Ghost World

(Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

I’ve been thinking about the title of “Ghost World”, a film I have seen many times, the dialogue of which I can now feel like rhythmic sensations coursing through my body as I watch it. I know every beat of it now, watching the fading moments of any current scene give way with endless inevitably to those that follow. But I don’t think about the title that much. I gather it indicates a world that has died and yet cannot find the interest to notice, opting instead for the comforts of modern popular culture. “You give people a Big Mac and a pair of Nikes and they’re happy,” says Seymour. He can’t relate with those people. They’ve passed away.

The choices: Join the dead masses, or continue living. The movie asks what life would be like without the comforts of aspiring to be like everyone else, and asks the question in a way no other movie asks it. Its impertinent, sardonic, dissatisfied vessel of enquiry is Enid, played by Thora Birch, who I would venture to call one of the most attractive female characters ever placed on screen. If I had to choose a “type”, I’d look no further. I see the women I’ve cared deeply for over the last 15 years in subtle ways through Birch’s performance. A strong, young woman with character. Artsy, with a disregard for shallow perceptions and stereotypes. Sarcastic, witty, pale and bespectacled. Be still my beating heart.


I digress, for now. I saw “Ghost World” for the first time at the World Exchange Theatre on Albert Street in Ottawa on Monday, October 1, 2001 at 9:25 PM (I owe my diligent collection of movie ticket stubs for pinpointing that information). The movie is based on a graphic novel of the same name by Daniel Clowes, a copy of which is sitting on my bookshelf, a refugee of a past relationship. I had been endlessly excited to see the film after watching its amazing trailer on the apple.com website. Doubly excited, perhaps, because I was finally living in a city that had theatres that actually showed small-budget and independent films.

The film opens and closes with the song ”Jaan Pehechan Ho” as sung by Mohammed Rafi in the movie “Gumnaam”, a Bollywood film released in 1965. The song delights Enid, who makes it a profession to scour out marginal interests in order to claim them as her own. As much as “Ghost World” is a film about two young women figuring out what to do with their lives after the structure of high school has been pulled from under their trampling feet, it is also about the maturation of Enid’s artistic temperament. She compulsively sketches in a sketchbook, and her drawings are dismissed by flaky art teacher Roberta Allsworth, played by Illeana Douglas. Her relationship with best friend Rebecca, played by Scarlett Johansson, deteriorating, Enid relates to no one other than the boringly eccentric Seymour, who sells her a compilation LP containing “Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James.


Enid’s discovery of the blues is one of the sexiest moments I’ve seen in a film. Having failed at making a rebellious statement by dyeing her hair green, Enid catches the soulful quality of James’ voice in the air and wanders slowly into her bedroom. The camera pans around Birch’s face as the music registers, her eyebrows furrowing slightly at the effect of the music’s delivery and cadence. The shot cuts to the record as it plays, bent and warped with age. When the camera returns to Enid, she is lounging in a bathrobe as though she has just made love. Only when the song ends does she move to return the needle back to the beginning. It is a perfectly sequenced visual representation of how a song can take hold of a listener.


No actor other than Steve Buscemi could have played Seymour. He is just awkward enough, just odd-looking and sheepish enough to pull the right strings. He is yet another oddity in Enid’s collection that she believes sets her apart from everyone else. Withdrawn and bitterly antisocial, Seymour comes to read Enid as his only possibility for happiness. His desperate play for her towards the end of the film puts him in therapy. As I get older, I tend to watch the film from a different perspective than I did at first. I’m getting further away from Enid’s frame of mind and coming to realize how much I don’t want to be like Seymour at 40.


But what about Enid? Throughout the film, a man most view as crazy waits on a bus stop bench for a cancelled route. Only Enid, in her Louis Leakey-like obsession with the offbeat, would talk to this man. She observes him coolly, tired after settling terms with everyone around her. It is early evening. The lights of a Radio Shack and restaurants in the background blare a message of banality. The man rises, and a bus appears to pick him up. Enid regards this as though she has witnessed an asteroid crashing into a field five miles off. The movie appears to end.

Fade in. It is early morning. Enid is dragging a suitcase through an empty downtown street. Commuting cars are peppered lightly on the road. After umpteen viewings, I know she is heading for that bus stop. The sharply bowed strings of the score follow her steps exactly. The bus appears, empty. She makes her way to the back, and the final shot shows the bus taxiing her across a bridge into the unknown. The symbolism is thick, but completely apt.


Every time I watch the last shot fade out I want so badly to know where Enid ends up. I would like to think it is a world in which she is able to keep being as unique as she is. She has spent years trying to figure out how she can exist without the world that defines her as different. Perhaps she can’t. “I used to think about one day,” she tells Seymour, “just not telling anyone and going off to some random place. And I’d just disappear, and they’d never see me again.” Words from an almost ethereal presence in a world of ghosts.


Seven more reviews to go.

I added "Own an electric guitar" to the list.

This afternoon, Andrea and I had lunch at Social on Sussex Avenue. She had to write a review of it for The Charlatan. I jumped at the chance to go, since it's a place I've walked by many times. Very ritzy looking, a place I've assumed caters to wealthier 30-somethings on weekend evenings.


Ritzy. They did have affordable lunches. I went with the Social Club, served on cranberry bread with frites and a garden salad:


Really tasty. Great service. Classy atmosphere. I'd love to try out the couches in the lounge area sometime. The bathroom stalls had frosted glass windows on the doors.

Five more restaurants to go.

Diamonds are Forever is Connery's last EON film as Bond, and it's, well, astounding. Not really in a quality way. It's probably the worst Bond film I've seen so far. But it's so bad, so unapologetically kitschy and stupid, it's hard NOT to give it credit. Seeing Connery pilot a space vehicle through the Nevada desert while being pursued by dirt bikes is the height of absurdity, but you can't help being amazed at the dedication to PUT IT ON FILM. He also spends much of the movie being stalked by two homosexuals who are seemingly Crosby, Stills and Nash fans, awful actors whose inherent awfulness actually makes them creepier. The third actor to portray Blofeld in as many movies, Charles Gray, is effectively cookie-cutter. This is the height of late 60's-early 70's "future technology" pictures. The red lights on beige control panels blink on and off menacingly while spray-painted cardboard machines try to draw attention away from matte backdrops. And Connery looks tired by this one, his age starting to show.

Hell of a break-in to a penthouse, though, I must say.

I completed another original song, my seventh. It's called "Punxsutawney", and you can listen to it here: http://www.myspace.com/wireandlight

American Beauty

(Sam Mendes, 1999)

I saw American Beauty for the first time at the Oshawa Centre movie theatre in the fall of 1999. As I exited the theatre I had to fight back the tears by biting my bottom lip. I was convinced I’d seen a movie that would change the way I saw the world forever. No other movie to that point, and for some time later, would provoke such an open and honest reaction in me.

At the time, I was a fan of fare that flouted society’s rules, characters in films that shirked their responsibilities without regard for the consequences. Mike Judge’s “Office Space” featured a character hypnotized into not caring about a job that made his life miserable. The protagonist of Stephen Frears’ “High Fidelity” operated a business in spite of a laconic regard for his customers’ opinions. American Beauty has Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey. At 42 years old, Lester continues to work at the same job he had at the age of 28. His life stands still while an unnamable, burning desire within him begins to build speed.


To a 19-year-old kid, which I was at the time, the mid-life crisis is a foreign concept. I think I understand it a bit better after spending a lot of my twenties freaking out over life paths and social expectations. At the time, however, I identified far more with 18-year-old Ricky Fitts, Lester’s next-door neighbour, played by Wes Bentley. Ricky quits his job in front of Lester without batting an eye, making him Lester’s “own personal hero.” His youth lends him privileges – to sell drugs and have it look glamorous, to make films and look like a blossoming artistic talent. Lester feels the loss of privilege as he ages and feels himself sliding into images antithetical to those of the ones he had while flipping burgers and getting laid as a teenager.


Lester’s wife, Carolyn, played by Annette Bening, has deluded herself into championing the romanticized grown-up image. She has the daughter, the house, the neighborhood, the meals at the dining room table she was more than likely always instructed to want. Yet she weeps uncontrollably to herself, barely keeping it together, hurting herself physically in order to keep from admitting that the image is only a sick joke of artifice. As I watched the film again, I was struck anew by the efficacy and bravery of Bening’s performance. Lester and Carolyn offset each other perfectly, revealing two very different reactions to mid-life malaise.

I worked at a video store for a time. I told a co-worker that American Beauty was my favourite film, and she replied that she had seen it and didn’t understand its appeal. I told her that she was watching it wrong. It was meant to be a flip comment, something to shock with its arrogance. But there are degrees at which the film may be viewed. If I were to tell someone “how” to watch American Beauty I would tell them to figure out how the framing and bordering of each shot says something about the character in that frame. I would tell them to pay attention to which characters' faces are in light, and which are in shadow. Above all, I would mention the colour red.


Of course, this is all in credit to the great Conrad L. Hall, the film’s cinematographer. This was one of the last films he photographed in his lifetime. Hall once said in an interview that film audiences were always given credit for being smart, when in actuality they were “pretty stupid.” A flip comment. Something, maybe, to shock with its arrogance. But how many of us actually watch a film? How many of us are interested in HOW a film tells a story, and how it makes us feel the emotions we feel? We should not be content with artifice, with surface images. I like the idea that we should always require a film to dig deeper than mere appearance.

I would be remiss to not talk about how the film makes me feel. It’s one of the only films that makes me cry. There are two scenes in particular. The first is Ricky narrating over the video of what he calls “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed” in an attempt at mining some emotional comprehension from Lester’s brooding teenage daughter Jane, played by Thora Birch. It is footage of a plastic bag, floating in the wind. Ricky talks about the bag’s invitation to view an “entire life behind things,” and how this recognition signals the existence of God. The second scene is the film’s conclusion: Lester narrates as his life flashes before his eyes, images intercut with the circumstances and reactions surrounding his death. He slowly and peacefully utters the line, “I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.” These words express a boundless humility and thankfulness in the face of infinite understanding, something I try to express at every conscious opportunity in daily life.


As a youth, I would have ideas that would rise in my head from time to time, usually when I found myself outside, walking, thinking, staring at my feet. I would notice something as simple as a stone on the side of a road and experience the strong impression that I was having a unique moment. No one would ever notice the stone I was seeing, or think about it in the same way. It was a purely singular experience that would never be repeated. Since seeing the film for the first time, I have read poetry that has hoisted the seemingly mundane to the level of the holy. I have studied transcendentalism, which operates under the principle that God is perfectly visible to humanity in the natural world. American Beauty gave me the language for these ideas first. There are moments in life when it feels as though God is looking right at you. You can choose to either look away, or look closer.


Eight more reviews to go.

I added "Skinny dip" and "Shotgun a beer" to the list.

I watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service yesterday, the first and only 007 film that stars George Lazenby as Bond, and to tell the truth, it wasn't nearly as awful as I thought it would be. Lazenby is fine as Bond. This is the first film in which Bond falls in love, and it's interesting that it therefore has the darkest ending to a Bond film so far. Telly Savalas takes over for Donald Pleasance as Blofeld and does a good job. The downhill ski chases are great. I am, however, sitting in increasing awe at Bond's one-liners. A SPECTRE agent falls into a snow machine and gets chewed up and spit out all over the mountain, prompting Bond to say, "He had a lot of guts." Arnie had nothing on this guy.

32. Learn to play Risk.

I had the gang over last night for a Risk game. I played red and totally lost. Simon played black and took over the western hemisphere before crushing the stronghold I had built in Africa.

I think this weekend will be a good one to build a snowman.

Ten months until I turn 30.