Ghost World
Director: Terry Zwigoff
Enid (Thora Burch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) are the two school misfits who have found comfort with each other’s company and spend their time looking at the world and poking sarcastic fun at it. Ghost World begins at their graduation where Enid finds that she’ll have to do art at summer school to graduate. Life is moving on and both the girls have to make big decisions about what they’re going to do.
Amongst all this angst they decide to pull a nasty prank on a pathetic guy. They find a personal newspaper ad from a lonely man who is trying to contact the gorgeous woman he briefly met on the train. They leave a message on his answering machine and lure him to a café. They watch as he waits and slowly realises that he’s been stood up. They follow him home and Enid becomes obsessed with him. She befriends him and becomes entrenched in his life.
Enid is the focus of Ghost World, with her late-teens angst, her post-modern angst, and her nasty self-seeking streak. She is hard to like, but enthralling to watch. Steve Buscemi is fabulous in this film as Seymour, the late 30 something who collects old blues records and wonders what he’s doing with his life.
So if you want to enter the world of geeks, misfits and teen angst, all done hilariously, watch Ghost World, you won’t regret it.
Oh, and director Terry Zwigoff made the documentary Crumb about artist Robert Crumb. There are little references to Crumb throughout this film and Sophie Crumb, Robert Crumb’s daughter, did all of the drawings in Enid’s sketchbook.
Esther Speight
