In Laman's Terms: How Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Changed My World

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

In the last days of July 2010, my father came up to me with an inquiry. Would I be interested in seeing a free advanced screening of a new movie? A lot has changed in the last ten years. My embracing of every possible chance to see a movie on the big screen has not. Of course I said yes. Of course, I had no idea exactly what movie we were seeing. All I knew was that it was something called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and that the poster featured some guy wailing away on a red guitar. At this young age, I had no prior exposure to either Pilgrim’s source material or any of the preceding works of Edgar Wright.

I went into Scott Pilgrim totally blind. I left seeing a whole new world of cinematic possibilities.

Now, I’ve been a fan of movies since I was a kid who mastered a VHS player before I mastered talking. That passion was taken to a new level over the course of 2009 and 2010 when I saw a slew of movies that changed my perception of what films could accomplish. In this timespan, I managed to watch both Scott Pilgrim and Gremlins 2: The New Batch over a single three-week period. Both managed to blow my mind in a similar manner by demonstrating how you could use meta-humor to humorously challenge the traditional form of a movie. Jokes in these motion pictures were not just limited to lines exchanged between the characters. They extended into elaborate gags like gremlins breaking into a projector booth.

In the case of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (which turns ten years old tomorrow), this feat was accomplished by creating a world that never even tries to evoke naturalism. Scott Pilgrim is a universe where characters can reach for 1-UP’s, where a ringing telephone emits a long string of on-screen text reading “Rrrrrriiiinnnnnggg” and where a conversation between Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) and Wallace (Kieran Culkin) takes on the rhythms of a comedic exchange on a sitcom, complete with an accompanying laugh track. Perhaps my favorite example of Pilgrim’s unpredictable comedy is how one of the evil exes is taken down by the sudden presence of the Vegan Police. That old Hollywood cliché.

Much like in Gremlins 2, Scott Pilgrim creates a world where anything and everything can happen when it comes to jokes. In Gremlins 2, that means Gremlins can turn into Tony Randall impersonators. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, that means Vegan Police can show up at random to defeat adversaries. In the process of embracing this type of comedy, Scott Pilgrim creates a barrage of jokes and visuals that could only exist in this movie.

This includes the nifty feature of Scott Pilgrim characters being accompanied by on-screen text emphasizing their motions or emotions. It’s a shame Pilgrim and Into the Spider-Verse are the rare films to utilize the comedic possibilities of the kind of on-screen text comics use constantly. Meanwhile, Bill Hader’s recurring bits of faux-dramatic narration are incredibly humorous. I’m particularly partial to a scene where he divulges the awkward truth about Scott’s recent break-up. These lines play directly against Pilgrim constantly trying to downplay the harshness of the split, which makes for great comedic juxtaposition.

This style of humor is enhanced by the trademark rapid-fire editing you find in Edgar Wright movies. Thanks to editors Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World runs like a road-runner who just drank ten cans of Red Bull. Back when I first saw Pilgrim, this style of editing was a revelation to my brain. Films can be edited like this?!? They can move at this speed? Ten years of exposure to all kinds of editing styles later, Pilgrim’s editing still manages to impress me, especially in how it is used to accentuate the timing of several gags. Plus, this rapid-fire aesthetic conveys a sense of excitement over this fictitious world on the part of Wright and company. It’s like they’re so excited to explore the world of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that they’ve gotta move at a high level of speed to scope out every inch of it.

That excitement proves just as infectious in 2020 as it did for wide-eyed Douglas Laman in 2020. Of course, not everything in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World holds up as well as the editing ten years later, though most of the shortcomings emerge as quibbles. Most notably, the ending for Pilgrim feels wrong. Scott Pilgrim being an unlikeable protagonist is something the film is clearly aware of, hence why his “evil” doppelganger Nega Scott is actually really chill. However, after a film that’s about deconstructing Pilgrim’s worst tendencies and giving him “the power of self-respect”, he should end the film finding solace in himself and further self-growth, not in the arms of Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Having the two walk off into the sunset is a cookie-cutter resolution to a film that otherwise

It’s also discouraging how Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has cultivated an online fanbase that idolizes the titular character rather than recognizes him as a flawed individual. It’s like how so many Breaking Bad fans view Skyler, not Walter White, as that shows villain. In both cases, people have latched onto a white male protagonist as a straight-laced hero figure rather than as the complex person he was intended to be. It’s a reminder of how people who love a piece of pop culture can also fundamentally misunderstand it. It’s also another reminder of how, if we must tell more stories about toxic dudes, they need to be told through an exclusively female lens, like this year’s excellent The Assistant.

But long before that fanbase emerged, there was just me and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Walking out of my advanced screening, a film I had previously zero knowledge of was now all my brain could think about. A movie whose thoroughly unique sensibilities helped to reshape how I viewed film as an artform and put me on the road that would eventually lead me to even more groundbreaking cinema from around the world. Ten years after it left an unforgettable mark on me, I’m still totally in lesbians with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.