Ghost World Endures for Its Cynicism—and Pathos
“This is so bad it’s almost good,” Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) says with a laugh to her best friend Enid (Thora Birch) at their high-school graduation, marveling at the unironic chintziness of the band onstage. “This is so bad, it’s gone past good and back to bad again,” Enid snarks back. If the early minutes of Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 classic of disaffection Ghost World have any dramatic tension at all, it lies in that never-ending debate: What enjoyment, sincere or otherwise, can we draw from our increasingly decrepit culture? Or, to put it differently, what’s it like to be a teenager in the 1990s?
