Ghost World (2001) is a classic. It’s a film that I and all my friends in high school loved. We related to the cynicism of Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson and their love of all things vintage and kitschy. We saw ourselves in these high school outcasts and fell in love with them. Some of us even found Steve Buscemi sexy after watching Ghost World.
What Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes captured was the ennui after high school. It’s an ennui that comes with white privilege and manifests itself as an aimlessness. Without the structures of high school it can be difficult to define oneself and this is the problem facing the teenaged characters of the film. When one is young and watching Ghost World Birch and Johansson are surrogates of a kind. Watching Ghost World as an adult they are less sympathetic and instead function as a reminder of the frivolousness of youth.
Zwigoff’s singular obsessions rub shoulders with Clowes’ low steaks melodrama to create a wholly unique take on the coming of age drama. Ghost World is part Heathers (1988) and part Harold & Maude (1971). Zwigoff’s stylistic flourishes and interests are subtle but they have the cumulative effect of creating a highly stylized and unreal film of teenaged angst.
The casual cruelty that comes with teenaged cynicism reveals the protagonists’ privilege and recasts them as the anti-heroes. The only real enemies these girls have are themselves as their manipulations backfire and spin out of control. The cost of their “fun and games” is their bond, their friendship. Ghost World charts this self-destruction in slow motion.
Yet, haven’t we all been there before? Isn’t that time between high school and college when we discover the limits of friendship and test the bounds of self-identity? Ghost World packs a punch even after twenty years or more. It’s a film that is honest about the emotional lives of the young. Ghost World is almost brutal in its observations of teen egos run amok and it couches that honesty in Zwigoff’s pop culture obsessions and style. Ghost World is not just one of the great films about teens, but it’s also one of the best comic book movies ever made.
