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The Scott Pilgrim comics are six volumes (each about the size of a manga collection) of black-and-white excellence, written and drawn by Bryan Lee O'Malley. The series is a somewhat surreal homage to video games, crappy bands, post-college malaise, Toronto and growing up for real. Scott Pilgrim (unemployed dude in a band) falls in love with Ramona Flowers (who makes Amazon deliveries on rollerblades through Scott's dreams) but her seven evil former lovers have formed a League and will fight him for Ramona. Ramona is unimpressed. Each book is full of video game references, and each book is like a level of a game, with each "Evil Ex" as the boss (until the seventh book, anyway).
While the first two volumes are more than a little wobbly on the Bechdel front, and on the manic pixie dream girl front, the next four turn that around beautifully. One of the great strengths of the comic is that, because of its length and rambling style, it has a wonderful supporting cast. Scott Pilgrim himself is something of a Nice Guy douchebag to start, with some very immature behaviour, but, amazingly, he grows up. Ramona Flowers is the manic pixie dream girl with a dodgy past, but we get to see her make decisions for herself and grow up, too. There are numerous female characters who interact with each other at length, and certainly not all circling around the main characters. Envy Adams, Knives Chau and Kim Pine in particular leap off the page and do their own thing - and so does Ramona. There are also several characters of colour, though only Knives has a major role, and several gay men and bi men and women (though no lesbians as such).
The comic is a solid Bechdel Pass. Female characters discuss music, their jobs, ninjas, their relationship to each other, their thoughts on Envy Adams, Ramona, America, the beach, and ideas about parties and costumes. It's still Scott-centric (and het-centric) but there's enough space and enough women with speaking parts to get around this successfully.
The movie is rather different. The special effects and use of video games and cartoons are wonderful, but time constraints have cut out most of the side characters' storylines to focus on Scott's story. Even Ramona gets very little of her story told. Knives is more prominent in the movie - and Ellen Wong is terrific - but this comes with the nasty addition of casual and really unnecessary racism and violence directed at her, and an oddly flat ending. A few characters - Knives, plus Wallace Wells, Lucas Lee and Stacy Pilgrim - are even better than in the comic, and others - Julie Powers, Gideon Gordon Graves - embody their characters to a frightening degree, but Michael Cera is very flat in the lead, and the pacing is really off, not something I expected from Edgar Wright. The last comic wasn't actually finished when they started filming, so maybe that's part of the unsatisfying ending.
The other problem I had was the way that particular moments from the comic were moved around and/or edited. Sometimes - as with Knives and the final fight - they were incorporated well. Most of the time, they were a bit icky out of context, often with racist and/or sexist overtones not present in the original. In the comics, Ramona fights Envy Adams (Scott's evil ex) but in the movie this is transplanted to Ramona fighting Roxy (Ramona's only female evil ex) which means that the gender divide is firmly enforced - Scott doesn't fight girls. Knives gets punched so hard that the highlights get knocked out of her hair - in the comics, this is part of a bigger fight where Knives has plenty to do and hits back, but in the movies it's a really nasty scene of Knives getting punched to the ground for no real reason and then slinking away in tears. The Matthew Patel fight in the movie just involved Matthew Patel dancing Bollywood-style (giving the impression this is something inherent to Indian-American people) but in the comic everyone had a big dance-off (formation dancing as something inherent to all kinds of people).
Most characters' conversations are about or with Scott, but the movie still scrapes a technical Bechdel pass. Kim and Knives talk about Sex Bob-omb, Knives and Julie both talk to Envy about her blog and jeans respectively; Roxy and Ramona talk about their former relationship. That's less than a minute total out of the entire movie. The movie has a lot of female character in it, which is great, but they're mostly kept apart because the rest of the movie is all Scott, Scott, Scott. I wish it had been a TV series instead - one of those 6 hour BBC style miniseries would have been awesome.
(shorter version posted at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bechdel_test
Interesting link about story tropes and gender roles: In which Candy asserts that Scott Pilgrim is really a romance novel.
While the first two volumes are more than a little wobbly on the Bechdel front, and on the manic pixie dream girl front, the next four turn that around beautifully. One of the great strengths of the comic is that, because of its length and rambling style, it has a wonderful supporting cast. Scott Pilgrim himself is something of a Nice Guy douchebag to start, with some very immature behaviour, but, amazingly, he grows up. Ramona Flowers is the manic pixie dream girl with a dodgy past, but we get to see her make decisions for herself and grow up, too. There are numerous female characters who interact with each other at length, and certainly not all circling around the main characters. Envy Adams, Knives Chau and Kim Pine in particular leap off the page and do their own thing - and so does Ramona. There are also several characters of colour, though only Knives has a major role, and several gay men and bi men and women (though no lesbians as such).
The comic is a solid Bechdel Pass. Female characters discuss music, their jobs, ninjas, their relationship to each other, their thoughts on Envy Adams, Ramona, America, the beach, and ideas about parties and costumes. It's still Scott-centric (and het-centric) but there's enough space and enough women with speaking parts to get around this successfully.
The movie is rather different. The special effects and use of video games and cartoons are wonderful, but time constraints have cut out most of the side characters' storylines to focus on Scott's story. Even Ramona gets very little of her story told. Knives is more prominent in the movie - and Ellen Wong is terrific - but this comes with the nasty addition of casual and really unnecessary racism and violence directed at her, and an oddly flat ending. A few characters - Knives, plus Wallace Wells, Lucas Lee and Stacy Pilgrim - are even better than in the comic, and others - Julie Powers, Gideon Gordon Graves - embody their characters to a frightening degree, but Michael Cera is very flat in the lead, and the pacing is really off, not something I expected from Edgar Wright. The last comic wasn't actually finished when they started filming, so maybe that's part of the unsatisfying ending.
The other problem I had was the way that particular moments from the comic were moved around and/or edited. Sometimes - as with Knives and the final fight - they were incorporated well. Most of the time, they were a bit icky out of context, often with racist and/or sexist overtones not present in the original. In the comics, Ramona fights Envy Adams (Scott's evil ex) but in the movie this is transplanted to Ramona fighting Roxy (Ramona's only female evil ex) which means that the gender divide is firmly enforced - Scott doesn't fight girls. Knives gets punched so hard that the highlights get knocked out of her hair - in the comics, this is part of a bigger fight where Knives has plenty to do and hits back, but in the movies it's a really nasty scene of Knives getting punched to the ground for no real reason and then slinking away in tears. The Matthew Patel fight in the movie just involved Matthew Patel dancing Bollywood-style (giving the impression this is something inherent to Indian-American people) but in the comic everyone had a big dance-off (formation dancing as something inherent to all kinds of people).
Most characters' conversations are about or with Scott, but the movie still scrapes a technical Bechdel pass. Kim and Knives talk about Sex Bob-omb, Knives and Julie both talk to Envy about her blog and jeans respectively; Roxy and Ramona talk about their former relationship. That's less than a minute total out of the entire movie. The movie has a lot of female character in it, which is great, but they're mostly kept apart because the rest of the movie is all Scott, Scott, Scott. I wish it had been a TV series instead - one of those 6 hour BBC style miniseries would have been awesome.
(shorter version posted at
bechdel_testInteresting link about story tropes and gender roles: In which Candy asserts that Scott Pilgrim is really a romance novel.