Ghost World

"Ghost World," a new film based on a comic book by Daniel Clowes and co-written by him and director Terry Zwigoff, is a skillful presentation of an unsympathetic character and a dubious thesis. The character is passionately cynical, pageboy-wearing, vintage clotheshorse Enid (Thora Birch). Enid and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) have just graduated from high school. College would beckon, at least after Enid completes a remedial art class and gets her diploma, except that neither Enid nor Rebecca is interested. Instead, the two plan to get jobs and move into an apartment. Rebecca gets a job and moves into an apartment, but Enid becomes even more disaffected with the world.

She takes refuge in the company of Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a pasty-faced, poorly dressed man twice her age whose sole joy in life is collecting old ragtime/blues/etc. 78s. Drawn to him because he rejects the corporate falseness she sees everywhere around her, Enid first tries to fix up his love life and later comes to see said love life as a DIY situation. Meanwhile, Rebecca becomes increasingly frustrated by Enid's ambivalence towards their former life-on-our-own dream. With other tensions, including her dad's romance with a destructive old flame, tossed into the pot, Enid roils with confused, fiery emotions, which she may or may not resolve in an ambiguous finale.

Although the parched, gray-blue-black visual world of Clowes's comic book is necessarily lost in the cinematic adaptation, Clowes and Zwigoff have preserved the confused yet meaningful dialogue and the raw emotional honesty which make the comic book such an interesting read. Birch takes well to the role of Enid, skillfully veering from false composure to spasms of teenage disgust and rage, and occasionally to moments of actual delight. Buscemi makes his character seems utterly real, bitter and resigned and yet not without a certain dignity hidden in his self-castigation. The rest of the cast acquits itself similarly well.

But this is a movie with a thesis, and it must therefore be judged not only on how well it is made but also on whether its argument is coherent and worthwhile. Clowes and Zwigoff argue that the old bugaboo of artists everywhere, unrestrained capitalism, is destroying everything "authentic" about American—and, eventually, world—culture.

Enid is a searcher for this disappearing authenticity; in the end, she is a disappointed searcher. She razes most of the people she knows from her social landscape in a series of (deserved) sarcastic asides. Rebecca begins to fit in with the thoroughly average people she works with. And Seymour finds a girlfriend who doesn't understand his collecting but who he keeps seeing anyway. Enid cannot find someone who wants the same "realness" that she does, and her frustration is supposed to stand for the frustration that we all should be feeling.

So: what is authentic? Zwigoff and Clowes define it, implicitly, as a combination of scarcity, unpopularity, ephemerality, and an inability or refusal to be involved with large sums of money. If something becomes popular or remunerative, it is no longer authentic.

The semi-dilapidated diner which Enid and Rebecca frequent immediately becomes less attractive to the girls (and the co-writers) when a vapid actress classmate of theirs enters and pronounces it "funky." Seymour's blues 78s, to extend the argument, would be less authentic if more people enjoyed them and if CD remasterings of them were bought in the millions.

This is not authenticity, I would argue, but a vehicle for a kind of cultural elitism, an elitism born of self-inflicted suffering and self-gratifying prejudice. In our co-writers' view, only a few can appreciate the truly authentic, simply because if more than a few appreciate it, is it no longer authentic. Those who insist on authenticity will suffer, because they search out "uncommon" things, but they suffer rightly: for intelligence, for true passion, for art. They stand above those of us who would rather be happy and live in the world than embrace this horribly limited notion of the good. How can capitalism destroy this? There will always be things no one else likes for people like Clowes and Zwigoff to cling to as badges of honor.

And why is Enid unhappy? Because she cannot find something real in our modern "monoculture" (Clowes' word) to connect with? Or because she steadfastly denies herself happiness, chokes it with cynicism, beats it off with a long, operatic pout that we are supposed to see as glorious? She dismisses her firing from a job by saying, "The manager was a total asshole," notwithstanding that she did not do a single thing she was asked to do. She has artistic talent but is too unenthusiastic and irresponsible to pursue the opportunities which are given to her to use it. At one point, she whines, "Why won't everyone just let me do what I want?" But what Clowes and Zwigoff did not seem to realize in creating their avatar is that she does not know what she wants. She only knows what she doesn't want, which is everything, authentic or ersatz, real or imaginary, right or wrong.

A lot of you will probably enjoy this film, and you will not be wrong, exactly, to do so. It is a well-made film, and there are plenty of people who will agree with Clowes and Zwigoff up and down the line. But I find it impossible to make someone like Enid my heroine or make a thesis like this my guiding light, even for two hours, and if you give the matter some thought, I am convinced that you will too.

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