20 years on, a self-proclaimed Enid looks back at Ghost World
Feeling compassion for your younger self—and nostalgia for '90s thrift stores
Film Features Enid
I sprinted out of my high school graduation. Shoving through a crowd of classmates I couldn’t wait to never see again, I threw open the double doors of that rented auditorium like I had been holding my breath and was about to get my first gulp of air in four years. I wasn’t rushing out to greet my family; in fact, I ditched my parents after the ceremony. (I still feel guilty about that.) No, I couldn’t wait to stomp on my mortarboard and give the building the finger, like I had seen in Ghost World.
One thing I never noticed until I watched the movie again 20 years later was that the banner over Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca’s (Scarlett Johannson) graduation is adorned with corporate logos. Which is too bad, because I and my stack of Adbusters magazines would have loved that at the time. Daniel Clowes’ original Ghost World comic ran from 1993 through 1997, the heyday of coffee-shop slacker bohemia. But by the time Terry Zwigoff’s movie version hit theaters in the summer of 2001, Gen X apathy was an endangered species.
Elder millennials (fuck this “geriatric” nonsense) like myself grew up in the shadow of Gen X, and revisiting Ghost World’s milieu of ironically named zine shops and influential alt-weeklies was like looking into a past that was both painfully personal and never really mine to begin with. (For context, 2001 was the year I saw Sum 41 on the cover of Tiger Beat, and in my 17-year-old wisdom proclaimed punk truly dead this time.) Like me, Enid and Rebecca are too young to be proper Gen X-ers, but old enough to worship their sense of eye-rolling detachment. And so they observe the people around them like the alien patrons of Vonnegut’s human zoo, snickering at the pathetic weirdos and overeager losers who populate their daily lives.
Paralyzed with fear of seeming uncool—a.k.a. trying too hard or caring too much—Enid and Rebecca don the armor of ironic distance, swaying to a cheesy band at a graduation party and declaring that it’s more than “so bad it’s good,” it’s swung all the way back around to bad again. Like people who giggle at every outdated moment in a movie in a desperate attempt to defuse their own discomfort, they have to be better than these pathetic freaks. Everyone else has to be intensely weird, because that makes them the sane ones.
Some of those who, like me, grew up thinking that chain smoking in a coffee shop was the coolest thing a person could do with their time are currently carrying that attitude into their encroaching middle age. But on the whole, pop culture has moved on from the sneering condescension of my counterculture youth—and that’s probably for the best. But there will always be a part of me that gapes wide-eyed at the shirtless guy with a mullet in the convenience store of my mind, exclaiming “that guy rules!” with a combination of disdain and envy.
I missed Ghost World in theaters, but picked up a VHS copy in the Blockbuster bargain bin where I got most of my movies in the months leading up to my high-school graduation in June 2002. Watching the movie on a low volume late at night on the 13" TV/VCR combo that was my prize possession, I had Rebecca’s haircut and relentless determination to move out of my parents’ house by any means necessary. But it was the character of Enid that really spoke to me.
On a surface level, we dressed the same. Early experiences being teased for wearing thrift-store clothes had long since flipped into a defiant love of loud, kitschy castoffs by the time I entered my senior year of high school. (Is this the place for a rant about how fast fashion ruined thrift stores? Perhaps another time.) I still have a plaid ’60s shift dress remarkably similar to the one Enid wears in the film, and while I didn’t have a dinosaur T-shirt, I did have one proclaiming that “I saw ONE BIG TRUCK!” at a rural Ohio truck stop. This was paired with a plaid skirt, barrettes, and Doc Martens—this was also the Daria era, remember—topped with an over-it snarl and deadpan sarcasm.
Feeling out of time was another thing that bound me to Enid: Like her, I had interests that weren’t shared even by my close friends. She buys bootleg VHS tapes of mid-’60s Bollywood dance numbers; I bought bootlegs of obscure Southeast Asian horror movies. We both scribbled in our notebooks all day, although I wrote poetry (ugh, I know) instead of drawing. We both were so intense about rejecting this stifling conformist hellhole into which we had so unfairly been born that we failed to see how callously we treated those around us, and both lacked the confidence to defend the things we actually thought were cool: Had I been challenged, as Enid is on her ’70s punk look, I would have similarly folded.
Ghost World does care about a few things, however timidly. Zwigoff’s satire is more cutting when applied to some groups than others: A scene poking fun at old-timey jazz nerds is more affectionate than anything, probably because Zwigoff is himself one of those nerds. The film’s condemnation of forced capitalist cheer, meanwhile, is venomous. A patron’s request for 8 1/2 at a corporate video store is met with a blank stare from the oblivious clerk; the movie recoils in disgust. Ghost World is a culture snob, and proud of it.
That’s another cornerstone of the ’90s counterculture that’s long since gone out of style, drowned in a wave of “poptimism” and the mainstreaming of unselfconsciously slavish fandom. Seeing the nostalgia of those slightly younger than I for early-’00s monoculture is a confusing experience, given that, from my point of view as an angsty punk-rock teen, the whole thing seemed irredeemable. Moving on from the casual misogyny of the era is probably for the best, as is the softening of the ironic hatefulness that marks Enid’s more edgelord tendencies. (Enid’s casual use of ableist slurs, for example, barely registered as offensive in 2001.) But c’mon—“she gets in one car wreck and all of a sudden she’s Little Miss Perfect and everyone loves her,” is still a funny line.
Zwigoff almost certainly identifies with the character of sad-sack record collector Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a fortysomething man whose myopic interests and defensive misanthropy make him Enid’s unlikely soul mate. Their age gap was, frankly, the element of the film that I was most nervous about revisiting. I dreaded scenes I didn’t remember, but imagined must be there, where Seymour abuses the power he has over unemployed teenager Enid as a grown man with an apartment and a car of his own.
But while it’s undeniably icky that the two end up sleeping together, for the most part those subtle signals never materialized. Instead, I saw a girl who assumes that she’s unattractive to men in general, who feels invisible when boys try to chat up her best friend. (“Am I even here?,” she snaps at one of them.) Presented with a man who’s even lower than she is on the sexual totem pole, she’s unconsciously testing the limits of her power—and trying to soothe her guilt about how they met—by dangling the prospect of a relationship in front of this dork. The fact that she actually grows to like him is much too vulnerable, and so she keeps it a secret until it’s too late.
Enid is a self-sabotager. She cares about her art, and cares about Seymour, but feels compelled to blow both of them up by turning in an artifact of Seymour’s employer’s racist past as her final art project. (Ileana Douglas’ remedial art teacher, one of the more specific caricatures in the film, eats up her half-assed artist’s statement.) It’s not exactly right to say that she does this on purpose—she just has an instinctual urge to destroy everything she loves.
She’s a confused, frightened adolescent blindly punching in all directions, one whose smug superiority and selfish behavior cover a deep well of self-loathing. I was one of those, too. And looking back on my own mouthy asshole years through the lens of Enid Coleslaw, I felt a mixture of embarrassment and compassion. As a teenager, Ghost World was aspirational. But as an adult, I felt the same way Roger Ebert did in his 2001 review: “I wanted to hug this movie.”
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s also clear that the biggest mistake Enid makes in Ghost World is not whatever fucked-up psychosexual game she’s playing with Seymour. It’s being too wrapped up in that game to notice that the most important relationship in her life—that with her best friend Rebecca—is slowly dying. At the beginning of the film, the two are tuned in to the same frequency, thinking the same things and having the same desires and goals. But before long, it becomes clear that, although they wear the same disaffected armor, there are walls between them as well.
Rebecca is eager to become an adult, and accepts that she’ll have to conform to at least some of society’s expectations to get what she wants—namely, financial independence. Enid doesn’t want a job, or an apartment, or a boyfriend, or anything, really. Enid needs to figure some things out first, but instead of telling Rebecca this up front, she lets a series of little betrayals and inconsiderate slights build up until Rebecca gets annoyed and walks away, once again sidestepping the need for an (ugh) honest conversation. By midway through the film, Rebecca has almost been written out of the story entirely. Enid barely notices.
At the end of the film, nothing is resolved and no one is feeling any better. (Thank God.) Seymour is going to therapy and living with his mom, and Enid walks away, leaving the life she’s known in ruins. Enid doesn’t talk about dying, but she can’t imagine what her future will look like, either. She tells Seymour in a moment of rare vulnerability: “You know what my number one fantasy used to be?… I used to think about one day—just not telling anyone and going off to some random place. And I’d just—disappear.” In the journal I toted everywhere, I wrote about wanting to walk out into the woods on a cold, clear day, dig a hole in the earth with my fingernails, curl up in it, cover myself in leaves, and sleep forever.
Revisiting the film, there’s a moment where Enid, crawling back to the life she and Rebecca have been planning since they were kids, is packing her stuff to take to the new apartment. Holding up a T-shirt with the name of the almost assuredly low-paying, thankless job she’s taking on to afford rent, she sees the future she’s stumbled into by default. It’s a small moment, but it broke my heart.
Because eventually, you have to stop running from yourself. These days, my therapist makes me do meditation exercises that I hate and talks a lot about not judging your feelings as good or bad, but simply acknowledging them and moving on. I roll my eyes, because being too cool for everything lasts forever. But I wouldn’t be sitting cross-legged on a couch clutching a wet Kleenex if rejecting the world before it can reject you was a viable strategy for long-term health and happiness.
We don’t see what happens to Enid after she gets on that mysterious bus to nowhere, which some interpret as symbolic of her dying by suicide. But there’s another, more hopeful interpretation. Like Enid, I took the bus out of Cincinnati the first chance I could, and things did get a little bit better over time. The urge to flee has even calmed, with time and those emotion regulation worksheets I begrudgingly fill out every week. My life is full of Enids and Rebeccas, the weird girls of their respective high schools who drifted together. Sometimes the bus is the end. But if you can hold on, wait just a little bit longer than you think you can, your bus will come.
143 Comments
I like this movie & like all the characters & feel bad for & also relate to themI wish that Thora Birch’s career had gone as well as her costars, I think she was good in this
Her career seems to be doing fine to me. Hell, she’s only 39yo, and has been steady acting since she was like 4.
Birch is so damn good it’s a crime she didn’t have a better career and, sadly, much of the blame falls on her father slash manager who apparently is a gigantic fucking creep and did massive, nearly irreparable damage to her career and reputation.
That happened after she took a break from acting and her getting a degree.
In fairness, her career is going better than Brad Renfro’s. And I don’t remember the last time I saw Scarlett Johansson in a movie. Lucy, maybe? I hope she’s finding work.
You almost got me there, almost. Thora Birch has had a fairly steady career in the last decade or so. Taking a casual approach to acting and being specific about roles.
Scarlett Johansson has been living off that sweet MCU moolah for a decade.
I heard something about a lawsuit with one of those big movie studios, so that’s probably it for her.
Her career went fine. She intentionally took a few time outs from acting since Ghost World because burnout, personal stuff, and even went to school and got a degree. Now, she only prefers indie stuff and has gotten more involved in politics even as far as the stuff she does for the Democrats now.
In 2001 I would never have guessed that the “other girl” from Ghost World would become one of the biggest celebrities on the planet.
Thora Birch didn’t have the gravitas of Home Alone 3 to bolster her career.
I remember watching Ghost World and thinking it was weird how within the movie guys don’t seem to notice or hit on Enid as much as Rebecca. I had started crushing on Thora Birch in American Beauty, and the Enid character and look increased that exponentially. “Why is everyone supposed to be more interested in her bland looking, generically attractive friend?” I thought. And then of course over the next decade Scarlett Johansson became a mega star and an international sex symbol. Until I watched Ghost World again after Johansson became super famous, I didn’t even remember that she played Rebecca, as I was the inverse of the guys in the movie and looked past Johansson to the point of not even noticing her next to Birch.And on re-watch a lot of the issue seems to be Enid projecting her self-disdain onto others which makes sense, its not her looks its her personality getting in the way (and when I was an angry teen I found that personality very attractive, so I didn’t get that part then). I’m still baffled that her character in American Beauty wanted breast implants, though.
I last I saw her was (gasp!) riding the bus in a small part on The Last Black Man in San Francisco!
She’s been on the bus so long her hair rusted!
It’s better to feel, if you can handle it, but it’s a tall order if you are thoroughly traumatized. I really enjoyed this movie – Watching it convinced me that Scarlett Johansson is a really talented actress.I also feel bad for anyone born any later than, say 1995 – What an objectively worse world for those kids to grow up in.
“What an objectively worse world for those kids to grow up in.”That’s not true at all, by pretty much all standards the average person in the world is in a far better position now than they were in the ‘90s. Even with Covid.
This is such steven pinker(flight log)bs. Everything has gotten much worse in the past 20 years, from massive income inequality, more wars, and we are ever closer to a heat death on this planet. There is less violent crime but beyond that it’s much worse
I have no idea who that is but the idea that there are more wars now is entirely counterfactual.
“we are ever closer to a heat death on this planet”The Earth is not going to turn into Venus what is wrong with you?
It’s ironic that the decline in organized religion in American society hasn’t led to a decline in Apocalyptism, it’s just made doom-and-gloom spirituality sillier. Whatever internet personality or pseudoscientist that post mentioned is filling the same role as “Pharisee” a hundred years ago.
It’s always easy to be a doomsayer because bad things always happen, it’s hard for the average person to see that there are, for example, far fewer wars and a lot less African poverty than there were 30 years ago.
You people are so up your own ass it’s not even fucking funny.
Errr…you’re the one who has been writing one sentence replies and yelling at me for no reason, and now you’re insulting me out of the blue without even explaining your point at all.
Protip: That’s a thing that major assholes do.
You need to learn how to communicate in a civilized manner. You might actually be able to find friendship and meaningful relationships in real life if you don’t scream at people and insult them as soon as you meet them.
I’ve been reading your posts, and you have been absolutely correct that things are objectively and statistically better for most people here and worldwide now than thirty years ago despite the media and the internet/internet commenters insistence on otherwise who love to dwell in cynical, misanthropic, pessimism because it gets clicks and likes. It also demonstrates the ignorance/myopia of your average American. Yeah sure things were great for them as a white, straight, middle class American, they weren’t if you were LGBT (no gay marriage, normalized homophobia everywhere), PoC, (police brutality rampant and no one cared),or living in Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans, Africa, especially Rwanda and the Congo, East/SE Asia with its repeated financial crisis’s, etc. It also explains the nostalgia porn today, that they also hypocritically complain about.
I am trans fuck off with your cis white identity bullshit to me
Also if everyone’s lives are better why is everyone so pissed off? Oh because their lives have clearly gotten worse besides the richest people getting richer. Fuck off you losers
Explain to me how African Americans in America haven’t lost historic amounts of wealth over the last 20 years if you are going to base this on identity
Love when libs look for ways of denying climate change
And I live when fundamentalists pretend science is a religion.
Yeah, on the scale of “heat death of the planet” it really doesn’t make a huge difference whether you were born 15 years ago or 25 years ago.
So you all agree that it’s happening but that the world is a better place. This is the type of shit why most Americans are so frustrated. Everything has gotten countlessly worse, and then these college educated types spit in your face and tell you it’s the greatest time in the history of civilization. America is going to end the world and so many people would be fine as long as a dem is in office
Sure, you have no good future to look forward to, but line goes down on graph! So feel better.
What I’m saying is that “heat death of the planet” means that earth has reached thermodynamic equilibrium and that is not going to happen until the sun burns out sometime around 8 billion years from now.
“The Earth is not going to turn into Venus”No, but it might as well do for all the good it’s going to do us.
There’s a pretty huge difference between 2 degrees C higher temps that cause rising sea levels/more fires and 475 degrees C surface temp with boiling acid rain: One we can live in and one we can’t.This is the kind of stuff that doesn’t do anyone any good.
Also you know nothing about jsoc if you think there are less wars than before. Yes we have formally withdrawn from Afghanistan but we have more troops in Africa than in history
From what I can find, as of September of last year there were 7k US military personnel on rotational deployment in Africa. Unless that number has risen significantly in the last year I think you’re making my point for me.
WE ARE NOT IN A WAR WITH ANY AFRICAN COUNTRIES, IN THE PAST INSTEAD OF 7000 IT WAS 0 JFC.
Holy shit dude yelling at me is entirely unnecessary. Would you just scream in someone’s face in the middle of a reasonable discussion in real life? Because, if so, there are some things you can do to improve your conversational abilities and not get punched in the mouth so often.
We have 7000 troops in Africa but a lot fewer deployed overall.
Please, learn a bit about polite conversation before you post on the internet again.
You are my enemy I litteraly don’t care what happens to you or your life. We are not on the same side and dipshit reactionaries need to be educated or purged
Damn ok you’re getting flagged for hate speech on that one.
Standards of living/wealth around the globe have (on average) increased drastically, doubling almost across the board, in the last 20 years. The one exception — the one exception — is around the 80th percentile, i.e. the American/western European middle class. And even that has held steady rather than actively decreasing.
Would it be great if the gains realized by the 90th-99th percentiles were distributed more evenly down the scale? Eh, sure. But honestly, there are a lot of people below the people who are complaining who could use it more.
Thats because of one nation, China. In the United States the opposite has happened.
China’s historic growth (India as well) is why those global numbers have gone up. But when you look at countries on an individual basis the future is much bleaker.
I know you mean climate change, but that’s not what “heat death” is.
A few years ago Colombia’s civil war ended and for the first time in recorded history there was no war in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, a crescent running from Afghanistan to Congo was the only region on Earth where wars were being fought, and that’s unprecedented in human history.Besides less violent crime, teen pregnancy’s at a historic low, global poverty is at a historic low, and the vaccine scientists managed to put together in record time to deal with COVID may lead to vaccines for AIDS and cancer. And we put a helicopter on fucking Mars.Not saying everything in the world is perfect and wonderful, but saying everything is getting worse is every bit as blinkered and myopic.
Even tv is worse the average season 12 episode of the simpsons is funnier than most TV now
But the brunch was so tasty!
The world may be more comfortable, but you’ve still got to sit in it all day and wallow.
I posted this upthread, but especially in a conversation about hiding actual distress under disdainful irony, it’s wild to me that people would say it was better 20 or 30 years ago. Acknowledgement of mental illness and awareness of mental health has come a looong way. My parents were constantly concerned about my mental well-being when I was a teenager, but they expressed it by scolding me over stupid things like clothes and music. The handful of times I actually asked for help, they scolded me for complaining. Then my mom died of suicide, and my family had no tools to cope with those feeling (except drinking). Ironically, that perception of mental illness as weakness or moral deficiency just leads to worse mental illness.
I think part of why that attitude is common is there is a reasonable case that life for many people in, say, the United States has not gotten significantly better since the 1990s, although even that has some rather notable exceptions.But yeah, if you look outside of the United States, and maybe a few of its rough economic peers, then there are just so many measures by which outcomes have been objectively improving.
People in the US are generally better off than they were even 30 years ago. For example, check out poverty:I tend to find people really don’t know much about history at all, which tends to make them think things were better in the old days. Things absolutely were NOT better in the old days.And I’m not even going to start on the amazing advances in medical technology since the ‘90s. That alone makes this pretty much the best possible time in the history of humanity to be alive.
Dude, don’t be the “line goes up/line goes down = things better” liberal
Yea relying on facts to make an argument is something only a dumb liberal does, people who know stuff with their gut are the ones to trust!It’s like when the other kids in elementary school told me ‘My parents say only stupid people read books, smart people are farmers or truck drivers!’ when I was reading a book.
When you speak globally, you are correct, Hundreds of millions of chinese and Indians alone have moved out of poverty and had their lives improved economically, for example. However, the graph you use is a joke as it’s based on triple estimated food costs for Americans as it was 50 years ago. It does not account for changes in American life such as the fact that average rents/housing costs are a larger part of people’s bills nowadays. Further wages in constant dollars have stagnated over the last 40 years for most people and declined a little for people at the bottom.It is harder for the middle class today than it was for the middle class 40 years ago. Now that does not mean that there has not been progress in other areas.
“When you speak globally, you are correct”Which is exactly what I’m doing, and I know I’m correct, thanks!
Even with the shit-show of the last 5 years, there is no other time I’d rather be alive.
I might pipe up on medical advances, actually. I just went through chemotherapy and radiotherapy to treat my rectal cancer. When my mum had her chemo twenty-odd years ago, it was a bunch of intravenous stuff that knocked her thoroughly around. I had one intravenous hit every three weeks and the rest was tablets, and while it wasn’t pleasant and I was tired a lot, I hardly got any nausea and was still able to go out and live my life; I even had an interstate vacation in there.
Good call! It’s pretty uncontroversial to me that medical technology has progressed a lot. I might counter that access to healthcare is still really unequal, medical billing is out of control, and that regulatory capture has fueled total disasters like the opioid crisis, but those don’t negate your experience of getting a way better experience than would have been available to you decades ago.
Well, I’m Australian, and we have universal healthcare, so that also meant my experience was significantly better than what I understand a lot of Americans go through. I got billed for meds and some supplies; the rest was covered.
Sounds great. To your health!
I know economics isn’t really a zero-sum game where there absolutely have to be winners and losers, but still, part of the reason why the rest of the world is getting better is that for the past 300 years or so Europe and America have pretty much owned everything and now the rest of the world is finally getting in the picture after recovering from colonialism. That’s better overall, but not necessarily for Europe and America.
I don’t know if you’re reiterating the Steven Pinker position (which I am firmly in disagreement with), but we’ve firmly closed the door on a lot of possibilities of the 90’s even if we’ve made incremental progress in some areas.
We totally wasted the last 20 (60-plus, really) years on climate change, and we’re starting to really notice the pain in the western world, and we will never be able to make up that time. Mass incarceration has spiked since the 80s, and is only maybe starting to come down. The “war on terror” destabilized and destroyed a number of countries, causing an ongoing refugee crisis that the western world continues to refuse to grapple with. Economic inequality has steadily grown (since the late 60s) according to the Gini Coefficient. Housing bubbles have popped, bankrupting a large amount of people, and then the housing affordability index since the crash has gone up to now unreasonable levels (and not just in the US), tracking when people are actually able to have some earnings. There has been a huge loss in democracy, civil liberties, and civil rights in the last 20 years. I can’t source everything, but I’m not pulling this out of my hat. I can’t fathom a way in which the world and this generation of young adults is better off than people 20 years older.A lot of this stuff really goes back to the Reaganomics of the 80s, and a lot goes back even further. It’s just bad decisions built on bad decisions, built on a foundation of terrible moral and economic calculus. The sorrow I feel for Gen Z and whoever is next is much greater than my millenial self-pity. I have some possible hope around decreasing incarceration rates, but we have such a smaller social safety net, that there is going to be little opportunity for this underclass that we have yanked out of society for a long time. All of this depends on being able to magically implement something democratic from our existing state of oligarchy, and of course, climate change is the biggest danger and existing destructive force underlying it all.The problems of the 90s seem quaint by comparison.
“I don’t know if you’re reiterating the Steven Pinker position”Again, no fucking clue who this guy is, just looking at actual statistics the average person is better off now than any time in history. You’re talking about housing bubbles while I’m talking about literal poverty rates factually dropping like rocks. Crazy advances in medical technology that make diseases like AIDS, which were a death sentence in the ‘90s, not mortal illnesses. Even the Covid vaccine is absolutely amazing science that was developed over the past ~20 years that has saved or will save millions of lives.
You can call it incremental if you’d like but it’s a hell of a lot more than that for the millions of people who won’t die from starvation like they would have 30 years ago. Or people who won’t get black lung because we’re making power cheap as shit with windmills and they don’t have to work in mines like some of my friends parents did back when we were kids. Or people who have clean drinking water because of the environmental policies we’ve put into place…you think things like Flint are bad but back in the day there were A LOT more places like Flint.
Maybe this Steven Pinker dude looks at all of the actual facts worldwide rather than cherry picking things like you do? If so then yes, I take the same position as Steven Pinker, because it’s factually true.
You seem to have not understood my post, perhaps based on me not providing a chart. Here is a website with charts:https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/I am attempting to take your post in good faith and respond to it. There are different statistics that one can use to support their position. We could argue that the death rate for AIDs could have been greatly lowered if not for the government’s response at the time, and that technological innovation is incidental and not causative (this is a great place for us to waste time arguing about just worlds and naturalistic fallacies), and that the current COVID death rate could have been greatly reduced by a number of different decisions that could not be made due to not having a functioning democracy.
You are hanging your hat on your poverty rate chart, and I believe that my chart is more relevant. The debate over the best way to measure it is a big one – I disagree with your position, but by all means, look up Steven Pinker – I think he may confirm your worldview. I can’t even argue with someone with such a simplistic view of what a fact is.
“I am attempting to take your post in good faith and respond to it.”Great! I’m glad because I am posting in good faith.“We could argue that the death rate for AIDs could have been greatly
lowered if not for the government’s response at the time, and that
technological innovation is incidental and not causative”Sure,
we could, but it wouldn’t actually be relevant to this discussion
because we’re talking about what did happen rather than what could have
happened.“the current COVID death rate could have been greatly reduced by a
number of different decisions that could not be made due to not having a
functioning democracy.”We could discuss the definition of a ‘functioning democracy’ and the merits thereof in a different conversation, you’re specifically talking about the United States and I am not. Maybe it’s because I posted that US poverty chart in response to someone talking specifically about the US?
“I believe that my chart is more relevant.”And yet you don’t explain why at all. I’m saying that the average person on this planet has a better life than they did in pretty much all of the past, not being in poverty is a HUGE part of that, but it’s not all I’m ‘hanging my hat on’ considering I’ve talked about lack of wars and amazing advances in technology. You seem to be arguing that the life of the average first world person is slightly less good than it has been at points in the past, which is something completely different and not at all what I’m talking about.
“I can’t even argue with someone with such a simplistic view of what a fact is.”Hey wow that’s an asshole statement considering you were literally the one who said: “I can’t source everything, but I’m not pulling this out of my hat.” You’re talking about ‘Gen Z’ and I’m talking about ‘everybody in the entire world’. “look up Steven Pinker – I think he may confirm your worldview”I don’t need anyone to ‘confirm my worldview’, you certainly seem obsessed with this Pinker guy though.
I was writing about what has happened, what could have happened, and explicitly making the connection that what is happening and what will happen is both a function of what has happened and what hasn’t, but couldn’t. You didn’t need to respond to my post and complain to define my claim in terms that are convenient to you. This is going nowhere.I already explained my claim in terms of rising income inequality. Your poverty stat is a controversial measure, because of the way it is put together. To point to this poverty rate is pat and simplistic. If you and I are in a car that is in mid air from flying off a cliff, and you are claiming that our trajectory is upward, and my claim is that we already flew off the cliff, then we can both be correct in the particular claims we’re making.Indeed, Pinker is my particular synecdoche for a simplistic and totally anti-historical neo-liberal (“rational”) worldview. No worries, we’re not in danger of convincing each other of anything here.
“I was writing about what has happened, what could have happened, and explicitly making the connection that what is happening and what will happen is both a function of what has happened and what hasn’t, but couldn’t”And, in terms of what I’m talking about, is entirely meaningless.
“You didn’t need to respond to my post and complain to define my claim in terms that are convenient to you. This is going nowhere.”No, I responded to your post and asked you to elaborate on what you said, because you hadn’t explained a damn thing. You refuse to provide any elaboration, thus your argument goes nowhere.
“To point to this poverty rate is pat and simplistic.”To point at income inequality is pat and simplistic and also you NEVER EXPLAINED WHY YOU THINK IT’S IMPORTANT. Also the poverty rate is not the only thing I was talking about, but you’re entirely ignoring that. Additionally, I used the poverty rate as an example, which is something people do when they make an argument. I’d provide more examples but I really don’t think it’s worth my time since you won’t even explain yourself.
“Pinker is my particular synecdoche for a simplistic and totally anti-historical neo-liberal (“rational”) worldview.”Just because you apparently have no clue what I’m talking about doesn’t mean it’s ‘simplistic’ or ‘anti-historical’, it means that you don’t actually know what’s going on. You’re going to want to learn a lot more about history, economics and politics before you start having this discussion again. Facts are now ‘anti-historical’ lol
“No worries, we’re not in danger of convincing each other of anything here.”Absolutely not because you’re pretty much just imagining what I’m saying and then responding to your imagination. You’re not going to convince me of anything by setting up straw men and knocking them down.
Thank you for this. I was 23 when this came out, and it and High Fidelity influenced my music store employment snobbery for the rest of the decade. I still love this movie and it’s one of the most perfect castings of Steve Buscemi.I consider myself an Xenennial because X is too old and millennial is too young.
Yep. Born 1978 and the youngest of three with two solid Xer siblings (1971 [sis] & 1974 [bro]).
I was a male Enid in the 80s. Of course, all my posturing mattered not at all and I’m learning as an adult how useless and poisonous nihilistic cynicism can be. Now my daughter is an Enid in the 2020s. Thankfully she imploded early enough in middle school for her to get significant mental health help as a freshman and hopefully will shed some of her defense mechanisms now instead of carrying them into her adulthood. On the one hand, I’m happy that she isn’t seeing the world through rose-colored glasses but on the other it’s been really tough on her.
In hindsight it’s crazy that one of the most significant events in 90s pop culture was Kurt Cobain’s suicide, but I don’t recall any particular emphasis as a teen on destigmatizing mental illness or promoting mental health (beyond overtly religious, unhelpful “concern”). My age group indulged in that awful “Romantic nihilism” attitude, and my parents’ generation was so terrified of mental illness that they chose to focus on drug use as the root cause. When people talk about today’s world being so much worse for kids, they’re speaking from a very specific place. I’m really glad your daughter has access to a supportive parent and actual help.
Yeah thanks. There’s no doubt that COVID-19 related isolation and the internet acted as accelerants too. The internet enabled her to go down some dark holes. Not that she didn’t have her share of family related trauma (mild relative to many, many other but still there).
This thread really helped me today, thanks.
Yeah, same, mostly. My child is a bit younger than yours, so we’ll see where that goes.As to nihilism, I think a good distinction to make is that “nihilism” =/= “not caring about anything.” The former is an actual philosophy, while the latter is an easy go-to for folks who are (momentarily or otherwise) confused and scared by the world and need a ready coping mechanism. Actual nihilism can guide someone to find purpose in a world without intrinsic meaning (which is a MAD short version), while performative nihilism is more like flipping a switch off and HOLDING it there. If my child ever gets to that performative point (as we did, from what I can tell), I hope to effectively teach that lesson.
I’m so glad she’s getting the help she needs and you are supportive of that. My older kids have mental health issues, too, and I’m really determined to be pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it, to make it clear to them it’s utterly normal and a good thing to get help.There has to be a middle ground between rose-colored glasses and edge-lordy nihilism. I didn’t fit in either (in so many ways), but I never ventured into Enid territory; whether because of luck, temperament, or a genuinely happy home life, I don’t know.
Thanks for this terrific read. I loved this movie, but it’s been 20 years and I really should watch it again.
I haven’t seen this in years, but I never considered people would ever see Seymour as even remotely predatory when he was the one being taken advantage of. I remember when Enid seduces him, it really caught me off guard since it didn’t seem like that was the kind of relationship they had.I was in my early 20s when I saw this, and while I shared Enid’s sort of better than/smarter than/above it all attitude, I identified more with Seymour. I was afraid I was going to end up that lonely and pathetic and unequipped for life even into middle age with rare experiences of pity from women. And I was right. I don’t feel as lonely as I used to, but I think that part of me has just died.Funny movie, though.
It wasn’t until a recent rewatch that I noticed Rebecca is totally checking out mullet-guy’s bod when he walks up.
Said it upthread, but there was a guy almost exactly like that in my hometown. He’d do shirtless handstands against the wall of Store 24 for hours.
Thanks Katie, this essay was lovely.I similarly saw the book and movie as aspirational when I saw it as a teen. I had grown up watching Daria and trying my best to meet people who took culture “seriously” enough to mock everything that was conventional and not extraordinarily cool. Back then the ending to Ghost World felt poignant, in that way that cool stuff is poignant. I don’t remember what kind of meaning I drew out of it, except a feeling that everything has to end eventually, the acknowledgement of which felt like a badge that a piece of art had to wear to be deep.
Rewatching the movie now, I think I’d see myself in the Buscemi character a lot too much for comfort. And I think I’d be a lot more focused on the ending as a death of childhood naivete, with reflexive cynicism being one of those traits of youth we eventually have to set aside. Because hey, it’s a story that tells us what we need, when we need it. And that’s fucking deep.
I’ve mentioned it here before, not only was I into Daria, but for a little while some of my peers called me “the Misery Chick” after a particular episode of Daria. Except I am a guy. And it was my friends calling me that! But I DID speak in a mostly monotone voice laced with hostile sarcasm and cynicism until like my mid-20s, so I can’t say they were wrong.BTW, going back to Daria and Ghost World as an adult, I still find GW to be excellent and well-observed even if I come at it from a different point of view as an adult. Daria, though, is occasionally funny but mostly hollow and dismissively mean spirited, looking back I realize that even seemingly stupid or one-dimensional people I knew in high school had more going on than the caricatures in the show. Now I think her dad Jake is the best part of the show. The best joke in the whole thing was Jake reading a newspaper at breakfast and saying to no one in particular, “I don’t understand why they don’t they just have Marmaduke put to sleep?”
“They didn’t call it self-love when I was a boy, Kevin. They called it self-abuse.”
Geez Jake, he’s a Great Dane. They have a life expectancy of like six years at best, just let it be.I do still like the musical episode of Daria. And I appreciate that the show tried to dig into the flaws of her approach to life, at least in its last few episodes. But I agree, a lot of it lost its luster once I didn’t need constant commiseration about how high school was hell.
I hope you don’t take this as a backhanded compliment, but this is the kind of pop culture contextualization that I miss from this site. Great read, thoughtfully written, and a reminder of why I enjoy coming here.
I was thinking the same thing. A little glimmer of the AV Club of old.
Seriously. I saw the link on twitter, and expected to be taken to the way-back-machine. I wasn’t aware AV-Club was still pusblishing this sort of thing by 2021.
I was never an Enid, but I was absolutely a Holden Caulfield. The differences are negligible.
Thank you for such a nice piece. It is a great movie and a wonderful ‘zine.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as old as when I realised that I now found Enid fairly exhausting, and Rebecca was the more interesting of the two.
As a late period Boomer I liken Enid’s end to Jimmy’s in the Quadrophenia film – not suicide, but a symbolic acceptance of having to navigate the “real world” on its own terms. The white “blues” band may be the best satire of cultural appropriation ever (as well as the frat boy in the audience craving some Reggae). Lastly, I’d like current pop culture luminaries like Taylor, Harry, Ariana, Ed et.al a lot more if they were less aspirational/romantic and more sneeringly condescending.
Ariana Grande doesn’t have a sneer exactly, but she definitely looks like she thinks she’s better than you. More like one of the mean popular girls.
That’s worse – smugly singing about love, acceptance, exclusivity. I miss genuinely good-hearted punks whose lyrics took the piss out of such platitudes. Anyway, my daughter was a kid when Grande was on Victorious and a tween during the Sam and Kat years. I was shocked she suddenly became such a megastar. When driving my daughter to school these days, we’ll listen to the “hits” radio station. I will admit that Grande’s voice sounds better than most of her peers. Too bad the songs don’t resonate.
Who were these good-hearted punks that had the same level of fame as Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande? I’m not sure there have been any that sustained fame for very long.
I’m assuming kids these days gravitate more toward the successful than previous. Those I went to school with were more into the Clash, Ramones, etc. despite their lack of chart success.
No, there are still bands kids are into that aren’t the most popular chart toppers. The equivalent of Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande back then would have been something like Abba or the Jackson 5. The equivalent to the Clash today is maybe Kendrick Lamar or Tyler the Creator maybe.
I wish that were true, but I never hear the (college-educated, well-paid) Millennials I work with talk about the likes of Kendrick Lamar or Tyler the Creator. It’s whoever is trending highest on Twitter. In the age of influencers and TikTok superstars, the allure and impact of fame created and sustained through social media is too intoxicating for many teens and twentysomethings to call bullshit and check out the new Snail Mail album.
I like Snail Mail well enough and need to check out the new record, but she’s been ALL over Instagram (although this could be algorithms giving me what I’m likely to buy).
You may be right, and this may be proof no artist is indie enough to escape the homogenizing maws of today’s hype machine. If you’ll excuse me, I need to yell at some kids from my porch.
I think pop-grungy, solo female singer/songwriters are just kind of “in” right now is all. That’s not a slight on them, I like every one of them I can think of, but they are there on the fringes of the mainstream.
Like, I don’t expect Special Interest to be hosting SNL and doing Cosmopolitan photoshoots any time soon, so there are still shadowy corners out there 🙂
It is true. You just work with quislings. College-educated, well-paid people are pussies. Of course they’re listening to whatever the algorithm tells them to. On the other hand, I am a college-educated, under-paid millennial, and and I don’t even own a Spotify. I listen exclusively to Edison wax cylinders. Its a shame I can’t get my favourite music on them (it’s mostly recordings of people talking or electrocuting elephants), but it’s so much more authentic.I think if you worked in an office (or wherever you work) in the late 70’s you would have found very few people listening to The Clash and The Ramones. It was probably all Bee Gees. Don’t judge the whole generation on a few chodes you work with.
Also, Snail Mail is all well and good, but it’s cool dad music. Don’t let her being on an indie label fool you (a 30+ year old label I should add). I’m not saying it’s bad, but the music she makes is old fashioned.
Great read, I wish these articles were more popular.
I need to revisit this. Back then, which I guess is keeping with the source material, I liked it okay, but…yeah, I grew up with the precise kinds of townies in that flick. I did not care for them. Fuck, replace “dicking around with nunchucks” with “inexplicably doing shirtless handstands outside of Store 24 (for hours, apparently)” and I’ve seen that very thing. And I knew in the back of my head that the “self-styled edgelord/wannabe iconoclast” thing was a pathos-screaming exercise when I was doing that.All that to say that I’d like to see how it hits, two decades later, after having seen many iterations of those characters similarly grow up.
I actuallly related more to Seymour myself, in his relationship to his collections. And I was right there with him at the concert with the idiots enjoying that “blues” band.
I think that this movie is the best work that both Zwigoff and Clowes have done. I haven’t seen Bad Santa, but I have seen Crumb, and while I liked it when I first saw it, now I can’t get halfway through it without cringing at what a creep Crumb is. Similarly, Clowes’ reflexive cynicism and reliance on unpleasant characters just makes me tired. I don’t even like their followup collaboration, Art School Confidential, as it’s the sort of pisstake on art school that I feel like I could have written myself without having either been to one or having more than a mild acquaintance with people who have. But this movie is a great meditation on both the attractions and limitations of this sort of worldview for alienated young people.
Art School Confidential is painful, and Crumb was one of those weird movies where my wife and I kept asking each other why this was such an acclaimed documentary. There were some interesting moments (especially the comic strips drawn by Crumb’s brother that gradually become walls of text as his mental illness worsens), but he’s just kind of a boring, awful guy. Bad Santa was funny, though. I haven’t seen it since it came out, so I have no idea how it aged, but it had some great lines.
My original impression coming away from Crumb was that, yeah, he had some problems, but compared to the rest of his family, he was the normal one. This time, the way that he sort of paws at his ex-girlfriend while she’s talking about him just kind of skeeved me out.
I like Art School Confidential well enough, but they really had an uphill battle with that one, as it’s “adapted” from a two-page Clowes comic that was largely already mined for material in the Ghost World art-class scenes! Still, I kinda want to rewatch it. Bad Santa is hilarious, but yeah, Ghost World is pretty unbeatable in Zwigoff’s slim filmography. (Though I suspect that would be the case even if he had made a dozen more high-quality movies.)
Well … best work Clowes has done in film.
Mouthy Asshole Years is a great line, and the perfect descriptor of my teenage self as well (though I graduated high school in 1999 and you’ll have to take my self-imposed Gen X label from my cold, dead hands) …
As someone who graduated high school in 2002 and saw this movie for the first time a few months before graduation, I really wish I could say that I can’t relate to this as hard as I do. That teenage ironic detachment phase is mostly harmless, but it can really go some places if you don’t rein it in once you’re no longer in high school and shit actually matters. There are some lines that I still quote from this movie, though. I can’t see a Midwestern bar band playing without thinking to myself “Are you ready for some authentic down in the Delta blues?”The movie still holds up for the most part IMO (except for the wildly offensive but also period accurate casual homophobia and ableism) and I will never feel more seen by a film than when Enid is working at the movie theater and gets yelled at for not upselling the large sizes. High school me would have gladly watched an entire Get Back length epic about Enid’s experience being a bored teenager working at a shitty movie theater (present me is fine with it being a brief sequence in a larger film.)I’m convinced in the alternate timeline where Al Gore prevailed in 2000, Thora Birch became a huge star.
“I don’t want to meet someone who shares my interests! I hate my interests!”
Oh yeah, Blueshammer is still my go-to nickname for any bar band playing a blend of “blues, punk, rock and metal” while some dude gurns his way through some boomer-bends on a Les Paul.
“I roll my eyes, because being too cool for everything lasts forever.”Speaking of which, my two cents is you should be proud of the fact you wrote poetry, not ughing it. Not least because you are now a professional writer, and I dare say that your poetry was in some way part of that journey.
Great essay. Related to it a lot, though from an even further back vantage of envying, copying, and misunderstanding punk rock. Coolness is a delicious poison, and devious, because if you succeed and become cool, you then realize that you’re just another goddamn TYPE! You might as well have let yourself have authentic feelings and vulnerabilities that show you where you must grow the whole fuckin’ time!That said, I have been playing Jaan Pechechan Ho to my family incessantly lately, how timely!
Enid’s desire to just melt away reminds me of the novel “Generation X” talking about “living a small life on the margins” or whatever. It was a fixation of my annoying useless generation which is rightfully mocked. This movie was one of the thankful last gasps of Gen X culture
Gen Xer hating Generation X, how Gen X
She takes a bus somewhere with no money, job, clothes, or anything else, and is going to do what exactly? So, no, I never much liked the ending. Somehow end up with a job exactly like Rebecca but in a different city while living in a cardboard box? Too cool to have a job (but gets someone to buy her some catwoman bondage headgear) is just horrifying bullshit to me. I suppose that I sound like her parents.
No, her dad is much nicer than this.
He shouldn’t have been.
> She takes a bus somewhere with no money, job, clothes, or anything else, and is going to do what exactly?If only things like metaphor and subtext existed and we didn’t have to take everything that happens on a movie screen excruciatingly literally.
The movie did not bend reality in the same way leading up to that anywhere. Suddenly taking that tack at the very end is cheating the audience. What is she going to do with her life after boxing herself out of everything? The film did not really have an answer.
This is definitely a problem if the main thing you’re looking for in movies is rules and answers.
Yeah, no. Consistency in tone and presentation. A character arc. I thought of where she could go with no money or other resources and be welcomed with open arms: boot camp! If you can phone a recruiter, they will send a car for you. She has a high school diploma.
“The film did not really have an answer.”
yeah its not suppose to, its also how the comic ends
This article is the type of piece I started reading the AV Club for in the first place, so many goddamned years ago. In a modern internet full of snarky proto-slang-filled-pretenders seeking meaningless clicks and engagements, it is so very refreshing to read something like this and have a 1-1 comparison to my own thought processes, feelings, and experiences without even sharing all of the same opinions. It’s perfect, thank you so much!
While Blueshammer was amusingly terrible, I do think making them that terrible was a bit of a wallow in too-coolness. They seem like a band that could not exist outside of a movie that created them entirely to make something no one with ears could find worth listening to. Which is exactly what it was, but in being that kind of band, it felt kinda mean toward that lady who was so jazzed about them she actually recommended them to other people.
This is really wonderful Katie, thank you
Great article, painfully relatable. I was a guy Enid, got together with a girl Enid right after high school, and proceeded to spend the next few years doing fuck all to better our lives because we were happy to be together hating everyone else and not committing to anything. Caught up with us by our mid-20s, and financial and mental health issues we ignored blew up. The last 9 or so years have been slowly digging ourselves out of that rut and growing as people, thankfully we were able to do that together.
It’s been a long while since I saw ‘Ghost World’, but I did a ‘Daria’ rewatch recently and man, it’s interesting how your views on Daria as a person shift after a few years away from your teenage self. She’s still funny and smart and relatable in a lot of ways, but she’s also her own worst enemy. And the Enid/Rebecca dynamic is pretty close to the Daria/Jane one, where a friend with a similar level of detachment is nonetheless smart enough to start striving for more.
People think she commits suicide? Huh. Huh.
I think it’s a fair, even likely reading since she is getting on a bus that we know doesn’t really exist and that an old man who the movie basically tells us had been waiting to die had already taken. Of course I prefer a more optimistic or at least poetic view, that she is leaving to find herself.
Hm, respectfully disagree. I don’t think the old man is telling us he’s waiting to die. I feel like people too often take symbols literally (or have trouble differentiating between literal and symbolic), such as in this case, reading a symbol for transition/change as…literal death, the last transition?
And not that this is too compelling, but the comic makes it even clearer that that’s not happening. With Zwigoff remaining pretty faithful to the material, I just don’t see it.The thing is, too, I’m not really an optimist–I just don’t see any indication that Enid is suicidal.
This piece is a great encapsulation of the movie. “Ghost World” was one of the first DVDs I ever bought. Watched it so many times. It’s such a perfect distillation of my personality and sense of humor. Like Katie, I graduated high school in 2002, so this was the movie that defined my post-senior-year summer. A little too young to be Gen X, but still had something of that attitude. I haven’t shaken that attitude off completely but I like to think I’m less insufferable nowadays.Like Enid and Rebecca, I hated the suburb I grew up in, didn’t care for the people in my school, and I even had a crush on a friend who was eerily like Enid, who I befriended not long before I heard about “Ghost World.” I saw a lot of myself in Seymour, and my ever-growing movie collection is one my biggest Seymourish tendencies. I felt like I’d turn into Seymour in middle-age. I’m mostly happier than he is, but I still have my curmudgeonly tendencies. And I collect movies the way he collects 78rpm records.
This was beautiful. Thank you.
Imagine seeing this film when it was released (as I did) and being asked which of the two female actors would end up being the mega-star who gets paid obscene amounts of money… who else would have picked Thora Birch rather than Scarlett Johannsen? Not that Scarlett was bad – not at all – but Thora was simply amazing (and yes, she had more to work with as a character). Anyway — She looked like she had massive fame lined up in front of her (and had already done American Beauty)… then kind of disappeared while Scarlett sky-rocketed.
At least you channeled your Enid-esque snark and detachment into a job where it works for you, Katie. Whereas Enid would probably take the suggestion of “why don’t you take this interest in the quirkier parts of pop culture and channel that into a writing career?” and snap, “sure, THAT sounds cool” as she rolls her eyes dismissively.I liked the two characters as the movie started, but quickly empathized more with Rebecca as she at least recognized she had to live in the real world, while Enid just didn’t seem to even realize she actually had to grow up now and not just pretend to be an adult.She’s kind of like a female Ignatius Reilly in that respect.
This has always been one of my favorite movies, and I couldn’t articulate why I connect with it so much nearly as well as Katie does here. It’s this kind of thoughtful, insightful writing that keeps me coming back to this site.
Katie, this was a really beautiful reflection. You nailed how attractive GenX cynicism was for proto-Millenials, doomed to come of age in the last monoculture before the internet blew it up. You articulated something that I’ve felt now that I’m approaching 40. (Extra points when you mentioned Cincinnati — The best GenX hipster hangout was The Comet in Northside, serving pre-Chipotle mission-style burritos and micro-brews *before* it was cool.)
Like a lot of commentators here, I really loved this movie when I was younger. My college film society showed the movie in spring ‘02 when I was 20 and I saw the movie twice in one night. Unfortunately I think the movie plays much worse approaching my 40’s. Enid is a whiny, entitled brat and Seymour is a creep who should absolutely not have touched an 18 year old, even if she came on to him.That said, I still really like the film. I think the depiction of the suburban hellscape is amazing. Should have gotten some oscar consideration at least for production design. To me, the movie is of a piece with the classics from the late ‘90s which critique the suburban or bourgeois lifestyle, e.g, the matrix, office space, fight club, etc.. I am also a huge fan of Daria, which I think holds up better despite some dated humor. I think Ghost World is a bit too much on Enid’s side, whereas Daria reminds you more often that her outlook is not ultimately healthy.
I was 28 when this came out and i absolutely adored it. I watched it 2 more times in my 30s as an overeducated underachiever with 2 degrees and continued to call it one of my favorite films that i have so much affection for (i find the ending truly heartbreaking). I’m curious about how i would feel watching it as a 48 y/o who is working through his 3rd degree and staunchly refuses to be a success in life. Your piece inspired me to watch it again. Thanks.
What an enjoyable piece, thank you.
It sounds like I’m marginally older (I turned 18 in 2001) and significantly less cooler than you (small-medium cities in the UK don’t have the same thrifting opportunities), but I definitely idolised Gen X’rs detachment, style and sense of irony in a way that curdled as I got involved with, retrospectively, often very mean, online cultures in the early 2000s, all from a sense of defensiveness and rejection. I loved Ghost World, discovering the comic at about 16 and loving the movie on its release.
Now, staring down the barrel of 40, after learning only my mid-20s that, no, most people don’t hate everything so much they want to die every day and I should get help for that (with some close calls with alcoholism on the way), I’m really ambivalent about growing up that way. I like that I look further than most for art and music. I like that I excelled in my degree was I could think critically and draw connections well, but other than that, it’s an alienating way to live and I’ve definitely sabotaged some connections through it. Not that I think those necessarily would have developed into deep relationships, but it’s good to feel liked and be a kind and positive force to the people around you.
So yeah, damn, elder millennials of a certain stripe really got it in both barrels from Gen-X nihilism and the early days of web forum edgelordism.
But hey, Dinsosaur Jr and Doom Patrol comics are great, right?
Enid doesn’t have to make things good with her BFF. That is bringing 2022-ness to a movie that is anything but.