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Ghost World is a wry, warm film detailing the post-High School Graduation period of Enid, an intelligent, artistic 17-year old, who has a penchant for cutting put-downs, a flair for cruelty and a great unspoken need for recognition, in a world where she blindly receives mountains of the latter, and her protaganists cope magnaminously with truckloads of the former.
Played by Thora Birch (The Hole, American Beauty), Enid, dressed faithfully in comic-book primary colours after the original comic series, is confronted with a world which she both craves and rejects, lacking the grace and humbleness to admit that she needs to change, whilst possessing the intelligence and foresightedness to see that the world also needs to change as well. In short, she is a typical teenager. "He'll probably get AIDS when he date-rapes her". Enid lives in a world of ghosts. The people that occupy her life - her nervous eager to please father, her male friend who she sexually teases, the mysterious old man at the bus stop waiting for a bus that should never come - all have form in her world, but to her way of seeing them, they have no substance. It therefore doesn't matter what she says about them or how she treats because they are simply Not Real. "I promise I'll get you a date before the end of the summer". Enid's world is one where she has no control. Forced into a remedial art school over the summer in order to change her art grade from an F (despite her diary full of accomplished caricatures), Enid throws away the rules of the rational world, and slides into a world where the rules are flexible, where she can haunt the lives of people she views as lesser, more constricted beings and manipulate them to her heart's desire. She slips from the world where her father starts dating a woman who is not her dead mother, where her best friend is more attractive, has a regular McJob and is active in renting and furnishing a flat, and inhabits one where she creates the illusion that she has control over other people. In an attempt to find some semblance of control in her life, Enid decides on a whim to befriend a too-soon middle-aged record-collector, who's sad, drab (to her eyes), cardiganed existence she decides needs some sparkle and love. Assuming him to be a complete loser, she sets about trying to control his love life, setting him up for failures, in order to feel that there is at least one person out there who's life is worse than hers, simply by dint of the fact that she can control it and make it worse. "Look at me, I'm not even listening to you". Enid is a ghost in the real world. With a dead mother, a father trying his hardest to get everything right, and still live his own life, a best friend who rapidly confronts the realities of life post-High School, Enid becomes a ghost in their lives, drifting around and occasionally shouting in their ear to wake them out of their blinkered view of the world. When her pet project starts to go wrong, Enid starts to drift away from him too. But not before she has started to see that the romantic world which she has thus far inhabited is a barely sustained crumbling illusion, and that there are depths to people not apparent from the clothes they wear. As Enid gets to know her pet middle-aged dork better, she discovers that underneath his brown slacks and comfortable green cardigan lies the dedicated heart of someone interested in the seedier side of life, someone who knows that the history of the world can offer more shocking sights than the smeared corporate approval of modern life. Someone who can unearth for her the story behind the facade, someone who can, for example, show that the mighty Cook's Chicken fast food empire in the film was previously called C**n's Chicken, and is therefore built on the money of racist imagery. "I guess its kinda complicated" The world has no control over Enid. As her art is rejected in remedial class (caricatures and comic-book not being 'real art'), as her father's and best friend's life take on new dimensions and grow beyond the past, she finds that the two-dimensional world of art, the images all around us, can be more effectively used to shock her peers into wakefulness. She also finds that the caricatures and cartoons in her diary contain the emotional depth that she is scared to show to the real world. GHOST WORLD is a witty, sensitive look at alienation, the illusion of control, the randomness of life and the inevitability of reaching past your own boundaries and compromising Who You Want To Be, with Who The World Says You Must Be. It contains innumerable "I wish I'd said that!" one-liners (witness Enid's temporary job at the pop-corn counter at the local cinema), and an indie-tastic cast (Scarlet Johansson and Steve Buscemi in excellent supporting roles). This is not a film with a happy - or sad - ending. With the romantic allusions shredded, the ambiguities of the world prove too much, and Enid becomes a ghost in literal metaphor terms. Talked about, but not present. Highly recommended, I seriously recommend renting this film from [insert large video rental store here] and watching it with all your friends who still think that they are in any way alternative, and yet happily eat at [insert fast food chain here], buy [insert branded footwear here], drink coffee at [insert corporate lifestyle coffee house chain here], and pay money to mega-corporations so that they can avoid engagement in real-life issues by playing on their [insert latest computer console name here]. Wake up world, you're dead.
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