The search for truth in a caricatured world

BY SAM FRANK

The most precise, precisely coming-of-age story in recent memory, Ghost World is a movie torn repeatedly asunder, to its benefit and detriment. Its title—initially a bit of graffiti glimpsed by cartoonist Daniel Clowes (Eightball) around Chicago, then a leitmotiv in his comic of the same name—is nowhere to be found in this adaptation cowritten with and directed by Terry Gilliam (Crumb). Yet it remains as instructive: a world of ghosts, of real and unreal, or something in between, impossible to decipher. Still, we have to try.

COURTESY MGM Thora Birch (center) and crew flesh out the film adaptation of Daniel Clowes' classic.

Protagonist Enid (Thora Birch) and her best friend, Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), think they know real from fake. Or rather, they know fake: everything. At their high school graduation, and then into the last summer of childhood, when they're supposed to find a job, adulthood, "real world," they and the camera content themselves with parody: of the fat, sweaty, shirtless man slumped by an open window, of the wheelchair-bound-by-drunk-driving commencement speaker who declaims monotonically on the importance of faith and a good sense of humor before tippling out of sight of adoring parents, of the school jock finally, fittingly, hitting on the school slut (Enid: "He'd better watch out or he'll get AIDS when he date rapes her").

Enid has a nasty streak: she hates, hilariously; Rebecca has her own throaty monotone, but one that slays instead of soporifizes: she's more directly parodic than Enid, and less discriminate. Not that either of them lacks for targets. Clowes excels at set pieces about despicables (especially shirtless nunchakued mullethead vs. gun-toting Greek convenience store owner in the funniest scene of the year). And Affonso Beato's camera work lets them show their worst. Every color's a bit too bright, every angle's a few degrees askew when Enid walks down the suburban street. Something is rotten in this world of ghosts.

But what? If Ghost World contented itself with caricature—if all that was wrong with the world could be solved by eradicating the freaks through superficial Seinfeldian misanthropy—it would be a teen movie worthy of a place in the watch-10-times-and-mouth-along pantheon. But if Clowes is a master of caricature (even naming a strip after it; caricature as unrecognized search for truth), he's also deeply suspicious of it—there's no truth here, only bad jokes.

Enid and Rebecca are always making fun—fun never just happens. They strain to prove themselves funny, their jokes fall flat, they try too hard. They're as much caricatures as those they lambaste. And, crucially, being a caricature(r) is shown as the same as being a teenager: being as uncomfortable in your own skin as you are with everyone else's. It's to Birch's and Johansson's credit that they can underact so truthfully.

Ghost World—both versions—deepens profoundly as caricature proves inadequate. (Though one caricature, Illeana Douglas's Roberta Allsworth, Enid's fantastically pretentious summer school art teacher, remains, tacked on by two embittered comics buffs. Still, even she becomes sympathetic.) Getting beyond caricature is here getting to adulthood, getting beyond distortion in a world twisted beyond belief. And here's the first split, as early as the afterparty: Enid bemoans never being able to see a particular truly weird, lonely dork again; Rebecca wonders why Enid even cares. Rebecca is for the world; Enid for the ghosts.

The comic, swathed in a mystery of blue wash and graffiti, is powerful in its exploration of that chasm: episodically, slowly, Enid blurs and fades away, while the lusted-after, scrawny Josh forms the moral center for those of us in the real world—he hates cruelty and caricature, and he's sharp and steadfast enough for Rebecca to turn to him when Enid and childhood are gone. ("You've turned into a beautiful young woman" are Enid's last words to a viewed-from-afar Rebecca, standing with Josh.)

The movie, though, turns Josh into a confused convenience store clerk; Brad Renfro is wasted as a stoned hottie. He's mostly replaced by the aging record collector Seymour (Steve Buscemi, as good as I've seen him). As others have said, the lusted-after, scrawny Seymour smacks of wish fulfillment on Gilliam's part. Worse, though, he pushes aside both Rebecca and Josh, replacing a split and a center with something not quite either. The relationship between Enid and Seymour is poignant but confounding—he also hates cruelty and caricature, but hasn't found himself. How then can Rebecca or Enid find herself?

While the comic's Enid evaporates into the ever-present mist, midnight blue only cloaks Day-Glo in the movie's final moments; in a move both too obvious and too mystical (neither being a good thing in a story concerned, finally, with life), graffiti is replaced by a mystery bus. Funnier than the comic, the film is also more conventional—but at least Enid remains, if too intact.

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