"If your life had a face, I would punch it"

I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World this week. I loved it.

There, movie review aside, now I can get into what I'm really thinking about.

One of the most interesting elements of the movie to me was the character of Scott Pilgrim himself. In both the movie and the graphic novels upon which they're based, Scott is portrayed generally as a loser, with a serious disconnect from reality. Rather than interacting with his environment directly the way his friends, band members, antagonists, and even his major love interest do (albeit some of them in exceptionally skewed ways - I mean, in addition to being burned pretty bad, you'd also have to be a bit touched to devote the most substantial energies of your life to pursuing revenge against someone who broke your heart), he is consistently portrayed as once-removed from real life - only filtering his experiences through a schema constructed from the debris of classic-era video games.

There's a part of me that wants to say, "What the hell, Scot Pilgrim? What the hell?" This mindset seems like a textbook display of dissociation and anomie (or is that a little strong?) adopted by someone who feels largely alienated by the world they exist in. This coupled with Scott's initial lack of meaningful personal relationships, personal property, his naivety (whether real or affected), and uncommonly bad memory (played mostly for comic effect, but also potentially indicative of greater psychosocial concerns) seem to indicate a personality who has surrendered all existential agency. The recurring videogame metaphor also serves to reinforce this interpretation by implying that Scott, like the reader or viewer, is also part of the audience - an observer of his own life.

From here, it's tempting to go into a blistering tirade about how Scott needs to break through these self-imposed illusions and face life directly, and to critique his path toward maturation across the 6 volumes of the graphic novel or the 2 hours of the movie (although this journey is less obvious on the big screen; I guess that's partly a result of the limitations of transposing a story between media!). But I have to take a breath and pause before I dive into that and remind myself that I do the precise same thing.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that while I enjoy videogames, I didn't get into them until late in my youth, so they never had an extremely high impact on the development of my personal schema. Music and sci-fi/fantasy novels were always more my thing. I should also say that Scott Pilgrim exists as an exceptional case - because of his status as a fictional character, Scott exists as an uncommonly extensive and well-crystallized example of the mindset I'm referring to. However, the fact remains that I, as a young male adult in my early-to-mid 20s, find myself commonly viewing my experiences through a lens cobbled together from themes, tropes, and symbolic constructs of the media with which I most familiar.

In many ways, this is a natural reaction - the enormous complexity of social relationships makes them overwhelming to face without some form of interpretive schema in place - the ages-old concepts of "family", "race", "nation", and "religion" are good examples of interpretive schemata people have used to make social realities into comprehensible, describable units. However, after reading the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and watching the movie, and then taking a look at my own experiences, I realize that in some instances these schemata become so comprehensive they can be used by the naive or disillusioned as substitutes for experienced reality; i.e., rather than Scott's experiences being compared to a videogame his life becomes a videogame, at least in his own mind.

What I wonder about is the scale and prevalence of these interpretive schemata. To be willing to accept a sufficiently complex schema as a substitute for experienced reality suggests an "experiential fluidity" stemming either from a disillusionment with the importance of one's experienced reality on one's life, or an intentional willingness to accept known fictions as equally (or nearly equally) valid as real events. Perhaps this is due to the explosion of telecommunications networks over the past 20 years, and the proliferation of easy-access news media - on a daily basis, many of us are exposed to a relentless barrage of stories we are expected to accept as true, but which fall largely outside our realm of experience (I remember how difficult it was to fathom the enormity of the Russian wildfires that have been burning through the summer until I was able to relate it to a fire-based experience from my own life, and then extrapolate outward).

Is there a generational component to this mindset? I'm in my early-to-mid 20s, as is Scott. Bryan Lee O'Malley, the author of the Scott Pilgrim series is less than 10 years removed from his protagonist. All three of us have grown up in the media environment I alluded to in the previous paragraph. However, the similarity in ages also points out the necessity for an external reference. Has this pattern of blurring the experience/interpretation line occurred in the past, and we're simply at a new iteration? This seems likely, but what social or cultural circumstances cause it to occur? Compared to past blurrings how does this iteration compare in terms of scale, or proliferation?

Speaking of proliferation, is this mindset prolific at all? There's certainly a personality type that is more likely to adopt this mindset - I think it's a safe argument to make that videogames, music, movies and television, art, and literature provides a more stimulating account than most real-life experiences (especially when you factor in special effects!), and this appeals strongly to imaginative and curious people, as well as those with high sensation-seeking tendencies. Is Scott one of those people? Am I? Is this tendency limited to people expressing those traits, or is it truly spreading throughout our culture as media outlets regularly expose broad audiences to visions of life that, even when mundane, far exceed the sensationalism of most people's experiences?

I have some suspicions on this topic, but mostly I have a handful of observations and another handful of questions. Scott Pilgrim is a character that could be given an interesting treatment from a sociological, psychological, or existential perspective (any senior English majors looking for a thesis project? =P), but that's not my intention with this post. I simply wanted to note how the Scott Pilgrim series revolves around a protagonist who's experience of reality has been replaced, in whole or in part, by an interpretive schema constructed primarily from elements of a fictional medium.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go defeat some Sandwich Gremlins so I can eat lunch!