Scott Pilgrim vs. Itself

Like it or not, Annie Hall isn’t the crux of this post, but it’s a good starting point. Mostly because we are going to talk briefly about Marshall McLuhan.

In this 1967 interview, McLuhan discusses the concept of point of view in an electronic age, and basically says it does not exist.

“You have to be everywhere at once, whether you like it or not. You have to be participating in everything going on at once and that is not a point of view.”

This arouses questions regarding online identity in this day and age, when an identity is so splintered across social networking sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, et al. McLuhan was right when he said we have to be everywhere at once, which incidentally has eliminated point of view as we post and re-Tweet fragments of the online world we feel most closely applies to us. This can’t exactly be called a point of view, as it is a manufactured of construction of who we want to be, or think we, that has be remediated for quick online consumption and hyperlinking. 

“[It is] certainly true that the book has had an enormous amount to do with individuality. It’s true that competition and repeatability has tended to create a great amount of sameness.” 

Bringing this back to Scott Pilgrim, I had an interesting conversation with a classmate of mine regarding the film and the character (incidentally the same classmate who forwarded the above videos to me). He suggested it was only natural for the written character of Scott Pilgrim to re-tell his life story in the media hodge-podge format, as this is the environment in which he lives. And to a point, I think this is how we are all used to living which is why viewers are so comfortable with the format of this film. We get it, because it’s very close to what our own lives look like when we log onto Facebook while playing Halo 3 and listening to Canadian indie music all at the same time. Or something along those lines.