Flashback Summer Vol. 1: Ghost World
Maybe we're all a little bit Enid Coleslaw sometimes
The first thing you need to know is that I dressed up as Ghost World’s main character, Enid Coleslaw, for Halloween in my senior year of high school. In a bizarre twist of fate, I found the exact shirt that Enid wears on the cover of the film at a Goodwill in the little boys section (why was I shopping in the little boys section, you ask? It was the early 2000s! We were wearing children’s clothing and calling it fashion!). I didn’t have access to black bob wig so instead I took a long witch wig and cut it into a wavy, triangle-shaped situation that didn’t really work, but it didn’t matter. Literally only one person recognized me anyway.
So what I’m saying is…Ghost World and I go way back. Our connection started before I ever saw the movie, because I was very into Daniel Clowes in general and this graphic novel specifically. I have a crystal clear memory of re-reading it on an Adirondack chair on a Kenyon College lawn when I attended a young writers workshop, fervently hoping someone would stop and talk about it to me (one professor did; that was enough for me).
But I haven’t watched the movie since high school or possibly college, and it seemed like the ideal film to kick off Flashback Summer. It’s about teenagers in a pre-smartphone, pre-social-media era. A simpler time. One I inhabited, albeit in a much different way. I was curious how rewatching it now, as 37 year old mom, would feel.
Well, I felt like crawling out of my dang skin.
I almost immediately regretted ever starting this project because watching the opening of Ghost World reminded me of one crucial fact: I didn’t like high school. I didn’t enjoy being a child. My mental state when I was in high school is one I’d prefer not to revisit, and here I was willingly diving into the nostalgia deep end. What was I thinking?
The film opens with a dance scene from the Bollywood film Gumnaam, set to the wildly exuberant song “Jaan Pehechan Ho.”
We pan past several bland apartments, the inhabitants cast in blue light, basking in the glow of their televisions. And then we see Enid. She’s in her bright red graduation gown, shimmying around her room to the music, a pop of dramatic color in a drab landscape. The film packs a lot of characterization into this one scene. Yes, she’s dancing in her bedroom like any other teenage girl in so many teen movies through the years. But Enid isn’t dancing to contemporary pop music. She’s dancing to a Bollywood film that she can only get a copy of by hanging out with some antisemitic creep. Enid’s not like other girls.
We then see Enid at her graduation with her best friend, Rebecca. The two of them roll their eyes through the ceremony, then flee the building, stomping on their graduation caps and giving the school the finger. Enid’s first line includes the R-word, which could be defended as a character choice that shows how callous and cynical Enid can be, but was more likely just a sign of the times.
Enid is played perfectly by Thora Birch with a slightly wooden, Daria-esque disaffection. Rebecca is played by a fifteen year old (!) gravelly-voiced Scarlett Johansson. The two of them are completely over high school, everyone around them, and possibly the world in general. At their graduation after-party, they watch the cover band play extra-smooth smooth jazz. “This is so bad it’s almost good,” Rebecca says with a laugh. “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again,” Enid says with disdain, thus highlighting one of the main questions the movie poses: at what point does ironically liking something end and actually liking something start, and when is ironically liking something just kind of pathetic?
Enid and Rebecca’s straining friendship is the biggest plot line in the graphic novel, which is largely about the pain of growing up. And it is painful…I recently reread the graphic novel, planning to just flip through the pages and instead finding myself drawn in. There’s a scene where Enid cries on her bed listening to a record from her childhood that just about destroyed me. The girls’ splintering relationship is certainly part of the story here, too, but the movie expands upon a tiny plot point from the graphic novel. And that plot point is named Seymour.
Seymour is played by Steve Buscemi. He’s a cardigan-and-slacks-wearing fully-grown man who collects old records and mostly hangs out with other old records enthusiasts. Enid and Rebecca meet him because of a cruel prank they play on him, answering a personal ad and telling him to meet them at a 50’s-themed diner called Wowsville. Enid appreciates Wowsville ironically, of course, and is content to make fun of everything around her, including their waiter. When Rebecca orders something she actually wants to eat instead of something on-theme, Enid is disappointed. This is, perhaps, the first sign that the two of them are growing apart—Rebecca is starting to want to enjoy her life sincerely instead of ironically.
And then they see Seymour, looking pathetic and lonely. He doesn’t know they played a trick on him and assumes he got stood up. They follow him, at Enid’s insistence, and find out where he lives. Later, they go back to observe him and Enid’s initial attempts at a conversation meant to make fun of him for Rebecca’s amusement turn into curiosity. She wonders what this guy is about, and the two of them become friends.
Enid would prefer to be completely removed from current society, so hanging out with an older man who’s obsessed with ancient blues music actually makes a lot of sense. Her own teenage bedroom is decorated with brightly colored artifacts from long ago eras, so she’s drawn to Seymour’s vintage posters. She hates everyone around her, but she doesn’t hate Seymour.
In high school, a boy told me I reminded him of Enid and I thought, no person has ever known me less. Perhaps the joke was on me, given that I did dress up as Enid for Halloween, but I didn’t identify with her. But watching it now, as an adult, I see so much of my high school self in her. Enid defines herself and others by their interests; not by kindness, not by sense of humor, not by contribution to society. She’s like John Cusack in High Fidelity. Something as small as wearing Nikes is somehow a betrayal, a symbol that someone has conformed, and there’s nothing worse than conforming. And that’s why it feels like such a betrayal to her when Rebecca gets a job at a corporate coffee shop, the place that people like her are supposed to loathe. How can Rebecca shop for dish ware at a basic store and think that’s cool, when to Enid it’s so obviously beneath them?
I certainly defined myself by my interests as a teenager. I liked reading Dave Eggers and listening to The Smiths and those were things that said something about me. And the fact that the people around me didn’t like those things meant that we would never truly understand each other, which meant I would always be a little bit on the outside. Thinking you’re not like everyone else can feel good when you’re a teenager. But when you’re an adult, it feels pretty bad. Seymour is old enough to need lumbar support and he’s still holding himself at a remove from society, still thinking that hating loud classic rock radio DJs makes him different.
But neither Enid nor I were as above everything as we pretended to be. I deeply wanted to be liked by, well, everyone. If literally anyone (such as, say, a writing instructor at Kenyon) even pretended to care about what I was interested in, I’d talk their ear off because I was so desperate for human contact. Enid is rude to everyone around her and styles herself in a way that’s deliberately off-putting (see: dying her hair green when Rebecca tells her they have to dress conservatively to get an apartment), but she’s not immune to the feeling of wanting to be liked. There’s a scene that broke my heart when Enid takes Seymour out for a night in hopes of helping him meet women. She’s by herself at the bar, watching the faces of men who openly ogle their waitress. She looks at herself in the mirror, switches out her glasses. She takes off her little crocheted hat and tousles her hair. She’s trying to look attractive, even for these men she doesn’t like.
I go back and forth on whether Enid likes the way she looks, because I’m just not sure. In 2023, it’s a statement to style yourself exactly how you want, the opinions of others be damned. Trends are different now than they used to be, and it feels mainstream to dress weird. But the internet was barely a thing back then, and Enid was dressing this way in a vacuum. Does she think she’s cool, or does she identify with what Seymour says about himself: “Maybe I don't want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests.”
Ghost World has a really wonderful Criterion edition that has some interesting special features (and it’s currently on the Criterion Channel, so you can watch it if you have a subscription!). I always love the essays they include with their films, but I was struck by the absolute wrongness of this passage:
“Enid and Rebecca have cultivated a dumpy, desexualized look—an antifashion statement that reads like an obstinate inversion of Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It. Their breasts aren’t billboards; they’re deadweight they are forced to lug around like unwanted packages. Between Enid’s schlocky-goofy Salvation Army castoffs and Rebecca’s World’s Ugliest Miniskirt, these outfits are straight off the fallout-shelter runway.”
This quote made me question everything in my life. Wait, am I supposed to think Scarlett Johansson is unattractive in this role? Was I wrong every time (both as a kid and an adult) I thought her black shorts were super cute on her? And was it incorrect that I thought, when Enid went to Seymour’s apartment, “damn, she’s rocking that look”? Are they…sorry, let me get the wording right…lugging their breasts around like unwanted packages? It’s true that this movie is decidedly not sexual, even with the sex toy shop and all the sexy vintage imagery. But I never thought the message was that they weren’t hot. I don’t think they’re dumpy! I liked their clothes then, I like their clothes now!
As I was wondering why Criterion chose a man to write about a movie that deals explicitly with teenage girlhood, I had a very obvious realization: everyone involved in this movie is a man. Daniel Clowes, who wrote so poignantly about the pains of growing up. Terry Zwigoff, who cowrote a script that got so much right about being a teenage girl. This is, ultimately, a man’s world. That wouldn’t have seemed strange at all to me as a teenager, when I was exclusively devouring works by men. I adored Manhattan, which is a film about an old man dating (“dating”) a teenage girl. It was all pretty normal at the time, not just to me but seemingly to everyone around me—just take this article from 2001, titled Terry Zwigoff: ‘Every Guy Wants a Teenage Girlfriend.’
This movie also deals with race in ways that are confusing and unclear. Rich Juzwiak wrote a very detailed and interesting piece about this in 2017 titled White as Ghost World. It’s hard to say how we, as viewers, are supposed to think about Enid’s casual asides about race or about her decision to enter that “found object” in the art show. I certainly don’t think we’re supposed to see Enid as unimpeachable in other aspects, so perhaps we’re not meant to support her here, either. Or maybe that’s too charitable a reading for a film from 2001.
If it sounds like I didn’t like this movie…well, there were certainly parts of it that made me cringe. Word choices I found abhorrent. Plot lines I found creepy. And yet it did touch on some universal human experiences. Loneliness. The pain of growing up. The loss of a changing friendship. And I laughed out loud several times, and I admired so many of the performances. Also I wondered if Steve Buscemi was hot, or if that was something I should even wonder in a public forum. Am I being too vulnerable?
But vulnerability, earnestness…that’s what Enid needs to learn. She’s got a handle on ironic detachment, cruel jabs, mean pranks, and flippant eye rolls. But throughout the movie, she learns to open herself up, to be vulnerable to the people around her. She has an actual conversation with Rebecca, one where they’re not just making fun of people or each other. She tells Seymour that she thinks he’s cool and shows him her sketchbook. She’s not suddenly a different person—she doesn’t become expressive or cheerful, but she does start thinking about other people’s feelings.
Not thinking about anyone but yourself, avoiding any talk of feelings by brushing them off with insults, doesn’t always work. Life is cruel, and it doesn’t matter. Until it does. Until she hurts Seymour, until she realizes she needs to find her own place, until she realizes that she and Rebecca won’t be friends forever. Until she actually tries for something and doesn’t get it. When Enid gets on that bus at the end, it’s a symbolic ending. But it’s also, I think, a hopeful one. We don’t know where she’s going, but she’s going there as a changed person, one who understands how much power she wields over other people and herself.
When it comes to an older movie like this that has clear issues, there’s an impulse to reject it as hopelessly dated, out of touch, and offensive. The other impulse is to defend it, to enshrine it as an untouchable classic (it is, after all, in the Criterion collection). But just call me Huma Abedin, because I think it’s both/and. You can deeply enjoy a film, and appreciate what it meant to you in the past, while still acknowledging its shortcomings.
Stray thoughts:
-Just seeing Brad Renfro makes me sad. The Criterion special features include deleted scenes, and one of them hints at an entire plot where Enid sleeps with his character, Josh. Which would honestly make some other things in the film make way more sense!
-Illeana Douglas is so funny here. The way she sits on that desk! She shows the art class a short film called “Mirror, Father, Mirror” that involves black and white shots of doll parts being thrown into a toilet and then says, “I like to show it to people I’m meeting for the first time.” I love her.
-David Cross has a small part and he’s such a creep.
-Enid’s dad is Bob Balaban, and his girlfriend is the Teri Garr! She has a tiny part, but I always love seeing her.
-The film’s look was consciously modeled after comic books, as described by Daniel Clowes in The Stranger: “We discussed with the cinematographer (Affonso Beato) that we wanted to have this comic-bookish look, but not what you typically associate with that, with Batman or X-Men, but something where the colors are enhanced and stronger but alienating in some way. It's candy-colored but has some horrifying strip-mall signage yelling at you. He really took it to heart and studied that comic carefully, looked at all my comics and how I use color on the covers, and tried to adapt that on film.”
A Few Questions
Do I still like this movie? With reservations, yes.
How did watching this movie an adult make me feel? Bad!!! But also, I laughed quite a bit.
What did Roger Ebert think of this movie? Four stars, baby! Rog loved it, but he always did appreciate a story about a complex teenage girl. “I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor. The Buscemi role is one he's been pointing toward during his entire career.”
That’s it for this week. See you next week (or the week after that, it’s hard to say what summer will bring) for another treacherous walk down memory lane. xo