Ghost World (film)

''Ghost World'' is a 2001 black comedy film directed by Terry Zwigoff and starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas and Steve Buscemi. Based on the 1993–97 comic book of the same name by Daniel Clowes, with a screenplay co-written by Clowes and Zwigoff, the story focuses on the lives of Enid (Birch) and Rebecca (Johansson), two teenage outsiders in an unnamed American city. They face a rift in their relationship as Enid takes interest in an older man named Seymour (Buscemi), and becomes determined to help his romantic life.

The film debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2001. It had little box office impact, but was critically acclaimed. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and has become a cult film.

Plot

Best friends Enid and Rebecca face the summer after their high school graduation, with no plans for their future other than to find jobs and live together. The girls are cynical social outcasts, but Rebecca is more popular with boys than Enid. Enid's diploma is withheld on the condition that she attend a remedial art class. Even though she is a talented artist, her art teacher, Roberta, believes that art must be socially meaningful and dismisses Enid's sketches as nothing more than "light entertainment".

The girls see a personal ad in which a lonely, middle-aged man named Seymour asks a woman he met recently to contact him. Enid makes a prank phone call to Seymour, pretending to be the woman and inviting him to meet her at a diner. The two girls and their friend, Josh, secretly watch Seymour at the diner and make fun of him. Enid soon begins to feel sympathy for Seymour, and they follow him to his apartment building. Later they find him selling vintage records in a garage sale. Enid buys an old blues album from him, and they become friends. She decides to try to find women for him to date.

Enid has meanwhile been attending her remedial art class, and she persuades Seymour to lend her an old poster depicting a grotesquely caricatured black man, which was once used as a promotional tool by Coon Chicken Inn, the fried chicken franchise now known as Cook's Chicken, where Seymour works in corporate. Enid presents the poster in class as a social comment about racism, and Roberta is so impressed with the concept that she offers Enid a scholarship to an art college.

Seymour receives a phone call from Dana, the intended recipient of his personal ad. Enid encourages him to pursue a relationship with Dana, but she becomes unexpectedly jealous when he does so.

Enid's and Rebecca's lives start to diverge. While Enid has been spending time with Seymour, Rebecca starts working at a coffee shop. Enid gets a job at a movie theater so she can afford to rent an apartment with Rebecca, but her cynical attitude and reluctance to upsell concessions get her fired on her first day. The girls argue, and Rebecca abandons the idea of living with Enid.

When Enid's poster is displayed in an art show, school officials find it so offensive they force Roberta to give her a failing grade and revoke the scholarship. Enid turns to Seymour for solace, resulting in a drunken one-night stand. Seymour breaks up with Dana and is called to account at work when the Coon Chicken poster is publicized in a local newspaper. He unsuccessfully tries to contact Enid, only for Rebecca to tell him about Enid's prank phone call, describing the way they mocked him at the diner. Seymour is upset and goes to the convenience store where Josh works. Another customer ends up in a violent confrontation with Seymour, resulting in his being injured and hospitalized. Enid visits him in the hospital to apologize.

After everything that has occurred Enid gives in to her childhood fantasy of running away from home and disappearing. She has seen an old man, Norman, continually waiting at an out-of-service bus stop for a bus that will never come. Finally, as Enid watches from across the street, Norman boards an out-of-service bus. The next day, while Seymour discusses the summer's events with his therapist, Enid returns to the bus stop and boards the out-of-service bus when it arrives.

A post-credits scene shows an alternate version of Seymour's scene in the convenience store, in which he wins the fight and is not injured.

Cast

Production and technique

The film was directed by Terry Zwigoff with cinematography by Affonso Beato. Zwigoff and ''Ghost World'' comic creator Daniel Clowes wrote the screenplay together. Years later, Clowes admitted that writing the screenplay came with a significant learning curve. He recalled, "I started by trying to transcribe the comic into Final Draft. I figured that’s how you do an adaptation. Then I tried throwing everything away and writing an entirely new story that was very different from the book. And I synthesized those two things into a final screenplay. The actual film itself is very different from the script we wrote. We ended up jettisoning the last twenty pages and rethought the whole thing as we were filming. It was really held together by hair and spit."

Zwigoff and Clowes presented Beato with the task of making a comic book look to the movie. They asked for a fresh technique: earlier examples of the form such as ''X-Men'' and ''Dick Tracy'' were dismissed as literal-minded and "insulting" to the art form. According to Clowes, cameraman Beato "really took it to heart," carefully studying the style and color of the original comics. The final cut is just slightly oversaturated, purposefully redolent of "the way the modern world looks where everything is trying to get your attention at once."

Zwigoff also added his individual vision to the adaptation, particularly in his capture and editing of languid