I barely remember 2010, but I remember Scott Pilgrim being to hipsters like Fight Club and American Psycho are to incels; They totally missed the point of the movie, thought it was aspirational, and the results in dive bars and shitty venues across America (maybe just the midwest?) were disastrous.
Was this real? Did I mandela effect it from the negative zone or something? Am I just getting old?
Everyone I hung out with loved the movie, but nobody missed that Scott is a disastrous human being. The movie actually insists that no, you cannot just weasel your way out of problems with the Power of Love, you have to learn Self-Respect so that you can also respect others and acknowledge your role in creating the current situation before you can move on.
And of course, the gag where “Nega-Scott” is actually a really good guy… because regular Scott is terrible. The movie is pretty clear about this.
But he also gets the love interest with whom he’s been creepily obsessed, and his high school girlfriend who he cheated on has a ridiculous turnaround and tells him to go for it.
The movie might show him as an asshole, but it also rewards him in a way that feels made to fit a male perspective.
I can’t remember the movie super well but the comics make it clear that Scott’s view of Ramona is heavily rose tinted and she’s a shitty useless asshole too.
This is the problem with the movie. It cuts out all Ramona’s complexity and Scott’s rose-tinted view of everything.
Most important pages in the comics, IMO, are these - all from Vol 6 btw, which IIRC was still being done while the movie was in production.
INCLUDING YOU - and she’s 18 here
Not having Lisa Miller (and also some of this stuff) was rough too.
Scott accepting the NegaScott as part of him
As someone who can never get out of their head, I really appreciate the role the glow plays.
Envy was a really important character
After 6 volumes of her being the big ex, this is very satisfying
Anyway, the anime gets all the character complexity even with the twist, it’s so much better than the film, which involved a ton of flattening.
I think its a semi-autobiographical story about Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson’s relationship and just them maturing from the kinda shitty Toronto hipsters they were to be more fully developed people. They end up together because they were married at that time and they even have a cameo in the film
This sort of treatment of shitty male protagonists was seemingly obligatory for my entire childhood. I haven’t seen enough movies recently to know whether it’s still the case but I’d guess it is, if slightly less so.
Everyone I hung out with loved the movie, but nobody missed that Scott is a disastrous human being.
We must expect higher standards for disastrous human beings
Was this real? Did I mandela effect it from the negative zone or something? Am I just getting old?
I think so. I don’t think Scott Pilgrim had anywhere near the cultural impact you’re assigning to it. This is my anecdotal memory, so take it for what it is.
When it came out, it did well, people talked about it for like a week or two, and then everyone moved on to whatever the next movie was, like most popular movies. It didn’t have even half the cultural impact of Fight Club, people weren’t still quoting it years after it came out, I had honestly forgotten about it till everyone here started talking about it again. Even among the bigger fans of the movie I’ve met, none of them emulated Scott, consensus seemed to be he was a douche. Even I got that when I first saw it and I sucked at media analysis back then. They cast fucking Micheal Cera to play him, people have hated that dweeb since he was in Arrested Development, he mostly gets cast as annoying assholes these days.
I think the movie got made because annoying hipsters were a thing at the time it came out, there were already tons of memes about how annoying hipsters were, years before the film was even in Pre-production. I don’t think the film made any significant contribution to the population of hipsters. I was a bit of a hipster back then, and I liked the movie but it didn’t inspire me to be more of a hipster, if anything it made me wanna cool it a bit.
So I don’t know why everyone is assigning all this cultural capital to a movie that was about as influential as Weekend at Bernie’s.
yeah, this here. Its just a movie based on a fun comic?
I’m not saying the message of the movie was great but I don’t really think it had that much impact on the world. People thought it was a fun mid-budget movie. At the time it came out we had a sorta similar thing to what we have going on now with Marvel movies dominating everything, it was just grim gritty action movies. Scott Pilgrim was colorful and not afraid to have cheeky inside humor. People liked it, but it was forgotten fast, the Fast and Furious movies probably had more overall impact on the cultural zeitgeist.
The FF movies are weird because I know on some level everyone watches them (they make money? they keep getting made) but I also feel like you have to be grown in a vat to enjoy them
They seem like the kind of movie to have in the background while doing chores. “Oh look, pretty car go vrooooom”
I watched the first three FF movies in a drive in when I was a kid because they’d show a Disney or Pixar movie and then the late show would usually be an action movie. I was supposed to be sleeping.
I’ve never even heard of this movie. Granted I’m pretty old, but still.
Also, how dare you slander the cinematic masterpiece that is Weekend at Bernie’s?!
I think a lot of people missed the point of it, but I don’t really know what, if anything in that entire movie could be seen as aspirational. Playing the bass? Cheating on a teenager with a girl with dyed hair? Getting in a sword fight in a club? Like, nothing in that movie is the type of thing I would describe as a goal.
cries in sword lesbian bassist Am i a joke to you?
You’ll be a joke until you break up with your fake high school girlfriend.
I already did that in my 20s and i still don’t have a Rickenbacker bass.
Damn, but can you at least play the bass line from FF2?
Playing basslines from video games is illegal in my jurisdiction
(not rly, but it should be)
This is my entire TikTok on a good day
Only having Wallace Wells as a friend is aspirational. We should all strive to either be or befriend that kind of person.
I don’t every piece of media has to “have a message.” Or maybe the message is just “be yourself even if you’re a complete dork and you will also get a hot girl to date you”
Right, but the entire premise of OP’s post was that hipsters thought the movie was aspirational and that fucked up the vibe in bars for years?
If there’s no message and no point, what did these people misinterpret? How would being yourself fuck up the vibe in dive bars?
I’ve never been a bar person at all so I wouldn’t know, but I truly don’t even get what OP is talking about, other than complaining about people adopting a “nerd chic” vibe in which case the OP also misinterpreted the film.
Given the movie’s target audience (marketed to 2013’s teenage boys who play video games), the aspirational part is being A Nerd who can win a prize as beautiful and aloof as the movie’s Ramona. I swear, Revenge Of The Nerds and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I really think you’re remembering a much bigger impact than there actually was.
I think you’re right.
I’m an old fart, and movies like this were always made. But it made little impact at the time because Kick-ass ruined this genre right before this movie came out. If anything, this movie feeds off nostalgia by a group of people who missed this movie in theaters because they were too young to drive themselves there.
I remember people were charmed by it for a while because it had a lot of video game jokes that were really natural and unforced, which is something I don’t think any other movie before or since has managed to pull off.
But I also remember people stopped talking about it pretty quick. I was in college in California at the time so that’s my reference point.
Same and same.
Yeah I liked Scott Pilgrim for the action and visuals. Good action, funny dialogue, great visual style. Never walked out of the film idolizing Scott Pilgrim at all.
I don’t know if the creators of the movie “got the point” either. That movie really feels like Hollywood fundamentally misunderstanding another medium (in this case comics) as usual. The alternate ending worked much better for the movie I think.
The comic really drives the point home about how being a shitty hipster makes you a pretty shitty person, with silly video game style boss fights thrown in. It’s a great read, with the characters becoming increasingly insufferable the older you are compared to them. Edit: This sounds like a negative, but it is deliberate and works really well in the context of the story.
what i don’t get about all the discourse around here lately when it comes to this movie is attacking the wrong ‘bad part’ of the movie (as someone who has been a fan of it)
no one I know was influenced by scott, if anything he’s the opposite of an aspirational figure - there is little, if any, cultural impact stemming from his character.
who we SHOULD be talking about is Ramona, and the way in which the Manic Pixie Dream Girl girlfriend became such an integral part of the 2010s culture, it’s impact on dudes who saw themselves as sitting outside the mainstream who now thought that an MPDG would fix them, and how this in turn affected women (feeding into internalised ‘not like other girls’ misogyny that was coming from spaces like early Tumblr)
As much of Scott’s character arc the movie had to skip over, they pretty much gutted Ramona’s entire arc in service of keeping the runtime manageable. A large part of the point of the comics is that they’re both terrible people with a trail of ruined lives behind them and they both have to become better for themselves, each other, and everyone else.
Big oof. I was the manic pixie dream
girlboyfriend for a bunch of people in the '10s. It was really easy for people to play with you for a while then throw the toy away when they found out that “manic” also comes with severe depression and sometimes real, actual, scary mania. : pUnbreakable Kimmy Schmidt at the least presented the downside and plausible consequences of “manic pixie” energy.
so true. I feel like 500 Days of Summer contributed to this a lot too. Really anything with Zooey Deschanel lol
She was the dream girl of the day.
This is an unexpected but very good take.
I remember the movie having all the cultural impact of a wet fart, particularly considering it did pretty poorly at the box office, even if it did develop an audience later.
Has anyone ever really watched a movie with a character played by Michael Cera and thought, “Oooh, him! I want to be just like him!”
Alan was alright in the Barbie movie.
He was funny but I don’t think anyone wants to be Alan
No one wants to be Alan in Barbieland I think, but Alan outside of Barbieland would be a pretty cool dude to have around. That dude can throw down.
We should fear whoever pulls the “he just like me fr” thing on a Michael Cera character.
I do like the Michael Cera is one of the few A-list (at least once upon a time) male actors in Hollywood who looks boy-ish and nerdy and isn’t a typical square jawed hunk. Even Timothy C and others are still very masculine and square-jawed.
Kind of feelsbadman as a roundfaced boyish looking guy when everyone mocks Michael Cera constantly, definitely feel like a lot of the venom aimed at him comes from a toxic masculinity place
Oh huh, I never thought about it that way. I do feel like I’ve kinda heard that sort of mocking of him.
Still think he’s an awful Scott though!
Yeah I think a lot of what undergirds a lot of the dislike of him is that he’s atypically “low T” and skinny for what you would expect of a Hollywood actor, who are all buff hunks or adonis-like twinks or fat comic reliefs. It’s similar to the hate people have for fat women that oozes out when they talk about them.
Scott’s character is an immature jerk for sure. Some of Michael Cera’s characters are sweet and cool though, like George Michael.
Love and support a “low T” and skinny boy
I gotta be honest this is way too over the top. Shitty venues and dive bars? Oh no, thats so terrible.
There’s a reason they’re called DIVE bars
I remember I was part of a very small cadre of people who went to go see it while there was a line around the block for the latest “Expendables” movie. It was definitely always more of a cult film, but it definitely had a huge impact on the people who were fans of it (especially those who were also in media). It’s kinda like the Speed Racer movie in that sense I guess.
As for myself: I saw it in my early 20s when it came out and I definitely got that Scott was not “aspirational”…but I also didn’t get just how much of a fucking asshole he was until my 30s so…mixed bag.
cadre
Nerd alert!
Scott Pilgrim is more incelcore than fight club
Flight club is like anti-incel. It is about creating elaborate rituals to allow yourself to touch the bodies of other men. And also anprim
ive seen one fight inspired by this movie in the middle school also its trash and he sexually assaults the lesbian character, like no one talks about that. it upset me so much in middle school i stopped talking to my aunt who recommended it to me for a week lol.
No what actually happened is hipsters are naturally obnoxious
hipsters havent been a thing in over a decade
Movie came out 13 years ago
then complaining about them makes us look pretty out of date
My memory of watching that movie is feeling uncomfortable and realizing “oh, these characters are the people I went to college with.”
Maybe that’s what I’m remembering. Scott Pilgrim didn’t influence the people around me, they were already there? I definitely had a roommate that was very Scott-like.
I remember an insufferable vegan guy being a huge fan of the movie, but I didn’t notice any dive bar activity in the UK.
Back then Wetherspoons were dingy old depressing pubs full of old men and moulding furniture.
Now they’ve all gone upmarket and you’d have to fight to find a nice comfortably depressing place to get drunk for under a tenner.
I don’t blame the film for that though, just the rising cost of living forcing stay-at-home-barkeepers to reconsider whether it’s worth keeping the pub open, or selling to some startup removed.
