Feature: Ghost World (2001)

Written by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff / Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson and Steve Buscemi
111 mins / MGM / Rated R
Retail: $19.98 / Street: $18

Poster

It's strange, but I can relate the movie more now than when I graduated high school. Back then, I knew what I was doing, my path was pretty clear and now, I'm not so sure. Everybody has felt like this at some point in their lives, making it a movie that instantly recognizable to anyone that has ever felt like an outcast or felt unsure of themselves.

The movie is co-written by Daniel Clowes (with director Terry Zwigoff) based on his comic book of the same name. Maybe I should call it a graphic novel. People get all freaked out when you talk about comic books. They don't always feature masculine figures in tights. And in fact, many of the good ones don't. They're able to convey, with a combination of pictures and well crafted words, a story that couldn't be told any other way. In the comic, Clowes manages to strike that most delicate balance where neither writing nor pictures overwhelms the other. Subtlety is definitely his field of expertise.

His comics are often about loneliness, appealing to us because we can identify with the characters. This aren't extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. They're normal people, with average lives.

It's from this source material that director Terry Zwigoff decided to make his film. Zwigoff was celebrated for his intriguing (if not a little disturbing) documentary about Robert Crumb. After watching Crumb, it's easy to see how Zwigoff's attention would turn to a project like Ghost World. Like many of the characters in the comic, Crumb presents us with a bevy of lonely people trying to find their way. Zwigoff was also able to bring some elements of Robert Crumb's life and combine it collaboratively with Clowes script. In the comic, Seymour isn't as big a character as Steve Buscemi 's Seymour. Zwigoff has added elements of Robert Crumb into the character of Seymour - the record collection, the blues infatuation and the almost complete disconnection from the outside world.

Loneliness is in almost every frame of Zwigoff's movie. This is the kind of movie in which strip malls and theme restaurants are celebrated for their banality. The camera lingers on these locales, taking a cue from both Clowes' and Crumb's sparse visions of the suburban landscape.

The cast of the movie is fantastic and perfectly realized. It's funny the kind of casting you can get for a perfect film. If this was a "Hollywood" movie, they probably would have teamed up Britney Spears and some sitcom actor. Instead we get Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, who not only look like the characters from the comic, they manage to get the manner or speech and expressions down too. Round it out with yet another good performance by Steve Buscemi and nice cameos by Bob Balaban and Terri Garr, and you've got one perfect cast. Not to mention the perfect movie.

Aptly, Clowe's work hasn't inspired just a movie. There's even been songs written about it. An artist who I've been a fan of for some time now, Aimee Mann, described the genesis of one of her best songs:

By Dave Itzkoff , Details Magazine, November, 1999

How did you write the last song you wrote?
I write a song when there's some kind of persistent emotional feeling that's stayed with me for a while, that I'm sort of chewing on. The last one I wrote I'm calling "Ghost World." I had just read Daniel Clowes' graphic novel Ghost World, which is about two girls who have just graduated form high school, and it was one of the best things I've ever read in my life. Then, when all the stuff with Interscope was going down, I had a persistent feeling very similar to the one I had when I graduated from high school, which is, What do I do with my life now? Maybe I should just forget music altogether and do something else

Click to Listen to a streaming version of the song (yes, even works over a modem)

It's a comic, it's a movie, it's a song. It's Ghost World. And I love it.