by Matt Campbell, Contributor

Sometime in January 2005, on a Sunday morning, on a friend’s laptop in the floor lounge of my dorm, I’m watching The Graduate for the first time. The film, which came out 19 years before I was born, is about to have a profound effect on my first-year-university self and my young adulthood as a whole. Mike Nichols’s sophomore release as a director, The Graduate is based on the novel of the same name by Charles Webb, and it helped launch both Dustin Hoffman—who plays Benjamin Braddock, the titular role—and the American New Wave of cinema, which replaced the foundational conservatism of the studio system that had once reigned supreme. The film is funny, cynical, and—together with Bonnie and Clyde, released the same year—reflects an angst of youth that to this point hadn’t been portrayed on screen. The Graduate both satirizes and embraces the contradictions of life as a middle-class twentysomething looking for purpose.

It’s August 2010. I’m preparing to start the second year of my after-degree program. The hype on the internet is nearly insatiable for Edgar Wright’s third feature film, the first without Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz collaborators Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. The film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, is adapted from the graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim, by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and it had lit on fire the then-niche online “nerd world” with its promise of trans-media storytelling: a fusion of comics, video games, and cinema. It’s a movie by nerds for nerds, adapted from a comic series about the same. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a middle-class twentysomething, he’s in a band, and he lives across the street from his parents’ house. He hasn’t gotten a haircut in a year because that’s when an ex, who went on to fame and fortune, broke up with him, sending Scott into a youthful malaise that even sees him dating a high schooler.  

The Graduate and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World may not seem to have a lot in common, aside from having famous soundtracks and being literary adaptations. Forty-three years separate these two films—43 years and at least three major shifts in Hollywood filmmaking. The Graduate is quiet, maybe even understated. Scott Pilgrim is loud, it’s colorful, the pace at times feels frantic, and the film is edited like they get paid more with each new technique they use. But at their core, both films are about melancholy young white cis men who seek a path out of their despondency via a romantic quest to win their love’s heart: for Ben Braddock, it’s Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross), and for Scott Pilgrim, it’s Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).  

This trope, however, is older than cinema itself. The path laid out for Ben Braddock and Scott Pilgrim can be traced back to medieval Europe, for their quests are ones of courtly love. Courtly love as a literary device sits at the center of the Venn diagram between erotic desire and a transcendent spiritual fulfillment. In the book The Meaning of Courtly Love, edited by Francis X. Newman, courtly love is defined as “a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent.” Typically, courtly love has stages (you know, sort of like stages of the cross in Catholicism), which usually include some or all of the following:

1. Attraction (first sight)

2. Worship from afar

3. Declaration of passion/devotion

4. Rejection

5. Renewed wooing, oaths, fealty

6. Lovesickness, moans of approaching “death,” how can I live without you?

7. Heroic action: great deeds to prove valor, win’s heart

8. Consummation of love

9. Endless Adventure

Scott Pilgrim has to prove his worthiness to date Ramona by defeating her seven evil exes, who have formed a league at the behest of Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman). Scott defeats the final boss—the final ex, Gideon himself—by wielding not the sword of love, but the sword of self-respect. Scott wins Ramona’s heart, and he and Ramona walk off together in their storybook—or comic book—ending. The next time you sit down to watch Scott Pilgrim, consider the stages of courtly love. They’re all there. The order may be jazzed up a bit, but hidden in a 2010 cult classic of trans-media storytelling is the same literary structure from the Middle Ages. Affirming the accepted social and literary norms, the hero’s purity of heart wins the day, he is uplifted, he proves his love, and he and his fair maiden walk together into the future. A happy ending.

Ben Braddock, like Scott Pilgrim, is in state of arrested development. He’s just floating aimlessly though life, as illustrated by the famous scene in the pool and the fact that, unlike Scott, Ben isn’t even in a band. Ben seeks meaning in a loveless affair with a friend’s parent, Mrs. Robinson, whose first name we never learn, demonstrating how casually both consider the affair. In contrast to this casualness, Mrs. Robinson shares with Ben that her marriage is loveless: she was forced to marry because she was pregnant with Elaine. This is where Ben’s courtly quest begins. But at first, unlike Scott, he’s pushed into it—by his parents, by Mr. Robinson, and by Mrs. Robinson expressly forbidding that Ben see Elaine after one of Mrs. Robinson’s trysts with him. Then follows the wooing, the rejection, and finally the climatic heroic act at the end.

Cinema is as close to time travel as we’re likely ever to get. Each film is a product of the culture that birthed it. Statistics Canada (dear reader, this writer is Canadian) identifies Baby Boomers as those born between 1946 and 1965 and Millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996. While both the authors and directors of each work belong to the presenting generations (the Interwar Generation and Generation X), the films were released as the earliest Baby Boomers and earliest Millennials were coming of age, just as Ben and Scott are in their films. The sensibilities of each film, both Ben’s and Scott’s actions, and each film’s ending demonstrate how Millennials are truly the echo Boomers—the reflection of their parents, while ignoring what came before, in all things including romance and cis male expectation.

The Graduate uses the structures of the chivalric quest, or courtly love, to demonstrate the hollowness that can be found within it: how it can give one purpose, only to leave the chivalric hero blank-faced in the end, not sure where to go now. Scott Pilgrim is the inverse of that, the echo, the reflection. It uses the courtly love trope to give Scott the happy rather than melancholy ending, reflecting the trends of many films in the 13 years since. As Martin Scorsese recently said at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner, “They [films] take us by the hand and, even if it’s disturbing at times, sort of comfort us along the way that it will be all OK by the end.”

In The Graduate, I don’t know if Elaine and Ben will be OK in the end. Either way, I don’t think pursuing a romantic relationship, courtly love or not, is a healthy way for twentysomethings to end their malaise. Only we can lift ourselves into the wholeness and enlightenment we seek. The real courtly love, the love I’m celebrating this year, is the twentysomething inside me from 2005, from 2010. We’ve done the work, we’ve made it: the consummation of the love of self, and on to the Endless Adventure.

Matt Campbell is a film enthusiast, podcaster and recovering excessive tweeter (@mattyhugh) based in Edmonton, Alberta.