Beyond Selidor

While Skyping with Mum yesterday, I mentioned that I'd seen Scott Pilgrim Vs The World last week.

'If a group of people had got together and planned to make a movie perfectly designed for me, that would've been the movie,' I gushed.

'But you'd hate it,' I added.

She would. She didn't grow up with video games, nor raise children who played video games. Most of the desperate indie hipster references would've whooshed over her head. She usually finds things that are very postmodern and meta quite artificial and contrived: she doesn't like Buffy precisely because of its self-referential nature, she found Zadie Smith's White Teeth annoying to read. She noted that most of the reviews she'd read (in places like The New York Times) had been very negative, probably because they were written by people of her age group. I imagine that, in general, the film (and the comic) wouldn't appeal to anyone over the age of 35.

That is because it is such an unabashed, gleeful celebration of the cultural milieu of the younger, geekier end of Gen X, and the whole of Gen Y. You have to have grown up immersed in that milieu (and I, for all that I've never played video games, have many friends who do, have seen all the parodies and so on that draw on video game culture and thus consider myself a part of it) in order to appreciate the humour of Scott Pilgrim.

That is not to say that all Gen X and Y geeks will love the film. But being in those generations and that demographic will put you at a greater advantage in appreciating it than someone like my mother.

Our conversation then morphed into a discussion of generational conflict.

'My parents' generation didn't understand the things that were important to mine,' she said.

'Yes, but I think your generation (baby boomers) is better at understanding that of its children than your parents' generation was at understanding yours,' I said.

'That is true,' she said. 'I can understand stuff like Scott Pilgrim on an intellectual level, but not on an emotional one.'

That is exactly the heart of the matter, and not something that we'd ever articulated properly before. It is right and proper that each generation creates and defines its own impenetrable cultural milieu. But I'm so happy that although my mother cannot see the appeal of my (geeky, Gen Y) cultural milieu, she can see why it appeals to me.