Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

9 Tell It Like a Game

211 9 Tell It Like a Game Scott Pilgrim and Performative Media Rivalry jeff thoss Today’s media landscape, perhaps more than any past one, is marked by a fierce rivalry among media. In their classic study Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that “[o]ur culture conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media ” (55). For them, changes to the media landscape are the result of an ongoing process of media refashioning and revising—in short, remediating one another. Coming from a different angle, Uta Degner and Norbert Christian Wolf observe that the current rise of intermedial artistic practices does not reflect a culture of media equality but is rather a “sign of an accelerated dynamics of competition” (Indiz für eine akzelerierte Konkurrenzdynamik; 11).1 The title of their book, Der neue Wettstreit der Künste: Legitimation und Dominanz im Zeichen der Intermedialität, hence proclaims a “new paragone,” one that takes place “under the banner of intermediality.” This chapter, too, explores the relationship between remediation or intermediality and media rivalry.2 My case study, Edgar Wright’s screen adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comic books, promises ample material in this regard. Adaptations from one narrative medium to another arguably constitute a privileged site of competition, seeing that different media are charged with telling the same story and representing the same storyworld. Even though, as Linda Hutcheon remarks, our culture harbors a disdain for adaptations, deeming them inferior because they are derivative (2–4), no adaptation aims at inferiority; rather, any adaptation vies with the work it adapts, tacitly claiming that it is at least equal if not superior to its source material. Yet in addition to adaptation, a further dimension to media rivalry enters the equation in the case of Scott Pilgrim: O’Malley’s comic book con- 212 Thoss tains numerous references to video games, and these mentions are carried over—and, as we shall see, amplified—in the film. This crossover is where a type of media rivalry, or at least a perspective on media rivalry, emerges that has hitherto been neglected in media studies. One might ask, what motivates media to compete with other media? For Bolter and Grusin, remediation has a double logic as media tend toward both immediacy (eradicating the signs of mediation) and hypermediacy (foregrounding the signs of mediation) in their attempts to appropriate each other’s techniques and forms, to improve upon them, and to outdo one another. However, the pole of immediacy is clearly preferred: remediation is acted out “in the name of transparency” (49), while hypermediacy is relegated to “an awareness of mediation whose repression almost guarantee[s] its repeated return” (37). The two scholars here seem to allude to a way of thinking about media that is deeply embedded in Western culture: where media compete, they primarily do so based on their ability to efface themselves and purely serve that which they represent. One only needs to think of the Renaissance’s paragone, in which painters pointed to the greater illusionistic quality of their art while sculptors highlighted the haptic and three-dimensional property of theirs, or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s strict division of verbal and visual art in his treatise “Laokoon.” According to Lessing, literature is a temporal art form suited to the representation of actions, while painting and sculpture are spatial art forms suited to the representation of objects (it being understood that the poet who tries to represent objects will always fall short of the painter). In a similar vein, albeit on a less theoretical note, the notorious discussions of whether particular novels are better than their film adaptations frequently involve generalized assertions about medial adequacy—for instance, that narrative fiction is more apt to relate characters’ thoughts than film, which must resort to the “unfilmic ” technique of voice-over for this purpose. In all these cases media are evaluated according to their mimetic potential, and media rivalry hence takes place in the name of mimesis. Media rivalry as it is present between the comic book and film versions of Scott Pilgrim does not fit into this pattern. In order to characterize it, I use the distinction between mimesis and performance as it has notably been elaborated by Wolfgang Iser. For Iser, representation, while understood as mimesis, always already contains a performative (that is, [18.188.20.56] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11...