Ghost World

Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johannson and Steve Buscemi

Playing at the Academy of Music, Northampton

There is a scene in Ghost World when Thora Birch asks a man sitting on a bench, forever waiting for a bus that will never come, if he knows that his wait is pointless. He promises her that the bus will come. She accepts that and walks away.

Whether or not the bus actually does arrive, Ghost World never arrives. Starring – beside American Beauty’s Birch – Steve Buscemi and Scarlett Johannson, the film never really goes anywhere, only showing in more and more complex story lines just how depressing the characters’ world really is.

Based on the eight graphic novels of Daniel Clowes, Ghost World stars Birch and Johannson as typically disaffected youths who find it easier to confront the depressing banality of their world with sarcasm and wit than with simple apathy. They choose not to look the other way, but instead to look right at that which depresses them. Birch leads Johannson with her searing view of the world. Johannson comes along for the ride, but seems more likely to accept her place in the world rather than challenge it.

Finding a personal advertisement in a local arts magazine, Birch and Johannson reply, Birch claiming she is the woman described in the magazine. She set up a date with the loser – played to perfection by Buscemi – who arrives but never realizes the girls in the corner are the ones that set him up. Birch, however, can’t help her self. She wants to know more about the man. She, with the guilty Johannson in tow, follow him back to his apartment, and later find him at a yard sale, where it is revealed that he is a record collector, a recluse, and a loser. In other words, perfect for Birch.

Birch’s interest in Buscemi tears away at her friendship with Johannson, who having just finished four years of high school, wants to get a job and an apartment. Birch, having to finish a summer arts class, is still living based strictly on her interests, thinking about little more than a day-to-day existence. The chasm between the two of them grows as Birch continues to see Buscemi. Birch sets him up on a date with the original woman from the personal advertisement, then gets upset when the burgeoning relationship threatens to work out. When she finally goes after Buscemi – one of the movies best moments – she is left unfulfilled after loving him.

This wasn’t what she wanted.

If that movie is about nothing else, it’s about Birch’s total inability to figure out what she wants. Does she want to escape, as she makes clear several times throughout the movie, or does she want everything to stay her version of ‘how it used to be?’ She clearly never knows and even at the end of the movie, when she finally makes a decision, one is left wondering if it was no more impulsive than her decision to bed Buscemi.

Terry Zwigoff, who directed Crumb in 1995, has made a movie that at times seems blatantly congratulatory. In one of the Ghost World’s earliest scenes with Buscemi, Zwigoff makes a self-indulgent reference to Crumb, earning him a laugh from the Zwigoff fans who caught the reference. Sure, it isn’t a scene where characters discuss the merit of the 1995 biopic, but it’s close enough. When he isn’t patting himself on the back, Zwigoff’s (and by extension, Clowes’) world is beautifully set. Clearly, both knew exactly what they were looking for when it came to capturing a world almost totally devoid of any soul. Instead, in a sea of lush corporate colors, there is nothing but a chilling cold.

Only in the rooms of the two main characters, Birch and Buscemi, is anything original found. Buscemi’s collection of blues and ragtime recordings, and the corresponding posters, showbills and instruments, are perhaps the most genuine scenes. Dark browns and yellow light capture the kind of room that seems to be apropos for Buscemi’s blues. Birch’s desperate collection of anything different – her seeming bemusement with anything that isn’t from Ikea – is similarly colored, in faded reds and oranges.

But while the world is deep and textured, the characters never go anywhere, and only Buscemi seems to make even passing attempts at the world. Birch can’t accept any of it, and her story of world alienation never comes together at the end. She might as well stay waiting for a bus that’s going to take her somewhere. She certainly didn’t go anywhere during the movie.