It’s a ghost, ghost world
For my mom, who bought me the Ghost World comic, and for my dad, who forbade me to read it (but I never listened)
This essay contains spoilers
● Writing
Two eccentrically dressed, gloriously weird outsiders march in unison through an empty suburb that—though never explicitly identified—clearly plays itself as Los Angeles, with its endless strips of mini malls, ‘50s diners, and sex shops. You can almost hear the weight of their footsteps pressing into the soft, molten surface of the asphalt. I don’t remember anyone seeming cooler to me at the time than Thora Birch as the sarcastic Enid in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001), loosely adapted from Daniel Clowes’s 1997 comic (which Clowes also co-wrote for the screen). Her out-of-time clothing and ironic stance toward everything around her encapsulated exactly what I felt as a teenager—digging through secondhand store bins and obsessing over music no one else my age listened to: that jarring sense of non-belonging, of being dislocated in time (for Enid, the turn of the millennium; for me, the tail end of the 2000s); the refusal to identify with the current era’s cultural artifacts, and the desperate need to assert a separate identity at any cost. And, maybe most of all, the aching uncertainty of not knowing who I was supposed to be at all.
Enid and Rebecca—one feverishly committed to escaping reality, the other coolly aloof—are the kind of protagonists who rarely ask to be liked. And yet, we follow them with an uncanny sense of recognition. Their story follows the near-universal coming-of-age arc: high school graduation, job searches, the slow, uneasy exposure to adult responsibilities (or the lack thereof). They are best friends bound by a shared, razor-sharp cynicism—sometimes even aimed at each other—but we sense that something is shifting. They are beginning to drift apart, taking divergent paths through the same stretch of post-adolescent limbo.
They’ve just flipped the bird to high school, only to find themselves pressed to make plans, to prove they’re doing something—anything—with their lives. But their instinct is hesitation, resistance, a shared rejection of all the obvious next steps. Enid and Rebecca are not just resisting adulthood; they’re resisting its aesthetic, its rituals, its promise of safety. Their lives unfold in that precarious moment where growing up feels more like an intrusion than a transformation. Where a future offered in templates—college, job, rent, bills—feels less like a direction and more like a trap.
Before we even meet the characters—before we learn what they refuse to tell us about themselves—we’re pulled into a filmic overture of euphoric absurdity. The opening sequence feels like a fever dream choreographed by Hitchcock and scored by Brian De Palma: Enid, possessed by joy or madness or both, dances with frenzied abandon to a VHS-tinted recording of the infectiously percussive “Jaan Pehechaan Ho,” from the 1965 Bollywood musical Gumnaam. It’s a moment of pure delirium, of kinetic defiance. Her body flings itself into the beat as if she could shake off the world itself.
The scene is not merely playful—it’s a manifesto. Through this ecstatic dance, we’re introduced to Enid’s obsessive love for offbeat, anachronistic pop artifacts. She seems to actively despise everything around her: consumerism, mainstream culture, chart-topping songs—and above all, her peers, whom she describes with withering precision as “those extroverted, gross, pseudo-heroic losers.” Her comfort lies in irony, in dusty vinyl records, in the fantasy of escape. The movement, the sound, the saturated colors—it’s not a rebellion. It’s a spell.
Juxtaposed against this possession is the world Enid lives in. In a long tracking shot, the camera glides past the dimly lit windows of nighttime apartments, peopled by grotesques straight out of a Diane Arbus photograph. Enid stands out like an apparition: purple lipstick, horn-rimmed glasses, a cartoonishly exaggerated prom dress—an outfit that screams of deliberate misplacement. She’s not celebrating graduation; she’s performing it, mocking it, dressing it in drag. The cinematography by Affonso Beato emphasizes this comic-book alienation: the characters are framed like panels, flattened, isolated, suspended. These aren’t just shots—they’re animated still lives. Zwigoff’s choice to strip the film of specific cultural timestamps only deepens the sense of dislocation. The mise-en-scène is anonymous, floating outside any precise here or now. We’re in Ghost World, a place that doesn’t exist on maps, but lives permanently out of time.
The city—or whatever passes for one—is stripped of specificity. Strip malls, chain diners, porn shops, auto parts stores: all repeat in endless loops, forming a faceless landscape of standardized consumption. The scenery is so generically American it becomes uncanny. Whether we’re in Los Angeles or suburban Chicago hardly matters—everything looks the same. It’s not a place. It’s a simulation. A backdrop. A blueprint printed too many times.
This is what anthropologist Marc Augé called a non-place: a space that cannot be defined by history, identity, or relation. The Ghost World these girls inhabit is precisely that—a world of blank signage, prefab furniture, and colorless geometry. Its very anonymity critiques the commodification of public life in late capitalism. There are no landmarks here, no idiosyncrasies. Nothing roots you. Nothing holds you.
In such a world, rebellion is aesthetic by necessity. Enid’s wardrobe—an ever-shifting patchwork of thrift-store time travel, ironic juxtapositions, and deliberate costume—is not just personal expression. It’s a form of refusal. Her body moves through the world like a collage. Her style is dissonance in motion. Next to this washed-out, flavorless landscape, her eccentricity becomes almost violent.
These girls drift—not because they’re lazy, but because there’s nowhere to go. They loiter in diners, stalk their ex-classmates, create fictional lives for strangers, and mock everything with surgical precision. Their sharpness is a shield, their mockery a way to make the dead spaces speak. They are, in their own way, mapping a ghost geography—a speculative cartography of misfit energy, laid out across parking lots and neon signs.
Enid and Rebecca’s world is bound not just by space, but by a particular state of being: girlhood—not as a prelude to womanhood, but as a fragile, unfiltered territory of defiance. Their version of girlhood is loud, cynical, messy, and stubbornly unserious. It resists transformation. It mocks linear growth. Where mainstream narratives tend to polish female adolescence into palatable arcs of learning and soft empowerment, Ghost World gives us something sharper, more unresolved.
Their jokes are cruel. Their friendship is barbed. Their affection takes the form of provocation. Together, they wander a liminal zone between childhood and adulthood, but they do not move through it gracefully. Instead, they drag their feet, throw tantrums, sabotage themselves and each other. It is a portrait of unruly girlhood—one not interested in pleasing, or becoming, or fulfilling expectations.
And perhaps that is why their bond feels so charged. It’s not just that they understand one another; it’s that they’ve built a shared resistance to everything else. They loiter in diners not just to pass time, but to assert presence. Their humor isn’t just sharp—it’s protective. They turn the suburban wasteland into a stage for their own performance of detachment. Together, they are less afraid. But even this makeshift solidarity begins to fray.
Rebecca slowly begins to pivot toward the world. She gets a job, starts apartment-hunting, flirts with a vague sense of stability—though her sarcasm remains intact. “Some people are okay,” she shrugs, “but mostly I just feel like poisoning everyone.” Enid, meanwhile, spirals inward. The prank they play on a lonely man searching for a lost connection in the classifieds—intended as a joke—backfires, unsettling the friendship’s foundations. Where Rebecca sees a target, Enid sees something else: a wound.
Seymour (played, devastatingly, by Steve Buscemi) enters the film like a ghost of the future—middle-aged, soft-spoken, obsessed with rare blues records and wholly uninterested in being understood. At first, Enid treats him like a curiosity, then like a project, and finally like a mirror. “He’s the exact opposite of everything I hate,” she tells Rebecca. What she means is: he’s the version of me who never made it out. He’s not weird in a performative, girlhood way—he’s weird in a way that costs him something. Every day.
The two form a connection that is more than friendship and less than romance. It’s a strange kind of refuge. Enid is drawn to his clumsy gentleness, his resistance to cultural fluency, his inability to pass. Seymour cannot play the game, and Enid, for all her posturing, knows she may not want to either. They are both drifting in time, caught between decades, ill-fitting in the present. Seymour, with his records and routines, is a man paused in history. Enid is still searching for the moment she’ll agree to start hers.
This is where Ghost World slips into something almost existential. Laura and Paul Canis, writing on the film through a Sartrean lens, recall the notion of “three o’clock” from Nausea:
“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. A strange, in-between hour”①.
It’s a perfect description of the film’s mood: that suspended space between adolescence and adulthood where nothing feels quite possible, and yet everything is expected of you.
Enid keeps hitting the snooze button, while Seymour may have slept through every alarm. Only Rebecca, perhaps, is up early enough to catch the morning bus to grown-up life.
If Ghost World opens like a horror film, it ends like Fellini. The cityscape slips out of focus. Enid climbs aboard a phantom bus, bound for nowhere or everywhere. It’s not a destination—it’s a choice. A quiet divergence. A final, deliberate turn away from the life she’s been expected to lead. This isn’t a rejection of growing up, but a questioning of what "growing up" even means when the available options feel empty, pre-packaged, and insincere. Ghost World doesn’t just capture alienation—it performs it. It doesn’t resolve the tension between identity and expectation—it leaves it vibrating. Girlhood here isn’t something to outgrow, but a strategy. A way to inhabit dissonance. A way to exist without conforming. And perhaps that’s its most radical act. And that, perhaps, is its most radical gesture.
Joan Didion once wrote that we must keep good company with the people we used to be. Otherwise, they show up unannounced, banging on the door of our minds at four in the morning. We forget our loves, our betrayals, what we shouted and what we whispered. We forget who we were. And perhaps, as Sartre might say, at three in the morning. I’m still in touch with Enid. Because there’s always an Enid. And there’s always a Ghost World.
① Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Jacek Trznadel, Zielona Sowa, Warsaw 2005, p. 20.