Word: rebecca
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They have cast themselves as outcasts. Standing apart at their high school graduation, they gaze at the proceedings from the Olympus of their scorn. "This is so bad it's good," says Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson). Enid (Thora Birch) corrects her only friend: "This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again." The girls are subtle connoisseurs of bad. They have a favorite lousy comedian, ugly doll, porno store and, eventually, a favorite pathetic nerd. That's Seymour (Steve Buscemi), who collects old records and fresh psychic wounds. "I would kill to have stuff like this...
...party where every kid pairs off with a comely partner and has fabulous sex, here comes the genre's cleansing, toxic antidote--Ghost World, the Heathers of the new century, the movie that shows how morose and furtive an ordeal growing up can be. Residing both within Enid and Rebecca and at an ironic distance from them, the film allows the viewer to see them--and Seymour, that other displaced person--with a kind of detached sympathy. When Seymour calls himself "an amusingly cranky eccentric curiosity," he might be describing the film as well...
Ghost World originated in Eightball, a serial comic book by Daniel Clowes, whose anatomizing of anomie--Pussey!, David Boring--has made him the R. Crumb of Generation Y. (The Ghost World title is graffiti Clowes saw on a wall in Chicago.) Enid and Rebecca first appeared in 1993. "The characters came to me spontaneously, fully formed, when I drew them in my sketchbook," says Clowes in his Oakland, Calif., home. "They felt like two parts of my personality. Enid is the id, dissatisfied with everything, not sure where she belongs; Rebecca is more pragmatic, trying to make the best...
...changing "look," embodies the cartoon Enid so closely it almost feels embarrassing-- like seeing someone you know on the screen. Fans of the Clowes original will want the audience to like her even if she's kind of obnoxious and opinionated. Johansson likewise perfectly matches the blonde, more reserved Rebecca. And though his character doesn't exist in the original comic, Buscemi's self-hating, nerdish record collector Seymour could easily have stepped out of its pages...
...Enid and Rebecca in the original 'Ghost World...