Analysis 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Simulacrum

If a person is a text, as postmodernism and poststructuralism attest, today’s generation would have to be the texts of computers, television, video games – all manner of electronic mediums. We communicate through electronics – we are increasingly developing our own discourse out of them, complete with emoticons, chatspeak, and acronyms that have even found their way into real life (or should I say “RL”), past the screen: LOL, WTF, the list goes on. We say three little letters, and these are meant to signify a whole slew of various emotions that relate to “laughing out loud.” We are the generation of the text message, the quick response – we thereby exemplify the poststructuralist standpoint that we are nothing more than a brief number of letters, nothing more than computer screens and cell phones. Behind these screens, do our “true” personalities and selves still exist? Or are we nothing more than these electronics with which we communicate? We are no longer interacting with each other, rather, we are interacting with a device that has taken our place.

In this same vein, video games provide an interesting look at how we interact with electronics on a fictional level. In playing video games, we aren’t just interacting with a text like a novel or film, something that we still recognize as existing somewhat independently of ourselves and our actions. In video games, we have a hand in creating the story on some level – we become the characters, we control their actions. And in this way, we are equally controlled by them. We begin to see ourselves in the game, the game as our reality. In this way, the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World provides us with a reality in every way a simulacrum of video games. Scott Pilgrim is your average 20-something, struggling with relationships, but his life is nothing more than the text of a video game. For Scott and his world there is “no more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept” (Baudrillard 1557), for all of reality is a game and there is no distinction between the two.

Scott and his new girlfriend, Ramona, are getting along quite well in their relationship, but Ramona still has some emotional “baggage” holding her back – seven exes that keep coming back to haunt her and Scott and keep them from growing closer. And in their reality-as-video game, this is quite literal: Ramona’s exes have formed an “evil league” to stop her and Scott from being together. In order to move forward in their relationship, Scott finds himself having to fight them in various video game-style combat. Fistfights and weapon fights in the tradition of various combat games, musical fights reminiscent of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, even fights controlling magical creatures like something akin to Pokemon. And not only that, but when Scott’s defeated an ex, he gets to pick up some coins and bonus points for his trouble. In this way, Scott and Ramona’s relationship is “nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture” (Baudrillard 1566), as they work through their emotional baggage not by connecting romantically or personally, but through the action of a video game, through fights and collecting abstract points to add to a score that may or may not in any way relate to their “winning” of this game of love on any real level. For their reality is “a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1557).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvqzWHvrZiA

The final fight scene is a prime example of all of Scott’s reality working like a video game. Here, Scott fights the “final boss battle” against Gideon, Ramona’s most recent ex who she has now gotten back together with. As Scott declares his love for Ramona, he is told by an anonymous narrator voice that he has “earned the power of love,” which gives him a powerful weapon to use in his fight and a level up. Again, we see Scott’s love for Ramona translated into something else, a tool to be used in a fight, a further skill level to be achieved, and this fight again stands between him and the person he seeks to connect with on the other side. Eventually, Scott is killed, but because he picked up an “extra life” in a previous scene he is able to come back. He learns from his little near-death experience a valuable lesson of “self respect,” and he realizes he needs to take responsibility for his own past mistakes, upon which he gets to retry the level that is his confrontation with Gideon. We then see him apologizing to various people, like his friends and former band mates, as well as his ex-girlfriend Knives, and Ramona herself. This is once more all approached from the standpoint of a video game – each time Scott apologizes he gets more points added to his score, and is finally able to defeat Gideon with the help of Knives, having regained her friendship. In the end, Scott and Ramona walk off together to try their relationship once more, and do have a momentary scene where they connect as two people, not as two players in a game. And yet, the thing that brings them ultimately together is Scott’s defeat of Gideon, something purely narratological, symbolic – a simulacrum that takes the place of their relationship, their true human connection.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World may just be a movie, but it poses some serious questions about what our reality truly is. Are we ever more than our various modes of discourse, our texts, whether fictional or otherwise? Are we people or heroes in our own video games, playing by rules we don’t so often make ourselves as are programmed into us from before we even begin – by the world in which we are born into and the ideologies we are presented with. For the video game hero is never free – he is always controlled by the person playing on the other side of the screen. The question is, are we so sure our reality isn’t the game itself? If so, we are controlled by the game, the text – not the other way around.


Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1556-66. Print.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Writ. Michael Bacall, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and Edgar Wright. Dir. Edgar Wright. Universal Studios, 2010.