ABSTRACT
Scott Pilgrim was content with his hermetically sealed, freeloader lifestyle until he met Ramona Flowers. She pried him from his happy safe existence and forced him to grow up, even if just a little bit. The title of the first of six volumes in the Scott Pilgrim series (2004-2010) encapsulates a lot of the key themes that are dealt with in the series. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life (2004) implies not only Scott’s childish outlook on the world and refusal to grow up, but also the fragile nature of such an existence. The Scott Pilgrim series embodies a tenuous relationship to the past as well as growing up, through the employment of a nostalgic longing for a past that was not all that great to begin with. Nostalgia is a powerful cultural force that is often used to espouse a conservative ideology by showing the past to be an unachievable ideal compared with the reality of the present (Coontz 1992, 35). Scott Pilgrim reverses this idealized nostalgic ethos, thereby giving it the potential to be a more progressive ideological text. Related, this series plays with its comic-book medium by weaving vintage video-game and indie rock references into its very fabric, which puts Scott Pilgrim in dialogue with a contemporary society that is obsessed with past cultural artefacts. Using the concept of ‘remediation’, Scott Pilgrim’s medium refashioning is understood as having progressive potential similar to what Walter Benjamin discussed in the loss of aura (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 74). The issue is that Scott Pilgrim does not live up to this idealized nostalgia reversal or remediation potential, and
SUPERHEROES AND IDENTITIES
246 R. Lizardi
ends up reaffirming hegemonic gender roles and heteronormativity under the guise of a hip, politically correct perspective. These problematic reaffirmations need to be studied within a popular comic-book series that speaks effectively to its targeted nostalgic generation, especially as Scott’s influence grew past the comic book in cultural influence. The faithful film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), extended these problematic gender and sexuality concerns in a cross-media manner to an even wider audience, making it that much more important to analyse and expose these concerns.
