6 Attempts To Deconstruct The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
5. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World
Sample Dialogue: "Look, I've dabbled in being a bitch. It's part of the reason I moved here. I was really hoping to just leave it all behind me." Perhaps the easiest way to tell an MPDG deconstruction story from a conventional MPDG story is how in looking at how pathetic we're supposed to perceive the protagonist taking his fixation with finding 'the one' and being saved by her to Ted Mosby levels of entitlement. Which brings us to Scott Pilgrim. In classic Michael Cera style, Scott is an awkward, geeky loser who, although we're obviously supposed to empathise with him, is also oblivious, self-absorbed, infantile and, on occasion, kind of an asshole. His perception of the world as one big video game is cool but also indicative of the movie's theme that he needs to grow up and get a life. And so it is with his relationships with women. Scott is both aware that his dream girl Ramona Flowers is well out of his league and yet also thinks he can 'earn' her by jumping through the hoops of defeating all her evil exes, even while not really appreciating how damaged her complex past has left her. In production while writer Bryan Lee O'Malley was finishing the innovative manga-esque series on which the film was based, its lack of sureness about what it's trying to say about Ramona and Scott's relationship is clear in how both versions feel a little uncertain of how to wrap up the story. While both conclude with the two of them giving the relationship a shot, it doesn't feel entirely convincing, to the extent that director Edgar Wright tried an alternative ending of putting Scott together with schoolgirl Knives Chau instead. Ultimately, the biggest issue with Scott Pilgrim the movie is that it has to condense the whole story of its characters' growth into one movie, thereby failing to do what Wright's TV classic Spaced did so well and show the bittersweet development of its geeky twenty-somethings into real adults the way O'Malley's books did.
