Blood in the Gutter – 1 + 1 = 3
Blood in the Gutter – Scott McCloud
“We’ll fix it in the edit”
These were the first words to draw me away from my computer screen and into my lecture. It was a sentence I had heard, and admittedly said, many a time before and so it caught my focus. Our guest lecture springboarded off this sentence, common do doubt to all of us, to call into question exactly what was being “fixed“. Editing, he proposed, was less a fixing process than it was a breaking process. A process of tearing your work apart to put it together in a new narrative. A narrative that relied on the broken nature of its pieces to engage the audience in what story was unfolding.
He referenced the Kuleshov effect, the concept that the viewer derives just as much information from the relationship of two clips as each individual clip itself. This was of infinite interest to me as some of my favourite films have used post-production to truely bring their narrative to life. Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World is one of my all time favourites and it was upon remembering this that the lecture and corresponding reading clicked into place for me.
Scott Pilgrim Comic/Movie Comparison – image courtesy of Kevin Hendler
Blood in the Gutter uses the setting of a comic to visually express the ‘gutter’ that exists between different frames. This is understandable as comic books are perhaps the only medium to have a literal, physical gutter between panels. McCloud uses this to show how the information that we aren’t directly given, we ourselves create out of a sense of faith. With all our prior knowledge of the world (and often also the genre of the text itself) we fill in the unpronounced details between the panels. We tie the images together, giving them coherence.
It is easy to see within the format of a comic this process that we go through, divulging exactly what conclusion we draw between each panel, but in film it is often a lot less obvious. Invisible editing is called ‘invisible’ for a reason and it is a language that we, in a such a media active world, have become fluent in. Most of us believe that meaning lies in the images themselves, not in the conclusions we, the audience, draw from those images. Even as we watched The Assassination of Jesse James I myself found it difficult to see exactly how editing had been used to deliver the narrative to me; my mind was so used to picking up the visual queues I barely had time to notice myself doing it… But it is here in which I return to Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Wright’s film is an adaptation of a widely popular comic series Scott Pilgrim and has been acclaimed for its visual loyalty to the comics structure and style. Wright’s editing is not invisible, in fact it is built to stand out as the film is meant to be viewed as one would a comic book.
As the lecture continued I thought back to this film and, in my mind, tried to strip the narrative of its editing. I couldn’t. The foundations of the script, the visual humour, the stylistic brilliance, were all due to post-production editing of footage that, without that process, would have made little to no sense. As someone who has also read the original comic series I could see the gutter transferred from comic pages to the silver-screen. Wright left out large spaces of time and cut frames together to develop the magical realism and humour of the narrative. He utilised transitions to shift location and subject in deliberately jolty fashion to leave the audience off balance and amused. He undercut his characters by throwing them through the narrative in ways that still make me laugh. He edited in the exact style of the comic the narrative was pulled from, which is what has made the film a cult classic along side its original text (something few adaptations have achieved).
More than the comparison of the robbery scenes shown in class, this really instilled in me the use of the gutter and how it can be exploited to drive a narrative in a certain direction. It occurred to me that most of us see the editing process as a decorative one when that assessment barely scrapes the surface. The production period gathers raw ingredients only, it is in the post-production process that we create the narrative in its entirety, cherry on top and all.