Crumb, with a whole panoply of asocial misanthropy introduced, along with blues connoisseurship, record collecting, and cartooning. In the comic book, he’s a walk-on, the sad-sack victim of the girls’ personal-ads prank, but Zwigoff, with cowriter Clowes’s assistance and blessing, expanded Seymour’s passing, passive role to a pivotal degree-very much along the lines of Zwigoff’s documentary portrait of his friend R. Then there’s the squeaky third wheel, Steve Buscemi’s “clueless dork” turned Enid’s mentor Seymour. The two eighteen-year-olds at the off-center of Ghost World, the artsy-kitschy Enid (Thora Birch, profoundly and riotously engaged with disengagement) and her implacably sullen coconspirator since childhood Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, a smirking no sign), are a match made in mutual disgust at their wan lives and strip-mall, masscult surroundings. Honoring Daniel Clowes’s poker-faced, weird-out comic book while folding Zwigoff’s own neurotic baggage into the mix, Ghost World made desperation not only morbidly funny but also cheekily enigmatic, moving, and sort of heroic, in a Sisyphus-goes-to-the-convenience-store way. Audiences in 2001 had never seen such a tonally jousting, pinwheel immersion in late-adolescent ennui, and it struck a quotidian, satiric-poetic underground-comix chord-and nerve.
Clear-cut yet fabulously mutable, Ghost World did both things, fulfilling many high hopes and expectations while at least half its pleasure lies in the craggy, melancholy detours Terry Zwigoff takes getting us there-adding unexpected twists to already twisted material. Others catch us unawares in a whirlwind of surprise and glee. We’re predisposed to love some films because they speak to our sensibilities-they wear our hearts (or our discontents) on their sleeves.
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