It shouldn’t surprise me that a movie where the world is like one big video game is obnoxiously in-your-face, over-the-top, and simplistically ridiculous, because most video games are obnoxiously in-your-face, over-the-top, and simplistically ridiculous. And it shouldn’t surprise me that a movie where the world is like one big video game is incredibly misogynistic. Female video game characters are usually little more than cosplay prostitutes, flouncing and bouncing around for the titillation of easily amused pubescent boys. And gamer girls (and even girls who are just perceived to be gamers, or even just gamer-friendly) are shamelessly objectified to the point where they can get jobs working for The Daily Show, even though they clearly do not have the comedic skills necessary for such a role. So I shouldn’t have surprised me that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is such a simplistically misogynistic movie. But it did.
The plot of Scott Pilgrim is simple: boy becomes obsessed with a girl he doesn’t even know, stalks her, then (because good-looking girls just love being stalked by strange Canadians) gets to date her, only to find out that, in order to date her, he must defeat her exes in video-game-style combat. Okay, so maybe that’s not a very simple explanation. How about this: cute indie girl is property. Hipsters fight over her, because they want to possess the finest property. I think that pretty much sums up the basic plot of the movie.
But Shawn, you might be saying, isn’t this just a damsel-in-distress plot, with George Michael trying to free the girl from the clutches of her hipster exes? Aside from the fact that the damsel-in-distress archetype could easily be interpreted as phallocentricism in its purest form, the damsel-in-distress in Scott Pilgrim isn’t really that distressed. In fact, she seems pretty disinterested in everything. So, in addition to being a fetishized object to be fought over and possessed, the character of Ramona isn’t even a real character. She has no personality, no history other than how she is defined in relation to her exes. She is a hair style, or more specifically, a hair color, making her a textbook definition of an object of fetishistic scopophila.
And then there’s the character of Knives, the underage Asian Catholic schoolgirl who is obsessed with George Michael. She, too, has no real character; she exists to freak out and to scheme ways of becoming George Michael’s property again. She even takes the Vertigo approach, changing her hairstyle to match Ramona’s, not-so-subtly pointing out the only aspect of Ramona’s person that George Michael cares about.
In addition to being misogynistic, Scott Pilgrim is also relentless stupid. The director forces in video game style HUD notifications, as if in a desperately insulting attempt to point out to us, the hapless viewer, that the movie is actually supposed to be like a video game, as if the stylized violence and characters exploded into coins didn’t already let us know that. The movie might have been more enjoyable if the director didn’t feel the need to beat us over the head with the obvious, if the characters had casually gone about their business, as if the video game aspect of their lives was completely natural and normal. But that’s not the path the director chose. He chose the path of unnecessary and insulting graphics, which is disappointing because the director, Edgar Wright, also directed really good movies, like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
Sadly, the talent Wright displayed in those films is absent here. Or it could be that those films were more the result of the talents of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and that, when left to fend for himself with nothing but the blank expressions of Michael Cera, Wright isn’t able to pull his own weight. Regardless, Scott Pilgrim is an awful movie. It’s insulting to women, to video gamers, to hipsters, and to its own audience. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World merits the dreaded evil tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein.
