Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: A Case Study in the Rebuild Approach

The main character, who is fundamentally kind of an unpleasant character — but very easy to identify with in one’s early 20s.

I’ve long been a fan of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim – I thought I’d already written a review of it, but I see now that the last time I read it was 2018, back when this website was just where we were promoting our yet-unfinished podcast – but it’s an appreciation that has shifted over the years.

However, I come not to praise Scott Pilgrim, but to bury him. Or I would say that if O’Malley hadn’t rightfully done so already. Kind of. After a fashion.

I first encountered this weird little comic back when I was in college, in the late aughts. Being an awkward young man who bounced listlessly between things, spent time around friends in rock bands, and played too many video games, it seemed like a cartoonish over-exaggeration of a world that was very familiar to me. To an extent, it was wish fulfillment: at least the bad things that happened to this character were amusing and had a point, and at least he had romantic success after a fashion.

When I came back from my first semester of graduate school, my friends were getting together after a night at the bar to play the side-scrolling beat-’em-up of the comic and the soon-to-be-released film, and I even went to see the Edgar Wright adaptation in theaters the night before I left for graduate school.

There were other things going on in our lives: I’m highlighting one thing to show that it was something that my friend group engaged with. I read the comics and I enjoyed them, but I don’t think I really understood them at the time – and as the years have gone by, I’ve come to appreciate Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work with the comics more and more. With the release last November of the Netflix adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, I think that he’s produced the best version of the story yet.

Which is good, because the original had some awful things lurking in it.

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Let’s start with the basics. I’ve talked previously about how the role of the protagonist can warp things: with the way that we construct stories, it’s very easy for people to sympathize with and focus on the actions of a protagonist and realign their understanding of right and wrong – at least within the context of a story – to the protagonist. This is part of the problem with shows like Breaking Bad and Rick and Morty: when a character justifiably stands in the way of the protagonist, that character is demonized.

Look: not a lot of people get around to reading Dune Messiah. Frankly, I think it’s one of Frank Herbert’s weaker books.

I think Frank Herbert got this – in Dune Messiah, there is a portion where Paul Atreides, emperor of the known universe, reflects on the all-destroying holy war he unleashed by thinking back to the legendary figure of Adolph Hitler and reflecting that, between the two of them, he had a body count that made the death toll of the holocaust a rounding error. This wasn’t meant to exonerate Hitler, it was meant to show that Paul had unleashed a horrible destructive force, and the book encourages the reader to judge him. The character would demand that the reader judge them – but very few people who read Dune acknowledge that there is no “good” character in it.

Scott Pilgrim isn’t Paul Atreides, but they suffer a similar problem. In the original form of the story, Scott is the viewpoint character, and because O’Malley is a reasonably talented writer and artist, he secures the reader’s good will. The end result is that most readers ignore the character’s philandering, mooching, and selfishness, despite the fact that all of the other characters point it out nearly constantly.

(There is, also, the separate issue that people – or at least many adults who live in America – have a tendency to imitate characters in things that they watch, read, and generally experience. However, to avoid the tendency of such a read on things to gravitate towards the puritanism that is so common online, I’m going to put a pin in that. I’m going to come back to it later. However, I want you to think about the number of people you know who act like the store-brand version of a sitcom character.)

My own theory – and it’s possible that there is something written on this already, or that he has commented on it in the past and I haven’t found it – I think that O’Malley realized that he was sliding in to a dark space with his story around the end of volume four of the comic and attempted to cut into the more toxic elements of his own work and rescue the core that interested him about the story from what had grown up around it. I suspect that much of his later discussion of Scott Pilgrim since then has been guided by the understanding that there were elements in the story that were good and there were other elements that weren’t serving his purpose: unfortunately (well, from a critical perspective unfortunately) he found success too early to put together a more mature and well-developed work after the fact. There were elements that had a certain amount of toxicity to them that had been crystalized into the canon of the comic and became an inseparable part of it.

In subsequent iterations of the story – the video game (I don’t know if he had any part in that, most likely not, I would suspect?), the film, etc. — I feel like he’s been trying to salvage the good parts and minimize the bad parts.

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Look, the Rebuild of Evangelion movies are silly at times. Here we see a giant robot using the Eiffel Tower as a lance. I’m not going to argue that this isn’t ridiculous. However, I will argue that the whole thing forms an interesting circuit with the original text.

I use a term in the title: rebuild. This term, specifically, springs from the Rebuild of Evangelion films. A long time back, I wrote about watching Neon Genesis Evangelion as a kind of nostalgia-experience, but rewatching the series and watching the Rebuild are different experiences – I don’t know how the Rebuild films were received, but I very much liked them. It’s more than just a remaster or a reboot: it is the original creator going back and redoing their original work with a greater scope of knowledge and the experience of doing it the first time.

Look, it can be true both that it’s silly to argue over which character shot first AND that this has fundamental implications for the characterization of someone that the movie wants us to spend hours and hours with going forward. It can also be true that the owners of the movies are just turning a big “who shot first” dial back and forth and watching the audience for approval.

To a certain extent, this is something that people are largely hostile to: I’m sure that a number of readers are now thinking about the infamous “Special Edition” of the Star Wars trilogy. That, however, is something else entirely – Hideaki Anno didn’t destroy Neon Genesis Evangelion in the course of producing the Rebuild films; Bryan Lee O’Malley didn’t take Scott Pilgrim off the shelves before releasing Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I would say that the problem with the Star Wars Special Edition wasn’t that it existed in the first place: it’s that the original form of the movies is unavailable except as a pirated fan edit. The original prints have been destroyed – that’s the problem.

And I would say that’s key to something being a rebuild instead of a reboot. It’s not simply a remake done by the original creator or – I suppose – someone they approve taking the mantle. It’s a different version that iterates on the original but is an independent work of art, leaving the original alone. Is it still another version that can be monetized? Sure – there’s nothing anti-capitalist about the Rebuild mode, but I would argue that there is an artistic integrity to it that reboots and remakes lack. The original creator looks over the work in question and brings to it what they understand the original work lacked.

The Rebuild of Evangelion gave the father-son confrontation that the original series desperately seemed to need.

In contrast, what Scott Pilgrim Takes Off adds is the ensemble dimension: it takes us out of Scott Pilgrim as a character by removing him from the screen for half the series’s run time. Now, all of these characters that have been defined solely in relation to this protagonist – the underaged girl he’s dating, his apparent true love that he cheats on the first girl with, the seven enemies he must defeat to win the heart of his apparent true love, the members of his band, his gay roommate, and so on – and we have to learn who all of these people are in the absence of Scott. At first blush, it makes as much sense as looking at the solar system and trying to find out what would happen if the sun were removed.

But here’s the thing: without this loud, overbearing presence in center stage, it becomes clear that O’Malley has an incredible ensemble cast on his hands: now that they’re liberated from the need to relate to this one weird character, they’re allowed to develop a depth and richness that they would otherwise have lacked. In addition, it allows them to tell the story of Ramona and her relating to her past in a more independent fashion.

Given the comic and the show’s close connection to rock music, the shift towards an ensemble approach makes sense: despite the overwhelming emphasis on personal charisma in discourses on popular music, rock requires a band. It’s a group effort. An ensemble approach makes sense.

Is Scott still a major presence? Sure – his name’s in the title, and it’s acknowledged that it’s weird that the girl he went on one date with is the one investigating his apparent murder – but the change in focus allows the other characters to develop fully before bringing him back on stage.

In the end, it is revealed to be all a sort of time-travel plot: Scott – presumably the same Scott as the comics, who lived through all those experiences – is now separated from Ramona and is using a time machine to childishly try to manipulate his prior self into avoiding the relationship altogether. And while Old Scott is definitely a dangerous character, he transparently represents the mindset of the original comic, grown older and more inward-looking (in short, he is selfish, childish, and in possession of far too much power), more than anything else he is portrayed as pathetic and unable to let go of his dream of changing the past.

Young Scott, seeing this, is rightfully put off by his older self, and resolves to avoid becoming that same person. This, I’ll admit, could have used some more development, but the format of the series – eight half-hour episodes – had limited space, especially with all of the development the other characters went through.

I’m sure there are other things going on in the author’s life, and other people involved in the writing process of the show, but I think that this can be read as a limited disavowal of the original material: not saying not to read it or experience it, but saying that the original is a constrained version of what the story can be.

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This, ultimately, is what I think a Rebuild is: not just a remake, not just a remake by the original author, not just a remake by the original author that “fixes” something in the original, and not just a remake by the original author that “fixes” something in the original while allowing the original to continue to exist. A Rebuild is a new work, remixing the original in a way that is in conversation with it and shows the maturation of the artist’s vision.

In both this case and in Rebuild of Evangelion, I am reminded of what Edgar – my Edgar – wrote about “The Problem is Me” by the Get-Up Kids, and their comparison of the song to the earlier Get-Up Kids song “Don’t Hate Me” --

As the title suggests, “The Problem Is Me” gives us a speaker facing up to a pattern in his relationships, noticing a trend and zeroing in on the throughline. He tells us that he’s “trying hard not to throw [her] under the bus,” and seeking to change the behavior he identifies in the song, while also wondering if he even can.

In the broader context of emo music, as especially its third wave, on which The Get Up Kids were a major influence, and heavy-laden as it is with everything from latent sexism to fantasies of sexual violation, it’s easy to see this as simply a lateral move into the kind of non-apology that turns from a tossed off, “I’m sorry,” to, “I’m a terrible person,” with the latter sentiment the real focus. I mean, maybe it is. But it doesn’t feel that way: “The Problem Is Me” feels like a reckoning, both with the speaker’s personal history and with the influence of the band’s early work. It really feels honest.

(I strongly recommend reading the rest of that piece. It’s good writing, and I’m not just saying that because I’m married to the writer.)

This is a similar progression, and it’s why I point to the importance of the artist’s maturation in the process of creating a rebuild of an earlier work. So often it is put forward that – to a certain extent – the development of an artist’s talents is a bad thing. Think of the number of times it has been put forward that such-and-such band sucks now; think of the number of authors whose earlier work has a fire that seems banked and quenched in their later works; think of the number of artists that go off the deep end and just make paintings by using pneumatic guns loaded with ink that they fire at clouds of gnats in front of their canvas or something like that.

The progression and development of an artist’s talents is good. Not always an unalloyed or unproblematic good, but a good nonetheless, and sometimes in the course of developing one’s talents it becomes necessary to go back and right and earlier wrong or clarify an earlier, misunderstood point.

Or, simply, to do it better.

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