The Automatik

I re-watched Ghost World over Christmas, so I’ve been thinking of it a lot, trying to determine exactly what it is I took from the movie to make me like it so much. After reading some reviews online, I’ve finally been prompted to write what I should have written when I first saw the film.

I agree with the reviewers who have noted that the film is vastly different from the comic. Some have said that because the film creates a plot that wasn’t in the comic, it focuses so thoroughly on Enid that it reveals what an awful person she really is. As my boyfriend Shaun wondered, “How can you like a movie with so many unappealing characters?!” It’s true that as time passes and as I move further from my own past Enid and Rebecca-style relationships, I can see how unappealing Enid is much more clearly than when I first read the comic and saw the film. In fact, when I first read it, I remember commenting to someone, “It’s so great! It reminds me of me and my best friend!” and her response of, “I’m glad I don’t have friends like that anymore” puzzled me until months later when I witnessed the slow death of my own such relationship.

Contrary to what some critics have claimed, I don’t think the impact of Enid and Rebecca’s decaying friendship is diluted by the character of Rebecca taking a back seat to Enid in the film. You can still see the decay when Rebecca gets annoyed at Enid for dyeing her hair green (which she did seemingly only to piss her off) and when she balks at being considered kin to the weirdos and the freaks, even though she’s perfectly willing to stalk Seymour in the 50s diner after their fake response to his personals ad.

That particular chicanery hits close to home because some of my friends took part in similar cruel jokes and even went as far as befriending the objects of their mean spiritedness. I had a friend who would become “anti” on a whim, such as “Oh, today we’re anti-Troy” or whoever it was she felt like being nasty to at the moment. After a particularly ugly split with these friends (later they claimed they only became anti-me because they missed me after I moved to California), they reunited with me in that Enid and Rebecca way of, “aren’t we being clever by befriending the loser?”

Even though Enid is fundamentally horrible, I do feel an affinity with her and I do feel that some of her opinions are dead on. It’s painfully funny when her disdain for the blonde guy in the caf� turns out to be justified after we hear his cheesy, “You guys up for some reggae tonight?” I can’t say I wouldn’t roll my eyes at the jerks in the sports bar, either. It’s ironic that she claims an affinity with ’77-era punk when the comic store employee rips on her punk rock look, but feels annoyance with Seymour when three of his interests are types of music, as if his quirks are somehow less narrow-minded than hers.

I disagree with critics who have said Enid is a shallow poseur because despite her behavior, I believe that she genuinely loves the things she collects and obsesses over, even if part of her love is rooted the coolness factor of being “into” those very things. It is that bit of humanity in her that draws her to Seymour despite her initial dismissal of him as a loser.

Yet Seymour is everything Enid is well on her way to becoming: a misanthropic freak whose life is so out of step with the outside world that he doesn’t even own a pair of jeans. How does Seymour expect to find a girlfriend when he can’t find anything in common with people other than his record collector peer group? By the same token, one wonders how Enid will function as an adult since she can’t even hold her sarcastic tongue long enough to hold a job.

Like Enid, I am simply different from many of my so-called peers and I can’t help it, though in more youthful times, I may have played up that factor to be the rebellious iconoclast. My sympathy for Enid stems partly from knowing what it is like to just not be able to fit in, no matter how hard I have tried or how far I have traveled from my teenage years into a state of adulthood. Unfortunately, the film downplays the scenes that appeared in the comic where Enid is overwhelmed by memories of her love for her children’s 45 record and replaces those scenes with ones depicting her obsessive, yet sincere attraction to the old blues song because the plot needs a way to bind her to Seymour emotionally; however, I do not think their relationship implies a romance as much as it displays Enid being enamored with herself as reflected in Seymour.

Enid’s feelings about the children’s 45 record reveal more than an interest in pop culture artifacts; she is in love with her childhood, a childhood, which, in all likelihood, was filled with the same sort of ennui she feels as a teenager. It’s just that things were simpler when you didn’t have to worry about such pesky things as figuring out what you’re going to do with your life. This nostalgia is what prevents her from moving forward. Enid confuses being an adult with being some sort of boring sheep until she gets to know Seymour and spies a glimmer of hope. This is what makes her think, however falsely, that being a square peg is somehow acceptable and possibly even desirable. After all, he has a job and he has “cool stuff” and he’s twice her age, so maybe she’ll have the same luck. Seymour, however, is probably as miserable as Enid, only he’s learned to accept it and bear his idiosyncrasy with some measure of dignity.

I am in no way implying that being different is wrong and that with maturity comes complacency and conformity. I don’t think I will ever really be mature, if maturity means listening to “whatever’s on the radio” and liking Ben Affleck movies. Yet we all must grow up to a certain extent, shedding certain childhood trappings without falling victim to the hypocrisy displayed in Ghost World by the drunk-driving high school graduation speaker.

Growing up also means making yourself emotionally available to people other than your best friend and realizing that you do not have to be identical to someone to have a fulfilling relationship with that person. Like Enid, my growth was stunted not only by obsessive love of my childhood, but by clinging onto a symbol of that childhood: a friendship that represented such insularity, such insecurity posing as self-aggrandizement, that it threatened not only my own individuality, but any future friendships, romantic or otherwise. Sometimes familiarity breeds a twin before it breeds contempt. Such misery truly does love company. Who are you more likely to love to hate than your mirror image?

This is what caused the slow death of Enid and Rebecca’s friendship; although if a real-life friendship were based wholly on a foul brew of codependency, negativity, envy and jealousy, then we would wonder if the bell tolled for it from the beginning. In my version, at least, there were happier times, and memories of these have made it all the more difficult to reconcile myself to the horrible end. Furthermore, how do you heal yourself after removing your Siamese twin? Since my personality was based so thoroughly on hers and vice versa, it has, at times, given me cause to doubt if I even had one of my own. Is it possible to get a divorce from yourself?

Yet my healing process has begun and is in fact, well underway, thanks to people like Shaun and my family, as well as other friends I have made along the way. Films like Ghost World also help me to see things more objectively and realize that life, unlike the movies, doesn’t have to have an ambiguous ending, or even an unhappy one. Although Enid doesn’t graduate from high school, she does come to a sort of peace with both Rebecca and Seymour. She takes the phantom bus to some sort of future; we can only hope that it is a more positive and fulfilling one.

For myself, I am slowly coming to an understanding that no matter how much I may have been indentured to the stifling friendships of years past, those people cannot stake a claim to my personality, my individuality, or my sense of self. Those things belong to me and me alone and they can only become stronger through my participation in the give and take that is the key to all truly satisfying relationships. Just because I have come to accept certain things in this world, live with them, and even learn to like some of the things I hated in the haughty, cooler-than-thou ignorance of youth, does not mean I am a sell-out to myself. If anything, I’m more “me” than I ever was before, and that is a great feeling.