I got this for Christmas, Bloggers!
Every once in a while, my family pulls a rabbit out of a hat. How did they know?
I loved it, of course. Cannot explain how much I loved it. As I asked Ed, who’d come over to watch it because he hadn’t seen it either: “Christ, it’s really good isn’t it?” He spread his hands: “oh yeah,” quoth he.
“Suddenly I feel like a real asshole for never getting around to reading the comic, you know?”
“Oh yeah.”
And so it was decided. Although…
…Once I figured out that Ed had read the last volume at the library, I started peppering him with questions about the final big battle. Did he think that somewhere in here was where the film script finally parted from comics-logic, in the name of conventional closure? Or — or was I reading this wrong — was it simply the fidelity to the comic’s presentation, transposed directly to the big screen, that made the filmic part of its web of influence more apparent, made it seem like something more assiduously conventional than it was, because once you put something influenced by film back into film it just looks like…well…film? I couldn’t tell, you see: because ever since David Golding laid it on me that all the most impressive film-influenced accomplishments of Watchmen would look trite when actually put into a film (“oh my God I think that guy’s having a flashback about something FOR CHRIST’S SAKE SOMEBODY GET ME SOME B-12…!“) I try to be alert to how overly-faithful replications can amount to horrendous plot-losing…
Or am I overthinking it, Ed? Or what?
“Oh yeah.”
I think he might’ve meant: “well, kinda…but not really. Except a little. In a way. Maybe. Shut up.” But then again I suppose I can’t be sure that’s what he meant, because I sort of forgot what the question, uh…?
But anyway, right or wrong, true or false, north or south…it sort of got me thinking.
I really liked this movie…I mean, I really liked it. I felt, in a way, like it was made for me. But…
…That couldn’t be right, right?
So, since it couldn’t be right, and since therefore I could probably not really trust my own impressions about it to be those of who it was made for, I decided to phone a friend. Now over in snowy Toronto, best beloved, lives a good friend of mine who could probably win a Hallowe’en costume contest if he went dressed as Michael Cera…a bright young fellow, he reminds me of me at that age if I’d only been cooler and more talented and more tuned-in. Where I am lead, he is palladium; where I dully vibrate, he sings, and after a while his song begins to chain. So since it’s all aimed at him anyway, I thought, maybe I just better ask him.
“What’d you think about Scott Pilgrim?” I asked him.
Quoth he:
“I sort of felt like it was fucking with me, on a personal level.”
Now this came as something of a shock to me, Bloggers; because I’d really been expecting him to say “yeah, that part’s a condensation” or “no, that part’s just like how it is in the comic” or even “you have no idea how much sense that bit makes in terms of the gaming thing, and that’s what you’re missing”, but one thing I most definitely did not expect to hear him say was that, if you know what I mean…
…He hated The Breakfast Club.
There, I said it.
I said it, and I’m glad.
Except…
Not really.
***
Is Edgar Wright his generation’s John Hughes? Well, that’s obviously a terribly unfair and ludicrously high-concept sort of comparison, and not just because it appears to try to slot Edgar into some stupid “moral” comparison he obviously doesn’t deserve, but also because it takes as read that John Hughes is someone we don’t have to consider as a person or an artist — I mean, just take a look at his biography and filmography to see that he goes deeper than some self-serving “generational” prejudice, or better yet take a look at THIS, for God’s sake — I mean do we just judge people now, we modern media trackers, in order to shore up some self-concept of our own? Is that what we do, just obsessively “rate” every possible person in order to construct a constellation of taste we can belong to, that we feel is immune from exterior assault? Well, some people do, obviously: you can’t really even go online at all without seeing this horrible objectification taking place, these vile motives so cleverly and self-servingly exposed. And it is perhaps something very like a confusion of politics and ethics that we can observe there: in this case, though, as a deliberate tactic in the juvenile mind’s favourite argument, an odiously scornful zero-sum equation that reflects a paranoiac need to be better than somebody by setting up a rigged game. Politics and ethics, ethics and politics, which card is the Lady’s, ha-ha YOU FAIL AT BOTH. EPIC FAIL. It’s the morality of a game of marbles: the attempt to make nothing important if you can just knock it out. So…“is Edgar Wright his generation’s John Hughes”, that’s a question that decomposes rather easily in an alert reader’s mind to the statement “I am a venal and self-interested hipster whose only interest is in having a bigger slice of a smaller pie made of nothing”, but that is not why I bring up the idea of such a comparison Bloggers, I swear. But rather I’m just interested in the effect Scott Pilgrim had on my young Torontonian friend…
…Which is to say, I am kinda interested in myself, but mostly I’m interested in seeing how this guy copes with a cultural context he inherited from me and his mother and all our friends. Because I didn’t expect him, of all things I did not expect him, to resent the Scott Pilgrim movie, and feel like it was “fucking with him”. I thought he’d just naturally love it, as I did and do. But…
Can I just get back to that, in a minute?
(Some of you may want to get a cup of coffee, for this part.)
So there are a couple of things about this younger generation (although GOD but I detest loose-witted “younger-generational” excuses for “older-generational” self-dissatisfactions, but just for a moment please!) that have been made popular in the general mass media but that turn out not to be true…that very plainly to us, Bloggers, have no substance to them whatsoever. For example, how bankrupt is the idea that there was a generation of people (ugh) whose special province was the exploration of influence, the charting of artistic continuity, and that the ones that came before them made little insular kingdoms of taste, and the ones that came after were just ahistorical remixers who did excessively brilliant cut-up art but never saw a linking thread that wasn’t magical in its character: working by the ancient laws of sympathy, proximity, or similarity, and tossing aside the secret logical connections of Kingdom for the inspired collisions of Plasma? Answer: very very fucking bankrupt, is how bankrupt that idea is. Were the young people of today not supposed to care about history? Was history just supposed to fold around them and dissipate when it met its own outer edges, in some sick Childhood’s End fantasy of the last generation’s poignant Living Will? It’s not an expression I like to use, Jeeves, but: tchah. The “younger generation” types (like that even means anything!) have turned out to be far better and far more responsibly literate historians than many of their “older generation” predecessors, and the myth of their short attention span is like a misery-loves-company wish-dream; the loss of what they now call “cursive script” in schools is not on the kids but on the (bad) teachers, who want the kids to not have the Good Tools because (just like the principal dude in The Breakfast Club!) they’re more interested in their own past disasters than they are in the future…
Sorry; rant! But listen, I tutored a lot of these teacher-type clowns when they were undergraduates…and I can tell you pretty authoritatively, there are a lot of them that prefer cracked mirrors to open windows…
(And, don’t come back from your coffee just yet…you may want to put an extra sugar or two in there, or something…I mean what I’m saying here, in plain English, is stall…)
…So, but what I meant to say before I got started on that rant, is that when The Breakfast Club came out it was not seen then as it is now: through the two-foot airport glass of nostagia. Instead, it was loathed as much as it was loved. Yeah, check it out: it was loathed, as much as it was loved. And there’s a reason for that, and the reason’s called “realism”. Some people saw themselves in that movie, and admired its fidelity to their experience. Others saw it as a colossally over-romantic slap in the face to life as it’s really lived. And these differences didn’t exactly cook down according to party lines…at least, not the very obvious party lines that were drawn-out by the movie itself…but even so, more of the “outsiders” probably were annoyed with the thing than any of the “insiders” were, because there was a feeling afoot at the time that this movie was more for the “insiders” than their outer-dark brothers and sisters…and this really polarized the general “generational” view of John Hughes as time went on. Sappy “feel good about yourself” crap, is how black-painted people in their mid-twenties tended to characterize the movie “Home Alone”, as though anyone even asked them to see it…maudlin faux-nihilists beyond the very most excessive dreams of even Michael Moorcock, these proto-hipsters seized on the dehumanization of unlikely, lucky, intelligent, funny, and humane filmmaker John Hughes as a weird point of pride: I am against this…!
All because, probably, just a few years earlier they had been seduced by the comforting lesson of The Breakfast Club…because they were, in fact, the ones much closer to “inside” than “outside”. So in a way the canard was true, but then again that it pretty much had to be true is not really the fault of John Hughes: since how could the “real” outsiders in my town think either this or that of The Breakfast Club when like Napoleon Dynamite they just stayed in their rooms drawing ligers, and were never invited to Movie Thursdays in the first place. Eh? They didn’t even know this polarization was something to be a part of. It was only the people who might find something in it, who did find something in it, and then began the campaign of coolness against John Hughes long long long after they should’ve cared…
…Because it had claimed to be realistic?
Well, it never did claim that, actually…but those who are flattered by a thing always see realism in it, you know. Some cops used to say Hill Street Blues was realistic; some doctors used to say that ER was realistic. Absurd, of course…I mean it’s like saying Battlestar Galactica is realistic, or something…
(Maybe stir a little cream into that coffee?)
So the fun thing here is that Scott Pilgrim is completely not realistic, and cannot even be mistaken for being so in the smallish ways that John Hughes’ movies somehow mistakenly were…and yet it’s all of a piece here anyway, because we never were expecting Mike Leigh or Ken Loach or anything from most of our filmic or televisual entertainments, were we? And “real” realism is not really a real thing, that we talk about in this way in the first place; we know perfectly well that this word stands more for some sort of topical consanguinity than it does for any actual representational truth, so “fidelity to experience” or the reading of realism in flattery…well, that’s just playing with our descriptors the same way the movie plays with our images. Sixteen Candles, as a matter of fact, is a lot like Scott Pilgrim in its creation of a convincing analogic world where impossible, forbidden, and deeply longed-for transactions can occur in just this way…and the internal trivia, the trivial logic, of world-building takes hold very firmly to make it so. The themes, the arcs, the conclusions are all simple as can be, purest boilerplate really, and obviously pure fantasy…but each makes a special aesthetic feast of those generic frozen-chicken-finger ingredients, that is the viewer’s aesthetic: flattering, funny, forgiving…hopeful. Well, but The Breakfast Club actually is “realistic”, by those lights…!
Except that it ended up being vexed in a way that Sixteen Candles was not, and so the word was harder to apply in a casual, dare I say apolitical way. Which is naturally down to the movie’s very ambition: seeming to give an easy answer, but all too conscious that the answer in reality is not so easy, it shows it and then it takes it away, in a movement most profound to the mind of its intended audience-member. And you can’t not see the drawing hand behind that sort of thing: it has a point, but the point’s much more like the point in a play than the point in a movie, and so in a way it’s garbage. It’s thoroughly artificial, and so is deemed to be a cheat. Although it really is not…
But then…in a way…
…It sort of still is.
And that’s in the play, too.
***
(Okay, you can come back from your cup of coffee now.)
Let me just say that there was always something in me that resented the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…I mean, resented it like hell. And maybe that’s why I kept on seeing it over and over. I saw The Breakfast Club over and over too…because I was one of those people who had just graduated high school, had not yet found their own new thing to do. For guys like me, dating girls still in school, feeling viscerally tied to that weird conceptual environment…it was hard to break free. I mean: I wanted to break free, but it was hard. And so to me it all had something of a secret message, a subtextual trivia-reality that I could locate my misgivings in…and yet still not have to do anything about them…and so it was very forgiving indeed, and even better than that it was useful…
But enough about that, as we get back to Edgar Wright, whose Hot Fuzz (and to a slightly lesser, or possibly just more cryptographic degree Shaun Of The Dead) is a movie I can’t believe American audiences even liked…! Because it’s built on influence so very strongly. Beyond the callback to The Avengers in the final battle in the model village, which any normally-hip person is sure to pick up on, its televisual anglophilia runs so deep and spreads out so wide that myself I expected to see Penelope Keith in the thing and maybe I even did…! Expected to see Robbie Coltrane wandering around in it and maybe that even happened…! Why it shocked me to my core that there was not a portrait of Helen Mirren on a wall somewhere in this movie, I expected to see Saffy as a vampire, Felicity Kendall viciously slam Simon Pegg in the gut with an organic artichoke, this was JLA/Avengers stuff here, and it was no less pretty and no less ugly, and wasn’t Timothy Dalton just fantastic in that episode of Midsomer Murders? He really was, wasn’t he. And so this is the Northrop Frye thing, really: if you’re trying to read John Donne and you don’t know your King James, you’re not going to get more than 40% of the logical density. Well, I said the “younger generation” aren’t exclusively ahistorical remixers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do any remixing, you know…! And yet still, Edgar Wright is no more of the generation he appeals to, than John Hughes was of the generation he appealed to. Born in 1974 (according to Wikipedia, anyway), the director of a couple movies I like a great deal and one that I LOVE UNREASONABLY (if I may just remind you) is not quite as much older than my Torontonian friend, as John Hughes was older than me…but he is close, and that puts him in about the same ballpark as the Old Master, and arguably doing the same sort of difficult things excellently: i.e. setting a beat that others can drum along to, recognizing as their own. But more than that, absolutely Edgar Wright at…what, 36 or something?… is most definitely old enough to have absorbed some of the flavour of the young-adult Nineties (as Brian Lee O’Malley is just a bit too young to really have done) where I made what you might call my second adolescence.
Every generation is encumbered by the “coolnesses” of the previous one, you see; it takes time for that stuff to work itself through the cultural alimentary passage. And so here are the T-shirts, here are the shoes, why no wonder I liked this movie so much here is even my generation’s riff on Audrey Hepburn, the Unobtainable Girl with the ever-changing hair colour. My shit’s still not over, it seems: it keeps gaining vitality. Skateboarding with the good trucks? Invented it. Video game logic/music? In at the start. Basement-suite living? Jesus, no wonder Ben was driven crazy by this. The shoes, the quokes, the party scenes…that’s all me, isn’t it? Me and mine. I me mine.
But all through that beautifully-rosy two inches of nostalgic airport glass. “Fuck you, Twenties, you can’t hurt me anymore!” I think that’s what I felt. “Fuck you, Bueller!” It really was a wonderful moment, because where Ben saw it and thought, “oh movie, why you gotta rub my nose in it like that?” I saw it and and thought “why what wonderful virginal blood you have, movie, all the better for me to bathe in and now I shall NEVER GROW OLD, NEVER NEVER…!” Honestly, the Unobtanium Girl, the fantasy of how she is nevertheless-obtained is my own personal cry-yourself-to-sleep-at-night Alvy-Singer-play that’s-how-it-would’ve-gone-if-she-wasn’t-a-person distortion…and I would almost feel like I need a royalty from its use, except oh movie, oh movie, you did give it to me just the way I always wanted it, didn’t you?
Well…
It did, actually.
Because when I entered the early Nineties, where just about all this hip shit came from (what, you thought hipness was reinvented every seven years? nope, that’s Disney audiences), I had a very odd experience indeed.
“It’s called paedogenesis, Ben,” I said to him. “The amount of time an organism spends as a juvenile, it’s changing in front of our eyes.” And this much anyway, Bloggers, is true. Fifteen years ago, the Canadian government defined a “young adult” as anyone up to the age of thirty-four…and this year it’s actually crossed forty. The cause of this is schooling, one of the most powerful technologies ever invented by the human mind, macro-circuits like in Neil Gaiman’s version of Jack Kirby’s “Eternals”…big factory/prison style buildings, with input and output and throughput, Plato’s Academy only with the changes of efficiency and equality wreaked on it. Biologically, we’re adults as soon as we hit puberty — “shaddup and drink yer gin!” — and it takes us the longest to get there, even in the pure bio-state, of any other land-walking animal on the planet! — but school changes us, my dears. In that, as a certain two-time winner of the George Orwell Award For Clarity In Language might assert, it erodes the distinction between childhood and adulthood, erodes its marks and erodes its privileges on both sides, and puts the young into a peculiar position indeed…as now unlike any other creature on the whole Earth, being of reproductive age and achieving maturity don’t mean the same thing anymore, for us. I mean…
…Heck, it isn’t even close, really.
But we’ll get back to that my dears, back to it…back to it…I mean we obviously can’t get to it now, can we? Not, at least, when it seems the topic of how childhood and adulthood are constituted is itself such an alarmingly vexed one…so constructed, so fluidly-changing, so interpenetrated with all the other practical (read: social) issues of “how to be in the world” and indeed what that world even is…in the London streets of Dickens one sees it very clearly as the interference produced by several overlapping worldviews that the individual must find a way to transit, and for the poor at any rate the necessity is absolutely urgent, so the boundaries between interpretations are correspondingly more permeable. After all, if “childhood” is in some way the creation of the state of being wealthy, it only seems to stand to reason that as one’s environment gets wealthier one’s guiding definitions about childhood get harder to perturb…but on the streets, where being alone and unsupported is the most dangerous thing in the world, the notion of childhood/adulthood itself becomes fungible, and the cultural dialogue that surrounds it becomes correspondingly more interreactive. One “is” not one thing or the other, but one is a much more active identity-seeker than any “is”-type category would allow.
Which is the whole problem/burden/unexpected joy of adolescence…not being one thing or the other, but instead being an active seeker after identity no matter what one’s socioeconomic class happens to be. Because paedogenesis puts a strain on all of us…
As it put a strain on me too, of course…but then off I went to university, into a comfortable paedogenetic limbo of sorts, where those forces were balanced in a new activity. Aha, except that then I bombed right out of university, and the superposition of states failed: and back into my own hands fell the liquidity of a “youthful” identity, which really amazed me because I totally thought I was too old to have it. However, starting work, starting roommate living, out from under any sort of umbrella of purpose…I’m not saying it isn’t something we all do, I’m saying that it is something we all do, but what’s interesting to me, about my story, is that the second adolescence had two components. One being that it came right on the heels of an abject social failure…
…And the other being, that it was a wonderfully freeing time, a time between, an untethered time that felt a lot like adolescence, except that this time it was without the paedogenetic frustrations that run through teenagehood like Judd Nelsons through hallways. And once having tasted that absence of frustration, who would ever go back to it, eh? Con-sider yerself…!
But we’ll get to all that later, because now we finally are on to the business of Scott Pilgrim.
And you know, one of the great things about this for me was the Canadianness of it…I deeply recognize the locales as wonderful analogues of the places I lived in, the places I went to. BACK THEN. Through the airport glass. But for my good friend over there, they actually are the places he does live, they are actually the places he does go…and there ain’t nothin’ analogic about it, and besides that it isn’t great. Because they are loving looks at those places, but they are not his loving looks. Though not a single soul will ever come riding to the rescue of an averagely white guy who feels colonized, still that’s exactly how he feels, and he’s not wrong. We’re all colonized, some time or another. But some of us, strangely enough, are supposed to like it. And not start complaining when you get absorbed by your own stuff. Because that doesn’t make any sense, right? How can you colonize you? How can you think you have a leg to stand on, if you want to complain about that? However, as I always say, the people in the world who complain about the Americanization of their culture — your Nike, your McDonald’s, and so on — really would do well to stop and remember that these things colonized America itself first, and that’s even something that’s still being fought over. The slang of California, the music of the Rockies, how to broil good beef and boil good bagels…southern-fried poker, with its weird in-between hands like Little Dog and Blaze. All the myriad folkways of an America that was, that people are trying to hang on to, but having trouble articulating why, what’s so valuable about it, etc. etc. And as well, the America that may be, the melting-pot of the twenty-first century…all that stuff, too, is threatened by “Americanization”, is it not? That great modernist steel-and-glass superskyscraper, good to no one for nothing, except it makes money. Real culture has to go underground, in the sight of that monolith…
…And, just try to make the best excuses it can? Up in Canada, we see that pretty clearly, and identify with it. The thing you’re forbidden to complain about it, because it’s you, and other people don’t have a problem it, and it’s you…and other people don’t have a problem with it. Oh, just because it’s a bit weird up here, you see? Not to jump any guns, but Canada is strange because although it’s a post-colonial country — like Rhodesia minus the diamonds! — it still isn’t a post-revolutionary one, and so although it loves being part of stable old North-North America, the super-Anglo part, and feels for the most part rather cushioned in its nice-and-wealthy viewpoints (we are talking about the white people here, obviously, and don’t worry I will get back to this in a more complex and cautious way, for now I’m just dashing paint around) it still is true that we’ve got a little bit of what they call in ivory towers the “colonial mentality” — that weird pushme-pullyou perspective in which identity is always contested, and doing the contesting, all at once. So…
Scott Pilgrim. No wonder I loved it, but also no wonder my friend felt like it was touching him in a bad place, and couldn’t quite get his head around how to say that without having people jump all over him and tell him he was being insane. And I confess, I’ve never had anyone make a movie about me before, only featuring someone who’s exactly not like me, acting out my own colonial-mentality second-adolescent drama to himself while I watch and wonder how not to be insulted at being made to take that stance with respect to my own story…
(“It was like you and American Splendor, only I didn’t like mine…!“)
…I wouldn’t know about that, because (you see) the biggest movie anyone’s ever made in my town, that went to my places, is still Rumble In The Bronx. Not exactly a threat. The North Shore Mountains leaping and soaring over New Jersey and Manhattan: hovercrafts beaching near where I was swimming. “You are all cabbage.” It was like the ultimate triumph of Canadian locations being used for Anytown, U.S.A., Canadian actors being used as Anypeople, U.S.A. Simply as crazy as it could get, and I loved it. I felt, in a strange way, almost vindicated by it…
…And American Splendor, that was just a whole other thing, obviously. But it was vindicating too.
So, those two things were very nicely split up, for me…!
But not for Ben.
And is it not bad enough that he is walking around in all the cultural detritus that me and his mother and our friends left for him? Because he is, you know: the T-shirts and the shoes, the little hipnesses and the dream-girl we invented. My story, perhaps…and so not his. By the time “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”‘s source material was done, Brian Lee O’Malley was thirty years old. Dude, that’s old. As old as the chick who wrote Juno. It’s like his life is going in reverse, played out onscreen: things that we are removing from your imaginable possibilities. Oldies: gone for good. And so what’s a guy to do? They just come for you now, eh? And it’s just movies, other people don’t have a problem with it, how can you possibly pretend to feeling “oppressed” or anything, I mean isn’t that just ridiculous?
I must say, though I’m not feeling what he feels there with movies, there is something that this all reminds me of, and that’s…
…The Olympics, of course. That one felt like a hovercraft riding up over my head. And I really, really, really hated that aspect of it.
Seven evil rings.
But of course, I never beat them.
Because I got so in the habit of mistaking one thing for another over my lifetime, that I forgot the big lesson, and fell between the stools.
***
Yes, in case you were wondering: my new little nephew’s name is Oliver.
But, what were we talking about?
Gee, y’know…that’s the problem with blog-posts that go on too long, isn’t it? Eventually you stray from the clear focus you had at the beginning, and that’s when you’re bound to make a misstep, say something you didn’t mean, or can’t defend. Does it all add up to anything? Is any of it true?
Well…
That’s a good question, isn’t it?
But any question can go more than one way, I guess…
…So anyway there’s that!
And so that’s that.
LOVED. THIS. MOVIE.
But get those links while they’re hot, eh? Because I think Sony’s taking them away even as we speak.
Okay!
