Ghost World (2001)

directed by Terry Zwigoff

Hannah Kinney-Kobre

When I tried writing this at first, I did it all wrong. It was some stiff attempt at connecting the film I’m writing about to some broader, more meaningful theme. As if I were doing a high school English assignment. Let me examine this text and tell you what it is, and why it is. Let me tell you why this image is an image, how it is an image. It felt dead to write, and I realized the jig was up—and really always has been. It’s impossible to look at an image without trying to seek out our own reflection in it, looking for the places where the fine glaze fragments and we see ourselves looking back. What I want to understand here is not just the way I look at the image, but the way it looks back at me.

The Terry Zwigoff movie Ghost World was—and there’s no way around this—my favorite movie in high school. It’s a movie about an alienated, weirdo high school girl (surprise!) who develops a bizarre romantic friendship with Seymour, a record collector played by Steve Buscemi, while losing her best friend Rebecca to previously mocked strictures like “having to pay rent” and “showing up to work.” When I was in high school, I thought it was aspirational. (In high school you think many things are aspirational that are not; I guess this explains the bad rap J.D. Salinger’s ended up with.) I wanted to wear Enid’s Raptor t-shirt, and have the cool, above-it-all zeal that allowed her to toss off lines like “He better watch out or he’ll get AIDS when he date rapes her”—a line that is, today, still as brilliant with derision as it is repulsive.

When I was sixteen, I understood this movie solely through the lens of outfits and one-liners and a capacity to act out that I lacked entirely. Enid compulsively has sex with Steve Buscemi and ditches him, uses a racist “found art object” that was made for a fried-chicken franchise in order to best the irritating headband girl in her remedial art class, quits or gets fired from jobs because of her inability to put on a smile and muster through. She yields to an impulse, seemingly without thought, in a way that I’m mostly unable to.

But watching this movie now, six years later, what I linger on is a single moment.

It comes towards the end of a failed attempt to get Steve Buscemi’s hopeless Seymour laid. They’re at a bar to watch an old, under-respected classical blues guitarist open for a band of white men with bleach-tipped hair named “Blueshammer.” Enid leaves Seymour alone with a busty redhead to try and force a connection between them, and heads to the bar. When she sits down, she looks down the bar and notices a sneeringly handsome man looking at her. But then the blonde waitress sails by, and his eyes glide past her and fix themselves on the woman’s ass. She examines the other men around her, Zwigoff cutting from close-up to close-up: a man who would today be classified as a textbook incel, a man in a cowboy hat that is neither ironic nor earned.

And then we get the frame. Enid looks at herself in the mirror behind the bar, and sees herself. She is wearing a soft, knitted beanie and thin wire frame glasses—a softening measure, a modest attempt at a cute variant of “alternative” that doesn’t quite work. She removes the wire glasses, replaces them with the harsh lines of the thick black frames that she wears for most of the movie. She removes the hat, and musses her hair so that it becomes once again the cartoon-black bob that frames her face. And then she looks at herself again.

Everything around her is blurred, shallow-focus. She is framed by the soft outlines of the bottles of bottom-shelf liquor that stand against the mirror in the bar. Her face is almost babyish, pale and round, but her expression is sharp in a way that stands out against the indistinct lines of the world around her. There is something emptied out and despairing in the set of her lips, the reflection of the neon lights in her glasses. Yet there is something sure about it, too—a moment of self-perception that is unflinching, a look that does not waver. She is alone, knows she is alone, but is not in conflict about it.

Nothing makes you feel so alone or like such a freak as flunking out of the sexual competition, like Enid has in this moment. It is a feeling that, no matter how old you are, always has the hysteric, childish sheen of being picked last for the dodgeball team. But urgency of feeling always disguises the currents that run beneath it. There is room for equivocation here, for an interpretation of this moment of self-imposed isolation as a psychological signifier more than anything else. If the town she lives in seems full of sell-outs and caricatures, it’s easy to flip this understanding around. We can say that it’s Enid’s own acidic perspective more than anything else that creates these gross figures. She denies them contradictions and complications, rolling and cutting them into predetermined shapes with her own sharp edges. The more well-adjusted person in me wants to buy into this reading, at least to prove that I have learned something in therapy. And yet my teenage self—which has never left me—begs something else as an explanation.

The world is an ambivalent place, and so you can always find depth if you are willing to stick your feet in. But this idea of ambivalence as the highest possible reality is one that has never quite resounded with me, something that it seems to me was confected in creative writing MFA programs proffering realism as the one true way. While there is always more beneath the surface, sometimes the surface is enough. Sight-readings have their use, and so a perception of a job as bad or a person as boring is not shallow but instead almost clairvoyant. Enid’s view of the world may be crude, but its crudeness does not preclude accuracy. Looking at Enid’s world in this frame, we can see—even out of focus—that the bar behind her has a flattened, generic look no amount of colored fluorescents can salvage; it’s a dive bar presented with the help of generous funders like Capital One and Anheuser-Busch. Enid’s scorn might be hyperbolic, but it is not misplaced. She reveals herself as responsive to a world that ultimately might deserve scorn more often than not, and as someone who resists being worn down into acceptance.

And here the space between me and the screen shimmers like heat over pavement. I want to be generous to her, because I want to be generous to myself. Even as I’ve gotten older and found myself having to accept a world that is murkier and more difficult than I could have imagined at sixteen, I still long for the teenage sharpness I’ve never had. Like many people, I’m “on the job market” right now. This is of course a humiliating experience, one where I wring my hands over emails sent and left unread, over the stupidity of networking and the vagueness of terms like “content” and “engagement.” I have been asked questions like, when is the last time you saw someone cry? What three adjectives would you use to describe your work self? I have been told, well, we can’t say how many hours the job is right now, because, as you know, it’s a lifestyle more than a career. I smile and muster through all these things, but in the back of my mind I feel something that won’t yield no matter how I try to coax myself. I imagine myself asking back. I imagine myself unsmiling. I imagine myself defiant and unwilling. I imagine myself in the bar, the blurred world behind me, looking in the mirror and meeting my own gaze. I imagine myself not just knowing what I’m not, but also refusing to become anything else.

If the shallow focus of this shot makes Enid’s singular nature undeniable, it also reveals to us the flipside of this singularity. She is hard-edged and unflinching, traits that can be their own reward—but these things come with losses too, and a particular kind of claustrophobia. If she is distinct, then she is also alone. If she holds fast to her refusal of the world around her, she is also inevitably trapped by it. The blurred shapes of bottles block her in as much as they make her stand out. Her harshness exacts a high price, one the image doesn’t disguise. Enid rejects the slick and useless surface of the world around her, but a new one does not materialize around her as a result. The same haze still surrounds her.

I can’t say if this is worth it, because I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. Worth is so tied up in expectations—for what we should be doing, for what our lives should be—that it is effectively useless when it comes to Enid casting off the world that has been offered to her, like a coat when you first enter a party. And even after writing this, I’m not sure if I am capable of the greater commitment I’ve wrung from this single frame. Ambivalence has seeped into my mind too deeply, and I can feel where my sharp edges have been sandpapered down to something more gentle. Rebellion is something I reserve for moments few and far between. And yet, the beauty of focusing on a single frame is that you are able to make a moment last forever.

Hannah Kinney-Kobre is a sometimes writer and sometimes administrator, currently living in Pittsburgh, PA.