disgruntled
angel
by Pat Padua
There's
a sequence in Terry Zwigoff's documentary Crumb that shows how
underground cartoonist Robert Crumb feels about the modern world. Crumb's
sketches of a quiet country lane follow its changes over the years:
the lane widens, its natural character paved over for more and more
blacktop, until finally the very sky above it is blackened with a criss-cross
of phone and electrical wiring and a terrible sea of stripmallicana.
In Zwigoff's first fiction feature, Ghost World, several key
shots beautifully capture this menacing ugliness: horrible, yet breathtaking;
banal, yet mysterious. The roadside may be anonymous, but isn't Crumb's
vision of it distinct?
This
ambivalence about the modern world is the background for a story of
friendship and growing up. Can two teenagers on the cusp of womanhood
and diverging adult paths remain friends? Can a smart, alienated girl
find a kindred spirit? And what would she have in common with a record-collecting
geezer who looks like Steve Buscemi?
There's
a great moment for record collector geeks, and maybe anyone who's ever
been stunned by a piece of music. Enid (pale, piefaced, surly Thora
Birch - who rocks) plays an LP she bought from Seymour (Steve Buscemi)'s
yard sale. It's a collection of old blues 78s - not the kind of thing
you'd expect a teenage girl to try out, and she partly buys it out of
guilt.
But
as you can tell from the kitsch and cultural discards in Enid's room,
she's a girl who likes to try out different things, and this is certainly
different from anything in her known world. She puts the record on for
background music. Brushing her teeth, she stops in her tracks, and turns
her head to the sound coming from the next room. A scratchy record,
haunted guitar and voice going on about the devil. Suspicious, intrigued,
fascinated, Enid plays the record over and over. The image of a buxom
teenager fascinated by Skip James reads like a blues cognoscento's wet
dream, and the dream gets wetter. But for a lonely girl largely dissed
by a world of phonies and tenuous attachments, why not? "Devil got my
woman" is mysterious, unsentimental, honest, and broodingly romantic
- all things dear to a goth chick's young heart.
There
are plot elements that ring slightly wrong, but I love the characters
and laugh at the same things they do. Among the objects of satire: high
school jocks, politically-correct art teachers, and, well, record collector
geeks. Except for the jock, most types sent up are also observed in
a real moment or better-rounded specimen, though if the record - and
movie - geeks I know are any indication, well-rounded is extremely relative.
And if, like the couple who sat next to me, you wonder
what's so funny about a jock walking by and saying "Hey, let's catch
some reggae!" then you might not appreciate the satire.
Fans
of Dan Clowes (I'm one), who co-wrote the screenplay based on his graphic
novel, might miss the moodier tone of the comic, but I'm frankly glad
that the screenplay made more room for jokes. Arty pretenses have been
tempered with some of the throwaway humor from Clowes' comic book Eightball,
where "Ghost world" and the wheelchair guy first appeared. (Too bad
they couldn't work in the guy enamored of both a frog and a treehouse
with a knothole.) Dry laughter and hilarity ensue, but the eerie arch
of the original is intact. Duality is a good thing.
The
poster for Ghost World suggests you "Accentuate the negative."
But Zwigoff and Clowes don't just take us back to the painfully awful
adolescence of Welcome to the Dollhouse. Maybe Enid would recognize
Todd Solonz's vision of an ugly unforgiving world somewhere in her own
world. But where Dollhouse was entirely bleak and self-pitying, even
jaded Enid can look at the ugly world and find something that's kind
of cool: a kitschy toy from her recent childhood, a tacky diner, or
even, despite her confessed misanthropy, another human being.
©2001 Pat Padua
CineScene
