy and a girl, as told from his perspective. In Scott's case that perspective is something of a guy that that recent NYT article was talking about. He is self-centered, disconnected from any relationship that does not seem to contribute to making himself better, and generally a sweet but asshole-ish dude. Also, he clearly was a child of the late 80s with constant thinking in terms of Video Game Logic. This VGL is actually very important to the movie so lets talk about that.

As a disclaimer, I have not read past the second book in the series of comics. I know this makes me a bad nerd. Oh well, I got distracted watching Doctor Who or something…

VGL was first named for me as a bunch of my friends and I were playing the XBOX game Ninja Gaiden. A remake of a beloved NES game, Ninja Gaiden was pretty awesome but used a seemingly strange way of telling us if a door could be opened or not. It had a red or green light. These sort of thing might have worked if the level was some sort of industrial site, but we were on a kind of passenger ship. And the lights were HUGE. In real life these lights would never exist, but here they were. From there on my friends and I began to notice all sorts of things that made perfect sense in video games, but not in real life. These include but are not limited to total easy changes in jump momentum, wondering into people's homes in strange small villages, and one use keys. All of these things would be questionable in many ways if the game space was the real world, but in the Mushroom Kingdom you just accept it and move on.

Scott has a bunch of what might be considered non-diegetic (to anyone but him at least) concepts like character stats, hit counters, "vs" displays, points, and even scene title cards. In VGL these are simply a part of playing the game. Mario does not see the timer that we do that forces him to finish a level quickly. That is just something we know about, thus non-diegetic or outside of Mario's world, but still a part of the game as a whole. These are unfortunately the only things that most people seem to be focusing on when it comes to the gamic influences on the movie as a whole.

Instead, I want to focus on why anyone would join together to create a League of Evil Exes to prevent Ramona (and Scott) from being free from the past's grasp. To this, I propose, that the League is nothing more than another projection of Scott's as he dates and gets to know Ramona. VGL then can become what is truly is, an easy oversimplification of the world in order to better make sense of it. After all, we have to simplify the world in video games because of things like graphics and simply user mechanics. It is for our sake that we don't have to manage every key we find or have a fight staged with health meters. Scott just takes it one step further. Each time a bump comes in his relationship with Ramona, Scott sees it as tied to a past trauma of an (evil) ex who he must defeat in order to get closer to Ramona and produce a sort of fairy-tale romance. The fights with her exes, like the applause in one scene are all in Scott's head.

This introduces a concept played up this summer by the last scene Christopher Nolan's Inception, but seems rarely brought up if not made explicit: the unreliable narrator. While there at first seems to be a omnipotent third-person narrator, maybe The Voice as played by Bill Hader, visual cues of everything revolving around Scott, the applause scene, and the lack of any subject of conversation but Scott all suggest that this whole thing is from Scott's view only. This is not that bold to suggest. However, we cannot trust Scott to not inflate his own story. Especially when even the version of himself he is presenting is so untrustworthy! The movie can then only be seen as what this shallow and kind of selfish dude understood his relationship to be.

This is kind of disturbing because this actually paints the very crowd it is meant to appeal to as a bunch of people who see relationship baggage as bosses on some quest to get laid or fall in love or something. Seriously, is coming to accept that a new partner was a school bully, a bit too ready to dump someone, bi-curious, or still kind of mad for a former lover so hard that we have to think about these things as personified forms that we can beat until they explode into bus fare?

Even the last "fight" between Scott and "Nega Scott" was nothing more than Scott putting off a confrontation with a part of himself that he simply doesn't see as something he needs to deal with. Going to brunch with a dark part of yourself is nothing more than saying that you are going to wake up hung over some time soon.

This Scott-sided view limits our ability to have any absolute understanding of the relationships or girls in them. Ramona and Knives overlap for Scott much longer than I think Scott, our narrator, lets on. Considering the way that time seems to skip forward throughout the movie, this should not be a shock. This would definitely explain and even validate the extreme reactions of the women when the find this out. This is important to consider because it would also serve to explain why Knives felt so totally wronged and why Scott ended up feeling that he had cheated on both of them.

Individually, both girls are clearly not ever remotely understood by Scott. Knives is constantly seen as only a silly love-struck teenage girl with a crush and a single minded desire to have Scott back. While it seems likely that Knives did hold a grudge against Ramona, it is never totally easy to assume that any of her other actions are simply to get Scott back. After all, she is still dense enough to talk nothing but good things about Scott's big ex in front of him. That seems like something that a girl out to win back a boy would try to avoid. While it might make him sad enough to return to you, it could also just piss him off. By the end of the movie it is clear that Knives might still like Scott, but has moved on to the wider social life he introduced her to.

Ramona is THE girl with a past. Being with Scott is in many ways totally escapist for her, just like moving to Canada and getting a job as a delivery girl.* It is clear that by the movie's end she is not over her exes. They may be coins to Scott, but to her they still exist as memories of times that have a version of her that she does not like any more. Her hope was that by going someplace new she could simply bottle those memories, but of course they had to come out for Scott to deal with. Besides feeling naive for thinking she could run away from the past, at the end of the movie she is nothing but embarrassed for having shown just who she once was to Scott. Her fights were only just beginning.

*The delivery profession is clearly seen as the lowest non-blue collar job out there. This is why Fry and the rest of the cast on Futurama are so easily depicted as sad and lonely people. They are just working for a delivery service. Yeah, it is to other planets, but still all they do is take packages across the galaxy, return to Earth, and watch TV. Likewise Ramona makes her job seem cool because she rollerblades while wearing goggles, but that is just a superficial look to make the job seem less like something that requires no skill.

The video game logic Scott applies to these girls prevents him from ever seeing these romantic interests as dynamic characters who have more complexity to them than just their color pallet changes (hair dyes). Accepting all this, we are able to see that the movie is not anti-feminist at a core level, but simply depicts them all as Scott's pixilated versions of themselves.

These are not totally naturalistic assumptions to make about a movie. This is why the movie was a box office flop. However, I expect that in the very near future as video game logic becomes more common Scott Pilgrim will become a classic.