I watched Ghost World again the other day with my mother. I couldn’t help but pause it every five minutes to exclaim to her, “I agree with that! I TOTALLY AGREE!”
For those of you who haven’t heard of the film, Ghost World is about two girls who have just graduated high school and don’t really know what’s going on with their lives. It sounds pretty mundane, but after ten minutes, you realise that this isn’t your typical ‘teenage growing-up flick’. No, no. This film says so much more than “you have to change! Things will never be the same again!” Or it at least says it in a less obnoxious, more honest way than most American films featuring teenage girls on the cusp of womanhood.
It dares to feature these girls saying things that should make them unlikeable- they’re very judgemental people, but you don’t really notice how judgemental they’re being until you take a step back. Here’s a good example: Enid points out to her friend Rebecca that a couple sitting nearby them in the diner “are totally Satanists”. They then see these ‘Satanists’ get up to leave the diner, and as they go out the door, the couple put up umbrellas, even though it’s the middle of a sunny day: PROOF that these freaks are Satanists. The girls decide that they HAVE to follow these weirdos, so off they trot, leading to this great dialogue:
Rebecca: “So what do you do if you’re a Satanist anyway?”
Enid: “Sacrifice virgins and stuff.”
Rebecca: “Well, that let’s us off the hook.”
It’s always other people that are the butt of the joke. They bully an old schoolfriend who works in a convenience store, and not unknowingly; Enid openly declares that they ‘torture Josh’. When they manage to get into a sex shop that they’ve always wanted to visit, they openly mock all of the ‘creeps’ browsing dirty videos and leafing through raunchy magazines. They take the piss out of an old highschool friend who smiles and waves her hands around too much; fakery is their enemy.
As the film progresses, you realise that their judgemental natures, Enid’s in particular, is something that isn’t sustainable. Rebecca gets a job, and starts hanging out with different people. They drift. Suddenly the guys Enid accuses of being “extroverted, psuedo-Bohemian losers” are the guys Rebecca is finding quite attractive. They’re not just growing up, they’re growing in different directions.
I guess the reason why I love this film so, so much, is because I agree with pretty much everything that comes out of Enid’s mouth. When she and Rebecca are at their high school prom (“This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again”) the two of them snigger at one of the typical losers who is standing in the middle of the dancefloor by himself taking giant bites of a slice of cake. They laugh for a moment, but then Enid points out that they’re probably never going to see this guy again. And actually, that’s really quite a sad thing. Even though they weren’t friends with him, he was a part of their lives. Even the people you make fun of, even the people you disregard in life- they contribute to what you’re experiencing too. And they weren’t going to experience him anymore. Everything changes, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
This is a film about fitting in, but with a twist. Enid and Rebecca spend so much time trying to showcase their independence and how they’re ‘fighting against the man’, but by the end of the film, Rebecca has grown up, and is no longer the rebellious soul she once was. Enid, however, is stoic in her view of the world. So maybe the film’s message is “it’s okay to be weird and stick with it”? Don’t give into pressure from the outside world? After all, that would be the message of most other films of this ilk.
Not in this case. Enid meets a middle-aged man, Seymour, who exemplifies everything she loves about unique, quirky people. He’s into jazz, blues, ragtime, old records. He has lots of cool memorabilia, a room full of strange artefacts, things he has obsessively collected for years. He’s intelligent. He’s real. But he is not happy. He leads just an empty a life as someone who indulges in all things popular and commercial, and his attempts to fit in (ironically spurred on by Enid) are at best endearing, and are at worse cringe-worthy.
He, like Enid, and many others who don’t quite fit in, live in an alternative reality- a Ghost World. Rebecca went through a phase, like many do in those transition years, of not wanting to go with the flow, but she succumbed to the lure of nice apartments and plastic cups (which is quite fitting with the career development of the actress who portrays her, Scarlett Johansson). Enid doesn’t succumb to this contrived society, not because she doesn’t want to, but because she can’t. She’s doomed to turn into a Seymour by the time she reaches his age. My favourite statement of hers is that she can’t stand a world in which a guy like Seymour can’t get a date. And, you know, I can’t stand it either.
Anyway, despite my aimless ramble, I do thoroughly recommend this film, and it’s not as gloomy as it sounds. In fact, it’s pretty funny. It is, however, an Indie film through and through, so don’t expect any nice neat endings. For a film that makes a statement against fakery and commercialism and the strive for perfection, it’s apt that it doesn’t conclude in typical Hollywood style, but instead finishes off in its own Ghost World way.
paucis verbis 