Okay, pop culture, I get it. You have finally beaten me. Your insatiable entertainment juggernaut held me in its warm embrace for a brief, glorious moment of my youth, but then predictably, inevitably, churned onward toward newer and flashier things, leaving me stranded on the side of a one-way road that’s rapidly diminishing into the rear-view. So I guess it’s time for me to surrender to the obvious and admit that my day is past, my sensibilities are out of touch, and I am no longer even remotely cool.
At least that’s how I felt about ten minutes into the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
First, though, a bit of backstory to explain how I came to be watching a film that hadn’t previously drawn so much as one iota of my interest…
Earlier this week, my entire team at work was told to report for an important meeting. A meeting that was scheduled to last four hours. The length was unprecedented, even in a company and an industry that loves its meetings, and we all showed up under a cloud of misgivings. Some folks were afraid there was bad news coming, that the recent Summer Apocalypse had been one last spasm of activity and now there was nothing more for us to do. In other words, layoffs. I myself thought that line of thinking was ridiculous; even the most sadistic of corporate overlords isn’t going to take four hours to fire people. Even if it was done individually, it wouldn’t take that long; my team isn’t that big. For my part, I was simply dreading four hours cooped up in a hot conference room with too few chairs looking at boring PowerPoint® presentations. (Note the proper placement of the registered trademark symbol, if you please. I do have a professional reputation to keep up.)
It turned out everyone’s worry was for naught. The meeting was just a ruse to get everyone to clear our calendars and gather in one place. Then our only slightly sadistic overlord — after showing up a half-hour late, naturally — could reveal his true plan: There was no meeting, and no PowerPoints. Because discussions with our clients last week had gone very well and he knows we’ve all been busting our humps lately, he wanted to treat us to lunch and a movie on the company’s tab. As a happy sigh rolled out of the gathered staff, I reflected that we must all be colossal suckers to be bought off so easily…
No, seriously, I was truly grateful for the gesture. Lunch and a movie isn’t going to give me my summer back, but it really does help to have one’s efforts at least acknowledged by the higher-ups. And it was a delight to be out of the office in the middle of a bright end-of-summer day. It felt like we were playing hooky from school.
So, anyway, Scott Pilgrim. It wouldn’t have been my choice, since, as I said, nothing I’d seen or heard about the flick grabbed my socks in any way. But the majority of my team was really hyped to see this one — even though several of them had already seen it at least once — and I was in a participatory mood, so I went along with the group. I didn’t have to. We were kindly given the option of seeing whatever we wanted, but I thought it would’ve been snotty of me to actually go and do my own thing. These team-building parties are supposed to be about, you know, bonding with your team and all. However, once the movie began, all my thoughts of worker solidarity went out the window and I was soon wishing I’d gone to The Expendables instead.
Scott Pilgrim isn’t a bad movie, exactly. What it is, though, is a painfully self-conscious post-modernist mash-up of comic books and video games, as well as the overheated fantasies of a certain demographic who loves them. I guess it’s about time I came clean about something: all appearances aside, I’m really not a full-fledged geek. I can talk the talk, but I’ve never truly walked the walk. I never got into RPGs, my knowledge of (and interest in) computer games pretty well began and ended with the Atari 2600, and I’ve never been more than a dilettante in the comic-book world. Which means that while I understood the things the movie was referencing, and found it clever in the ways it incorporated the iconography of its inspirations — I’m referring to the video-game “hit counters” that hovered over people during the fight scenes, and the various visual elements that made the movie look like a comic come to life — I experienced no jabs of pleasure from seeing these things referenced. In other words, it just didn’t strike me as all that cool, merely clever. And clever in a very self-aware, “oh-look-at-how-clever-we-are” kind of way. Mostly, I found the film to be tedious and exhausting; after Scott Pilgrim’s third Mortal Kombat-style smackdown with one of his girlfriend’s “seven evil exes,” I started looking at my watch and wondering if the movie was really going to make me sit through four more of these things. (In case you’re wondering, yes it does, although two of the four remaining evil exes get theirs in a single fight, thankfully.)
The movie’s funniest joke in my view was the one nobody but me got, because it depended on the viewer recognizing a sound effect from a 30-year-old cult movie that Scott Pilgrim‘s target demographic wouldn’t know, or if they did, would only sneer at. And I just could not identify with the titular hero, played with halting, mumbling, insecure non-coolness by Michael Cera, a likable kid who’s on the verge of destroying his fledgling career through overexposure and playing essentially the same character in everything he does.
My reactions placed me in a distinct minority, however. Most of my coworkers — many of whom are younger than me, I might add — were having a great time, laughing their heads off and obviously fully invested in the proceedings.
This wasn’t the first time in recent years I’ve found myself in that slightly befuddled state of not seeing what the big fuss is. I didn’t get the popularity of the Star Trek reboot, or the Battlestar Galactica remake, or The Matrix. And these are all things that people just naturally assume I must like, because I’ve always called myself a sci-fi fan and skirted the fringes of that nerdy subculture that’s somehow managed to mainstream itself. Except… I don’t like those things that all my hipster-geek colleagues are so enthused about.
What I do like is the stuff those same hipster-geeks dismiss as obsolete, cheesy, or just plain old. I like ’80s detective shows and Ray Harryhausen movies and big-haired pop-metal bands. I prefer rubber masks and puppets to CGI. Steadi-cam shots are more pleasing to my eye than handheld stuff. My battlestar has room for personal nobility and daggits. I think the three-act screenwriting structure still works. And I loathe irony.
In short, Scott Pilgrim, regardless of its cleverness or technical quality, was not made with me in mind. Not much these days is, it seems. Which brings me back to the beginning of this entry. My days of effortless connection with the zeitgeist are gone. I am officially out of touch with what’s supposed to be cool. And honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that. It does make it somewhat alienating to work so closely with younger people who are in the full flush of their own connections, though.
Incidentally, that joke I mentioned that comes from a 30-year-old cult movie? It’s a sound effect heard when one of Scott Pilgrim’s nemeses flashes a large, ornate ring. Specifically, it’s the sound effect made by Ming the Merciless’ ring in several scenes of the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. Yeah, I know…. the one everyone dismisses as old and cheesy. I’ve just proved my point, right?
