August 2–9, 2001

movie shorts

Ghost World

by Sam Adams

recommended

Masked marvel: Thora Birch stuns in Ghost World.

Long after you’ve graduated high school, the teen movie retains its power to provide an uncanny shock of recognition and to dwell upon crises of identity that persist long after you’ve sat through your last third-period assembly. This is true for the Rabbit Angstroms who’ll never equal the glory of their frat-boy fame, or the pretty girls who realize it takes more than an unlimited clothing budget to hack it in the real world, but it’s perhaps most acutely true for the misfits, the burnouts, the ones who spend their whole high school existence praying for it simply to end, only to find out that the grown-up world can be even more disappointing. Despite the vomitous surge of gonad-driven, puerile teenflix spewing out of the Hollywood sewers in the post-American Pie age, every once in a while a movie like Election or Grosse Pointe Blank or Clueless or Welcome to the Dollhouse slips in under the radar, and when it does, it’s like a bomb going off softly inside your head. It’s not simply a matter of exorcising old demons; the best such movies draw on and explore the alienations and resentments that first become articulated in adolescence but don’t go away, if they ever do, for decades more. There’s a good argument to be made that such movies aren’t "really" about high school at all, or if they are, that they’re using high school social politics as a way for their middle-aged makers to get at the equally childish dynamics that make up adult life. It’s most obviously true for movies like Election and Gross Pointe Blank, where supposedly grown-up characters are placed in a teenage environment and end up acting exactly as you’d expect a 17-year-old to do.

Like any of these movies, Ghost World is a movie about teenagers but not "for" them, at least in the crass marketing-department definition. Though its main characters, Enid (Thora Birch) and Becky (Scarlett Johansson) are two sullen, sharp-tongued graduates trying to slog their way through their first post-high school summer, the soundtrack relies more on blues obscurities than glossy would-be hits, and Terry Zwigoff’s direction deliberately eschews sitcom snap. Though Enid and Becky are at an age that for many is just the waiting room to cheap beer and coed housing, neither has much of a plan for higher education, though Enid’s mulling over the possibility of art school. In other words, Ghost World isn’t about moving away from home, or losing your virginity, or any such easily contained rite of passage. It’s about slamming headfirst into the real world and wanting to run screaming, only to find that there’s nowhere to go.

If you’re anything like Enid or Becky, watching Ghost World is a little like having your nerve endings massaged with a belt sander; it’s hard to resist the urge to use the seat in front of you for cover. In the Dan Clowes comic from which Ghost World is adapted (the story first appeared as a serial in Clowes’ Eightball), Enid is a smartly bitter scenester who protects herself from a grotesque world with vicious barbs and caustic rhetoric. Birch’s Enid does the same thing, but it doesn’t work; underneath the put-on, she’s terrified of the world. As Becky grabs a job at a coffee shop and keeps urging Enid to look at apartments for them to share, Enid cultivates a friendship with Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a socially graceless collector of antique records whose hatred of the modern world isn’t nearly so funny or charming as Enid’s. (The character, Zwigoff’s main contribution to a screenplay co-written with Clowes, seems an awful lot like cartoonist Robert Crumb, the subject of Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary, but Zwigoff has said he’s more closely modeled on himself.) When Becky complains about the "freaks and weirdoes" who pester her at the coffee shop, Enid shoots her a querulous look: "But those are our people!" Becky, whose wardrobe has shifted significantly toward the Gap catalog end of the scale, can barely manage a response. The people she’s talking about aren’t pissed-off would-be artists using their difference as a shield against the mainstream’s corruption. They’re people who will never find a place, whose ostracism isn’t a statement but a way of life. Enid doesn’t seem to understand the difference.

Directing his first feature, Zwigoff — with help from cinematographer Affonso Beato, production designer Edward T. McAvoy and, especially, costume designer Mary Zophres ̵ creates a world that no sane person would want to be a part of, a strip-malled chamber of horrors. In one scene, Seymour and Enid, who’s been awakened to the joys of classic blues, watch in horror as a sports-bar crowd ignores the playing of an elderly blues legend, only to jump to their feet for the "authentic blues" of four screeching white boys billed as Blues Hammer. Meanwhile, Enid, who’s been stuck in a "remedial art class for fuck-ups and retards" over the summer, has to endure the hilariously pretentious judgment of a teacher (Illeana Douglas) who praises conceptually correct coat-hanger sculptures while dismissing Enid’s elegantly detailed cartoons (which, incidentally, were drawn by Crumb’s daughter Sophie).

After creating a nuanced mood piece — or, really, a depiction of a mode of being — Ghost World gets mired in unnecessary plot in its final third, but it’s the movie’s only real miscalculation. At first, the film is deceptively simple, but you may find it stuck in your head days later, its evocation of the pain of forging your own identity lodged deep within your skull.