Ghost World (2001)

Terry Zwigoff

USA

111 min, color, English

This is the first comic-based film that I thoroughly enjoyed, which is saying a lot. Far from being the banal teenage angst MTV-style "drama" that revels in the purposeless and shallow musings of thirty-year olds pretending to be teenagers, Ghost World is a sadly funny glimpse at hope, disillusionment, and self-imposed loneliness.

Enid (Thora Birch) has just graduated from high school. Well, almost. She has failed an art class and has to take a summer class to make up for it. She is smart, she is good-looking, and she has a good friend, Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) with whom she shares many small rituals, like following weird people in the street.

Unfortunately, Enid has no plans for the future. She does not want to go to college, she does not want to get married, she does not want to get a job, she does not know what she wants except that it is not what she has. When Rebecca shows some adult pragmatism and desire to move on and forward, Enid finds herself more and more abandoned in a world of shallow phony people that she detests and yet among whom she hopes to find a soulmate.

One day the two friends decide to play a trick on some poor loser who has placed an ad in the personals. They set him up for a date and go to have fun at his expense. However, when he shows up, the humor vanishes as his pathetic hope becomes too painfully obvious to bear.

Drawn to his insignificant personality by pity, Enid buys an old vinyl record from Seymour (Steve Buscemi) and soon finds herself strangely attracted by his very similar predicament. He is alone, with a dull managerial job and a obsolete record-collecting hobby. Yet he is not quite willing to mesh with the world. Sometimes angry, sometimes forlorn, his exile is in no small degree self-imposed and very similar to hers.

You would expect that their similarities would draw them together and you would not be wrong. However, there's the significant age difference that makes romance a little more precarious. Indeed, Enid tries to find Seymour a date, a remedy for his loneliness. In a way, his solitude becomes a cure for hers and she maybe hopes to return the favor.

Yet, when Seymour finally scores with an attractive blond, Enid finds herself utterly alone again with no project to distract her from the realization that Rebecca has irretrievably moved on, and she has lost the chance to go to art school because of the controversy created by one of her "found-object" art pieces. (The artsy diversion is actually one of the more fascinating sequences in the film. I thoroughly enjoyed the pseudo-intellectual snobbery of her teacher who took quite a while to recognize Enid's talents.)

In desperation, she forces herself on Seymour whose vulnerability has increased now that his armor of solitude has been pierced and now that the blonde has turned out so out of tune with his inner world. They make love, he breaks up with the blonde and asks Enid to move in. This would have been the cheap, unrealistic, and utterly Hollywood in style happy ending, which I am glade Zwigoff stayed away from.

The movie does offer a happy ending of sorts. Both characters have broken free from their exiles, they have awoken from the lethargic drift of their existence, and they are perhaps prepared to live their lives in a better way. The ending is happy because it is hopeful even though it does not pretend to tell us that it knows the solution.

Enid rides the ghost bus out of town, with destination unknown, following the example of the old man on the bench. Anything else would have made the ending a banal bowing to bourgeois conventions. Enid and Seymour did not adapt, they awoke. Arguably, they are in much better shape than the doubtless bound for middle-class prosperity Rebecca.

February 18, 2003