Ghost World

[osprey_archer]

I watched Ghost World because it was on a list of good movies about female friendship, and YOU GUYS, the movie is barely about female friendship at all and also that friendship, after being narratively sidelined, ends up going kersplat. And not in an interesting way! Enid starts relentlessly pestering a middle-aged man and simply loses interest in her former best friend Rebecca, who, incidentally, has been working her ass off at a coffeeshop trying to make enough money so that Enid and Rebecca can fulfill their dream of getting an apartment together now that they’ve finally graduated high school.

Except it is no longer Enid’s dream. Enid is now obsessed with Seymour (her middle-aged man) and the classic blues records that he collects.

The movie focuses on Enid. I have no idea why the movie thinks I will be more interested in the faithless Enid than the loyal Rebecca, who deserved better, as indeed do most of the people with whom Enid comes in contact, including Seymour.

WHY? WHY? WHY WAS THIS MOVIE ON A LIST OF MOVIES ABOUT FEMALE FRIENDSHIP?

Well, because there aren’t many movies about female friendship and so we are forced to subsist on crumbs, BUT STILL, we ought to have some standards about this.

Clearly finding this movie on this list gave me false hopes. I think that made me more irritated than I would have been otherwise, although I was probably never going to enjoy this movie, even though it is well-made and interesting - both as a character study of Enid (Rebecca never gets fleshed out as much) and a snapshot of a particular time and way of thinking. It really captures that cynical, scofflaw, we-don’t-care-and-the-whole-world’s-a-joke viewpoint that was popular in the late nineties - and I hated that even in the late nineties so of course I was never going to warm to the movie.

It’s this viewpoint that makes Enid & Rebecca think it’d be a fun prankto answer a lonely-hearts ad just so they can sit in the corner booth at a diner and watch the guy wait for a date who never shows. This is how Enid first comes into contact with Seymour. (He doesn’t know she’s the one who pranked him, mind.) She follows him to his house afterward, out of a weird combination of morbid curiosity and remorse, and buys a record from him at a garage sale. Then she becomes obsessed with the blues and with him and begins to browbeat him into spending time with him.

This may be the only movie I’ve ever watched where I felt genuinely sorry for the older man in a May-December romance. Seymour’s clearly so uncomfortable, but unable to say no (because nothing less than brutally shunning her would make her stop) and so lonely that he doesn’t quite want to get rid of her even though she does things like drag him to a sex shop (where she hoots, “Look at all these losers!” - meaning the men in the shop, and she’s speaking loudly enough that some of them definitely hear her - while Seymour looks like he’d like to sink into the magma core of the earth) and badger him into buying her a latex Batman mask there even after he tries strenuously to beg off. He doesn’t have cash! He really doesn’t want this showing up on his credit card records! Jesus, Enid, didn’t anyone ever tell you no means no?

Also, Enid, how about getting a job and buying your own goddamn Batman mask? She briefly lands a job at a movie theater and gets fired after less than a day because she’s rude to all the customers. Despite this, she has the audacity to get annoyed at Rebecca (who, let’s remember, has been working all summer so they can get an apartment together!) when Rebecca complains about the “creeps and losers and weirdos” who come to her coffeeshop. “But those are our people,” says Enid, who clearly feels that Rebecca is selling out by actually trying to make their dreams come true.

YOU FAILED AT CASHIERING AFTER ONE DAY, ENID. YOU HAVE NO ROOM TO BE JUDGMENTAL. Not least because she’s clearly judging her customers for being the wrong kind of losers and weirdos for wanting extra fake butter on their popcorn or going to see a movie Enid doesn’t like.

I don’t think the movie expects us to agree with Enid’s choices or judgments 100%, but I also think it expected me to like her enough to feel sympathetic as she makes yet another terrible choice that will make everyone around her suffer and her own life worse, and I just didn’t. Honestly, Rebecca really dodged a bullet losing that girl as a roommate.

Comments

[sovay]

This may be the only movie I’ve ever watched where I felt genuinely sorry for the older man in a May-December romance.

I was introduced to Steve Buscemi with Ghost World and therefore understand that he has a reputation for playing weird or dangerous characters, but think of him as essentially adorable, an impression which The Big Lebowski did nothing to disabuse. (As far as I can tell this is true of actual Steve Buscemi, but is not necessarily the opinion of people who saw him first in, say, Con Air.) I am also impressed in hindsight that while Enid and Seymour's one-night stand is awkward, inappropriate, and a terrible idea all round, it is not creepy. It would not have been a good idea if they were the same age.

[osprey_archer]

I don't think I've seen Steve Buschemi in anything else, but he was excellent in this, so perhaps I should keep an eye out for him.

And yeah, I have to give the movie props for taking a potentially creepy situation and not making it super creepy. As much as I detested Enid, and didn't particularly enjoy watching the movie, it really is well-made; there are probably some rec lists that it would definitely fit, although "movies about female friendship" is not one of them. "Weird romances that don't pan out," maybe. "Unlikeable heroines that some viewers will nonetheless adore and others will probably hate," definitely. Enid is well-realized and unique and that's not as common as one might hope in female protagonists. (Although admittedly male protagonists can be bland as hell too; this may not be a gender thing so much as "writing well-developed characters is HARD.")

[sovay]

I don't think I've seen Steve Buschemi in anything else, but he was excellent in this, so perhaps I should keep an eye out for him.

He's a really excellent actor. I have good memories of him in Big Fish (2003) as well.

Enid is well-realized and unique and that's not as common as one might hope in female protagonists.

I think it is still rarer in female protagonists, and it's especially rare to have conventionally unsympathetic female protagonists who don't get hit with the Production Code on the way out; for that reason I agree it's valuable, even if I didn't connect much with it personally. (I was the right age bracket, but Enid and Rebecca's particular species of outsider weirdo-ness was not mine; was specifically a kind of outsider weirdo-ness that I often found inimical. So even if you take Ghost World as a story partly about the limits of irony—Enid cares, Enid wants connection and meaning, she just doesn't want to look like she does and her ideas of where to find it are flawed—I was not the target audience.)

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, exactly. I suspect that if I had seen this movie when I was in the target demographic I would have loathed them with the fiery passion of a thousands suns, because they were almost the right thing (weirdo outsiders!) but the wrong kind.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the only thing stopping them from being completely vicious bullies is the fact that they don't have the social clout to give their insults force. Rarely have I been more relieved by any characters' unpopularity: it protects everyone else from them.

[sartorias]

Eccch. Sounds like yet another version of middle aged man idea of manic pixie dream girl (i.e. irresponsible twit who is as annoying as shit) having All The Sex with said middle aged guy.

[osprey_archer]

If someone had described it to me, it does kind of sound like that, but that's not really how it plays out. She's the protagonist in her own right, not a prop in a man's story toward happiness and/or character growth, and I think that disqualifies her as a manic pixie dream girl. Seymour exists for her rather than the other way round - if that makes sense?

[sartorias]

Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense. It also sounds like one i;d hate,

[missroserose]

This came out around the time I was working in a video store, and I remember trying to watch it and not being able to get past how obnoxious Enid was - and that was, like, fifteen or twenty minutes in. I couldn't even get far enough in to get a sense of the plot.

[osprey_archer]

She really is pretty awful. I kept at it because I thought there had to be some character growth coming (also, it's hard to quit a movie halfway through after going to all the trouble to get the DVD from Netflix), but no. There is no character growth. It's turtles all the way down.

[asakiyume]

(I didn't see this comment when I asked my character growth question...)

[asakiyume]

Wow, Enid sounds **super** unpleasant. Like, what makes a person that unpleasant? What upbringing encouraged faithlessness, cluelessness, and self-absorption in one well blended whole?

Given that she's apparently the (dislikable) protagonist, how does she grow and change?

[osprey_archer]

I don't know! Her mom is out of the picture (death? divorce? the movie doesn't specify), but her dad is still around and he seems kind of weak and ineffectual but not awful in a way that might explain Enid's... Enidness.

I was talking to someone not too long ago, I can't remember who now, that stories can either have character growth or character exploration. A character like, say, Hercule Poirot doesn't really change - or if he does, it's very slow - but it's so much fun to watch him being Hercule Poirot, and ditto all the side characters being their slightly less eccentric but still memorable selves, that it doesn't matter.

But I think this approach works better when the main character has more qualities than Enid has.

[asakiyume]

But I think this approach works better when the main character has more qualities than Enid has.

"My self-absorption--let me show it to you. In excruciating detail!!"

(But I take your larger point, and agree)