a heart or two guitar pics?

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Directed: Edgar Wright
Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Universal Pictures, PG-13, 112 minutes

It’s hard to say if Andy Warhol would love Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but it’s safe to say he’d watch it. Embedded with the lifeblood of culture, and walking the fine line between contemporary and nostalgia, it’s pop euphoria but without the irony. Warhol stood for that; he encompassed that. But what Warhol did was sell back to us our own disintegration. Our obsession with celebrity and consumerism made capitalism chic, so he crafted these products into art. He celebrated emptiness; the joke was that we did too.

Scott Pilgrim is in effect that emptiness realized. But there is something profoundly fascinating in the confidence with which its struts that same superficiality. For so long the idea of “style over substance” has been seen as a branch of negative cinema, where the aesthetic is the sole provocateur. Our emotional connection to film, it seems, has been resigned to the nether regions of pretension: “make me think! It’s the only way I can feel!” But Scott Pilgrim’s feel is based on just how little we’re asked to think. It’s not bound by logic. It giddily bounces between bevies of generational signifiers — the retrograde video games of the 1980s to the social networking info tablet of the Zero’s. Its confidence is in its volume.

Michael Cera is Michael Cera. We’ve come to expect nothing more, and we’ve also come to hate him for it. Once, Bogart would strut on the screen and part of the joy was the way he wouldn’t disappear into a role. That we’d be able to watch him and know that we’re watching Humphry Bogart, his rock-gruff face displaying nothing close to a smile, and his voice, the last remaining links between cinema and vaudeville. Michael Cera is no Humphry Bogart. He bumbles less than usual, but he still can’t make any honey. But if Pilgrim is the definitive flick of the new media era, where geek chic has invaded culture to the point of ironic obscurity, than Cera’s casting is almost metatextual — he holds more clout than maybe even he realizes.

He falls hard for a puckish pixie named Ramona, who isn’t your ordinary girl as evident through her vibrantly changing hair color and Doc Martin clad demeanor. To win her affection, Scott is forced to battle her Seven Evil Exes, all of whom contain some ounce of humorous embellishments (Chris Evans plays a cocky actor whose eyebrows should nab a Best Supporting Actor nomination; Jason Schwartzman oozes something else entirely). These battles are sized up via video game aesthetics: power ups help Scott fight dirty; coins are collected when he succeeds; a +1 Life token comes in handy at one point. These gamer nuances (can it be called a nuance if it’s drenched on screen?) make up the action, the joy, the candy-infused scenery and sincerity of Scott Pilgrim; Lichtenstein meets Sega.

Scott’s gaggle of buddies always strives to keep him in check, most notably Kieran Culkin as his gay roommate, whose sexuality is understated to believability; Anna Kendrick also nags admiringly. They attempt to ground the movie into something that resembles reality, standing out delightfully. Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) is Scott’s scorned ex, abandoned at the first sight of Ramona’s Crayola locks. As the embodiment of Western fetishism —a young schoolgirl who drips of Anime ink — her moments are perhaps the film’s only attempt at emotional sincerity. A maturity that is at once a welcome breath of fresh air and a distraction from the film’s giddiness.

There is, I think, this belief that we collectively both recognize and remain ignorant to, which is that a film can only reflect us culturally if it is calm. This isn’t a widespread truth: The Matrix is perhaps the perfect pre-Y2K construction, and brutally telling; the ten years in between It and Avatar perhaps even more so. But these are abstractions. They’re hyperbolically telling — a madman mistaken for a preacher. But the films that are always culturally resonant are the ones that reflect our ideological struggles, which are always narratively depicted as being more tranquil than they really are.

Scott Pilgrim is a lot of things, but tranquil it is not. It is so busy that it perhaps captures our current blip in the historical radar better than anything in recent memory; it’s nearly schizophrenic. Some may call it self-aware, but that’s not exactly right. It’s not that the film is aware of itself, but rather that it’s aware of everything else. It willfully frolics somewhere between childish and revolutionary, but that’s not just the fun, but also maybe even the goal. Finally we have a film that captures the giddy cerebreality of youth: unbound, but appreciative of that freedom.

Edgar Wright possesses that same post-modern pop that Tarantino did in the early-90s. But where Tarantino employed his sensibilities through use of the casual (talking about movies had never before been just as cool as watching them), Wright goes for the stark opposite. His characters don’t breath, they heave. What makes it work, as is often the case, is more up to us than it is to him. As within anything so influenced by context and congregation, the result is similarly participatory. It works only as much as we understand it.

This is why the film is important: because what you think of Scott Pilgrim speaks, loudly, about the kind of person you are; because it is, in effect, the sum of everything we’ve decided as relevant over the past two decades; because it is immune from real criticism the same way Tarantino was: to deny it simply means “you don’t get it”, which may be true just as much as it isn’t fair. The film feels like it bounces between both a visualization of the Nostalgia Age and an example of it. Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives balance to Ramona and the film. If Knives is the gamer’s dream, Ramona is the reality realized. Scott may fall for her, but the real world still feels just far enough.