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cropping up repeatedly if uncommonly in our society
Saturday, May 4 2002Anna, David the Rabbi's sister, has been off in Europe for the past month or more working as a backup actress in some play based on Pokemon. I don't know anything about Pokemon or even whether it's a noun or a verb, but Anna's role (when she plays it) requires someone with short stature, since she is dwarf. Now Anna is back in Brooklyn for a vacation and tonight she came over to our place to hang out and watch movies. We walked down to her video store down on 7th Avenue (instead of Gretchen's video store) because at Anna's video store they allow dogs and we'd brought Sally with us. After some deliberation, we decided to rent Ghost World. Various people had told me I should see it, so it was the movie I lobbied for among the alternatives Anna and Gretchen presented.
After watching it, I don't even know if I'm in a position to judge Ghost World. The character Enid felt like such a dead-ringer for a pre-Big Fun Jessika that her character development was almost wasted on me. But even then, to the subtlest detail, Enid was Jessika. As I watched the movie, the similarities were so abundant that I found myself wondering if perhaps its creators had read the Big Fun Glossary. It was all there: the eclectic punk-flavored wardrobe, the unflappable blasé attitude, the black book of sketches, the affinity for random antique music, the reaching out to older misfits, the crank calls, the stalking, the obsession with the stalked that gradually turns to admiration, and even the bad luck with menial service jobs.
As for Enid's one friend in the world, Rebecca, she's a less-perfect foil for Enid than any of the other Malvern Girls were for Jessika. Rebecca most reminds me of Malvern's Joanna, perhaps with a little Peggy practicality thrown in.
After watching Ghost World, I'm struck by the fact that Enid's character, the arty non-conformist teenage girl, though uncommon, is actually a type that crops up repeatedly in our society. What makes this movie unique is that it set out to document that type instead of all the more obvious varieties of teenage girl depicted in such places as Sassy Magazine, Noxema advertisements, post-virginity-pledge interviews, N'Sync mobs, Pepsi commercials, and cheerleader flicks.
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