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Scott Pilgrim Memory; The 2010 movie was a disaster that lead to a wave of insufferable giga-hipsters who did not get the point in the worst way. True or false?

I barely remember 2010, but I remember Scott Pilgrim being to hipsters like Fight Club and American Psycho are to incels; They totally missed the point of the movie, thought it was aspirational, and the results in dive bars and shitty venues across America (maybe just the midwest?) were disastrous.

Was this real? Did I mandela effect it from the negative zone or something? Am I just getting old?

84 comments
  • I don't know if the creators of the movie "got the point" either. That movie really feels like Hollywood fundamentally misunderstanding another medium (in this case comics) as usual. The alternate ending worked much better for the movie I think.

    The comic really drives the point home about how being a shitty hipster makes you a pretty shitty person, with silly video game style boss fights thrown in. It's a great read, with the characters becoming increasingly insufferable the older you are compared to them. Edit: This sounds like a negative, but it is deliberate and works really well in the context of the story.

  • I remember I was part of a very small cadre of people who went to go see it while there was a line around the block for the latest "Expendables" movie. It was definitely always more of a cult film, but it definitely had a huge impact on the people who were fans of it (especially those who were also in media). It's kinda like the Speed Racer movie in that sense I guess.

    As for myself: I saw it in my early 20s when it came out and I definitely got that Scott was not "aspirational"....but I also didn't get just how much of a fucking asshole he was until my 30s so....mixed bag.

  • ive seen one fight inspired by this movie in the middle school also its trash and he sexually assaults the lesbian character, like no one talks about that. it upset me so much in middle school i stopped talking to my aunt who recommended it to me for a week lol.

  • I remember an insufferable vegan guy being a huge fan of the movie, but I didn't notice any dive bar activity in the UK.

    Back then Wetherspoons were dingy old depressing pubs full of old men and moulding furniture.

    Now they've all gone upmarket and you'd have to fight to find a nice comfortably depressing place to get drunk for under a tenner.

    I don't blame the film for that though, just the rising cost of living forcing stay-at-home-barkeepers to reconsider whether it's worth keeping the pub open, or selling to some startup cunt.

  • I was in DC at the time and went w hipster friends who hadn't read the comics.

    They found it entertaining but I don't think aspirational was really the reaction? Granted they wanted my take (which was and still is, it got the style of the graphic novel but totally gutted the story's emotional depth), so maybe my instant negative reaction to the second half of the film played a role.

  • False. I hear this all the time about the comic or the movie and frankly I'm never sure what phenomenon it's referring to. At worst it was part of the wave of the mainstreaming of nerd culture, which brought mutual ruin to both the mainstream and nerd culture. Maybe you could tie it to every independent music scene simultaneously becoming shit, but I'm not sure I see the causal link there.

    What I do remember is the word "hipster" becoming popular in the late 00s and almost immediately becoming a signifier for any kind of annoying person who thinks they're better than you. This was instrumentalized to bury the last remnants of intellectualism and political consciousness in American culture, paving the way for the sneering stupid consumerism we have now.

    • Fr, I was either just out of or on my last year of high school in 2010 and we had hipsters everywhere cause that's what all band geeks became. Never heard a thing about Scott pilgrim.

  • I think it got more recognition later for being an Edgar Wright movie than it did immediately on release, and it does have some decent sight gags. I saw it around when it came out because I had read the comics but I don't know that I heard people talking about it much until years later when it was mostly people bemoaning how others had missed the point

  • This is cruel to some of us hipsters who were just nerds with obscure tastes and fell into the hipster label. Seriously, I didn't think crocs would be a joke until some 20+ years later!

84 comments