Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 · Edgar Wright · Scott Pilgrim vs. the World on Sightlines
A fist connects and the word arrives with it. Fat letters detonate in the air beside the guy's head, hang there a beat, and a small counter in the corner of the frame ticks up. Nobody stops to react to the typography. Toronto goes on being Toronto: rent, a garage band that isn't going anywhere, a bass player who can't hold a job. It also has combo counters.
That shot is the whole film, and it's worth saying up front why a French philosopher who died in 1995 is any help with it. Deleuze spent two books sorting cinema into two great machines. In the first, a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the acting works: the punch lands, the situation moves. In the second, that circuit breaks — the character can only watch, and time starts to be felt for itself. By 2010 the second machine was what serious cinema was made of. Edgar Wright went the other way. He took the oldest engine in movies, ran it at maximum RPM, and then drew the gauges on the outside of the hood so you could watch the needles.
Start with the shape of the plot, because it's stranger than it looks. Deleuze splits the action film into two forms. In the large form, a whole world presses down on a man until one decisive act transforms it: the western, the gangster picture. In the small form it runs backwards — someone acts, and the act discloses a situation you couldn't otherwise see. Scott Pilgrim is the small form pushed until it's funny. Scott doesn't know who Ramona Flowers is. She won't tell him. The only instrument he's been issued for finding out is his fists. So each ex he beats hands him one more piece of her past, in the order she filed them, and the list of seven is really a filing cabinet with a health bar. Courtship as forensics. The boss fight is an interview.
What each fight actually is, Deleuze would call the reflection-image: an action transposed into figure or spectacle rather than performed. Nobody calls the police. Nobody goes to the hospital. The fight is the shape a conversation takes when the conversation is unavailable — a status contest with a man who is richer and more disciplined than you, a jealousy you can't phrase, a breakup Scott lacks the nerve to have. Eisenstein had a name for the unit: the montage of attractions, a staged number that figures a relation instead of advancing a plot. Scott Pilgrim is built end to end from attractions. Each ex arrives as his own set piece with his own music, Beck's garage songs on one side and Nigel Godrich's score on the other, and the film pauses politely for the number the way a musical does. The rule the film never breaks is force against force: Deleuze's binomial, one body versus one body, seven times.
Now the graphics. Late in his second book Deleuze arrives at the lectosign, the image that can no longer just be looked at because it has to be read. He gets there through Godard's intertitles and Syberberg's projection-screens, solemn company. Wright gets to the same place through Batman '66 and Fight Club. When a bar appears over a character's head, you stop watching a body and start reading a quantity. The picture has become a page. His specific invention is that the annotation is binding. This isn't a commentary track floating above the drama, the way a caption sits above a photograph; the counter is telling the truth about the world, and the world obeys it. The film will draw a gauge for a man who badly needs to pee, and the gauge is as real as the man.
This is a cheerful demolition of the deal André Bazin thought cinema had signed. For Bazin the camera's whole dignity was that it bore witness: something was there, in front of the lens, and the image is its imprint, which is why he cared about neorealism and its patient streets. Scott Pilgrim voids the contract without apology. A defeated ex leaves no body. Nothing here is under any obligation to persist. And the film loses nothing by it, because its subject was never the world outside. Amélie had already licensed this, overlaying animation on live action to push a character's interior out onto the surface. Wright industrializes it. What you're watching is what a twenty-three-year-old's inner life looks like from the inside, where a rival really is a boss and an ex really does have a number attached.
The cutting follows the same law. Wright cuts on the beat, not on the geography — the rhythmic grammar A Hard Day's Night invented, jump cuts and undercranking pinned to a song. Space here answers to pulse. Critics call the condition post-continuity, which isn't Deleuze's word but names what happens when the cut stops serving a continuous world and starts serving a tempo. Run Lola Run had imported the respawn; The Warriors had already built a plot as a level-by-level gauntlet of themed gangs. Wright imported the whole architecture at once: levels, bosses, a score, a life count, an end-of-stage reward. Nobody had fused comics, games and pop cinema this completely before, and a generation of editors and music-video directors has been mining it ever since. It flopped in 2010 and was rehabilitated within a few years, which is usually the sign that a film arrived with a grammar the audience hadn't finished learning.
And then the rueful thing underneath. Scott spends the film demolishing Ramona's past while hauling his own behind him; the guy whose trouble was never getting a girlfriend, only getting rid of them. The machine works perfectly on somebody else's history and cannot lay a finger on his. He is, in the accounting of the film, somebody's future evil ex. Watch it again and keep one eye on the instrumentation. It will draw you a bar for a full bladder. Ask what it never draws a bar for.
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — Scott can only learn Ramona's history by fighting it: each of the seven evil exes, defeated, discloses another hidden piece of the situation he's actually in. The act reveals the situation rather than resolving a given one.
- the Figure (reflection-image) — Every emotional transaction is transposed into spectacle: a breakup, a jealousy, a status contest with a richer rival are all staged as full-blown boss fights that leave no bodies and have no legal or medical consequences.
- attraction-image — The film is built from staged numbers rather than causal action — each ex arrives as his own set piece with his own music (Beck's songs, Godrich's score), the plot pausing for the attraction the way a musical does.
- the readable image (lectosign) — Life bars, combo counters, a 'pee bar' and onomatopoeia blazing across the frame — HUD elements imported wholesale from video games — force the viewer to read quantities off the image instead of simply watching bodies.
- binomial — The film's unbreakable rule is force against force, one body versus one body, seven times over: Scott against each of Ramona's exes in sequence.
- the movement-image — Action resolves everything: Scott perceives a situation (an ex in the way) and punches it, and the punch works — a deliberate, maximal restoration of the sensory-motor circuit in 2010, with the machinery drawn on screen.
- post-continuity — Wright's whip-pans and match cuts subordinate spatial coherence to rhythm, cutting on the beat in the lineage of A Hard Day's Night's music-driven jump cuts and undercranking.