OMG, Epic Fail. LOL, GG, I Rage Quit

Rating: Null/10 (4 March 2011)

"You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it's all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You're glamorised drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn't a budget-driven eighteen-month video game production schedule, it's a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap." - Douglas Coupland
Cultural theorists see postmodernism as a vacuous trap of circular references. It is the product of a heavily globalized, multinational dominated economy, which carries the multinational media industry as one of its main branches. As such, postmodernism stresses a "blip time" aesthetic, one of amnesia and schizophrenia, in which the omnipresence of media merges all discourse into an undifferentiated whole. With this media saturation comes a form of "historical amnesia", in which contextualisation becomes increasingly impossible.
One of the chief characteristics of postmodernism is a kind of all encompassing fragmentation or "liberative incoherence" ("F**k it, just surf the wave man!"). This includes the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents, the rootlessness of the modern experience, the destruction of the family unit, the abolishment of the Sovereign Self (the trauma of which, ironically, leads to a rise in both narcissism and a quest for "individuality"), the complete reordering of society and technology toward vast networks, nodes, conduits, transit points and non places, and the general atomization and pixelation of every aspect of our world. Philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard also identifies several other shifts. That of a move away from art which addresses symptom/causes and toward instead pure desire, a shift away from metaphysics toward pure irony, determinacy toward indeterminacy, and transcendence toward immanence.
In addition to this, the postmodern subject, or what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological capital, described by the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton as a "dispersed, de-centred network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion." And of course with postmodernism, even alienation dissolves, for there is now no longer a subject to be alienated. Contemporary fragmentation and powerlessness could hardly be heralded more completely, or existing anger and disaffection more thoroughly ignored.
The Internet, interactive video games and the personal computer are themselves resolutely postmodern in the way they bring the outside, fragmented world into our lives whether we want it or not, each fostering the provision of a kind of ephemeral, and therefore unstable, experience. While this is going on, humanity itself starts to become an ephemeral substrate perpetually in the service of a long-lasting "transcendent level". Just as the cells of your body, which are short lived, are in the service of a body which lives longer, so too is the human subject the substrate of a technology/civilisation on a transcendent level (a singular, social super-organism). Or in technological terms, the human is now a node, always on and always attuned but never quite fully conscious of the network (what is known as CPA – continual partial attention).
But it is not that the world (or the chaos of postmodernity) is turning us into machines, as some grimly foretell, but that we desire to be the machines that we have created in our image. That we are already cyborgs, making the world in our image.
Humans have always been fascinated with the cyborg. The cyborg, of course, is itself inherently postmodern, by its nature drawn from a number of sources: art, science, medicine etc. And just as we create and draw toward ourselves ever more complex machines, machines which represent the hardware of human existence, so to we express through these machines a collective consciousness - the software of human existence - a consciousness increasingly garlbled and eclectic.
What does this all have to do with "Scott Pilgrim vs The World"? Essentially, "Pilgrim" represents the worst of our f**ked up, glass-eyed cyborg future. The film is populated by machines; one-dimensional non-entities. Significantly, these machines do not work, belong to splintered families and are never supervised. They are self-excited circuits, perpetually playing, pleasuring themselves or fighting cool video game battles. The emotional range of these machines is completely bipolar; they're either suicidally depressed or riding technology's drug-like highs. Likewise, they live in a jazzy, supermediated, hyper-reality. A reality which mercilessly absorbs everything from Manga, to video games, to Kung Fu movies, to romantic comedies, to "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind".
Born in digital graffiti, in which every image is augmented, the cast themselves cannot distinguish between reality, video games, past, present, sleep, dreams and waking states. It is all a blur. Time itself overlaps, our characters continually unaware of where they are, what time it is and what "plane" they are currently occupying. Unsurprisingly, the film's characters are mostly neutered, whiny, but sex obsessed kids, shooting dialogue back and forth like binary code. This is speech as economy; too much talk is wasted energy. Everything's been said anyway. The film is relentlessly dehumanising, its subconscious admittance that there is no human, no soul, no self, to destroy, cosily grafted onto a "message movie" plot in which our hero learns Self Respect. And that is the paradox of the post-human, for he destroys himself in the name of his own liberation.
7/10 – Formulaic behind its fireworks. See "Demonlover", "Summer Hours" and "Existenz".