Their idea of fun is perusing lonely hearts columns and arranging meetings where they just arrive and stare at the disappointed loser. They are Mean Girls, but an even scarier brand of Mean Girl that is intellectually acute, eclectic of taste and reference, and desperate to be unpopular.
While Enid is forced to attend a Summer School remedial class taught by a woman (the wonderful Ilieana Douglas as Roberta) who begins lessons by showing her own black and white art movie short called ‘Mirror. Father. Mirror.’, she and Becky also amuse themselves by stalking the lonely heart, Seymour (Buscemi), who somehow finds himself the only person, besides Becky, that Enid can bear.
Because Rebecca and Enid are slowly growing apart. Rebecca wants to move on from their private war on humanity and take her first steps to adulthood. Enid’s haughty sarcasm stems from sheer terror of growing up.
So it’s funny when Rebecca mentions that, to get an apartment together in the city, the pair need to buy some yuppie clothes and play the game, and Enid’s immediate reaction is to dye her hair green and adopt a studiously observed ’70s punk look. But it becomes sadder and sadder as Rebecca’s contempt for her best friend’s contrived shock tactics grows. Is sex with a funny-looking middle-aged geek who collects obscure blues 78s really Enid’s rite of passage?
Enid’s fascination with Seymour, which has been sparked by her love of a Skip James blues song she has bought from him at his record stall in a garage, even leads to her and Becky spending Saturday night in the arcane purgatory that is A Gathering Of Middle-Aged Male Record Collectors, a strange breed who I have had reason to spend time with and who really do get unnecessary over the jargon of vinyl condition and ten-band graphic equalisers.
The town has no name because it is a parallel universe; a state of mind between innocence and experience which features an old man at a bus stop always waiting for a bus that doesn’t exist, and which, despite how boring the girls keep saying it is, is actually a ’hood made up of monstrously cool things like record shops, video shops, comic book shops and ’50s-themed diners that don’t quite see the theme through. It’s like walking round the North Lanes in Brighton, actually, although the weird old men in my home town aren’t waiting for non-existent buses, but their 22-year-old boyfriend who is currently having his hair done in Queen Of Cuts. I like it here and will not be seeking a mystical bus.
But one of the many fascinating points of Ghost World is that even cult weirdo student punk paradise becomes unbearable when you are growing but your world is shrinking. Ghost World bigs up vintage jazz and blues music but then undercuts that by introducing us to the kind of boring bastards who like it. It celebrates retro clothes styles and America’s rich alternative cultural heritage while simultaneously critiquing retro as an empty postmodern ‘take’ on the past.
But Enid’s kitsch is growing darker. No sooner has she dismissed her put-upon shop assistant friend Josh (Renfro) as ‘this guy Becky and I like to torture’, than she tortures Seymour by dragging him into the local sex shop, forcing him to buy her a leather fetish Catwoman mask. Neither Seymour nor Becky are laughing. Enid’s irony is becoming forced.
Bizarre eccentrics wander through their lives, like Mulleted Convenience Store Topless Guy With Numchucks, and the crazy old hippy man in a wheelchair who takes a laptop into the coffee shop where Becky works so he can answer the obscure trivia question that wins a free coffee. And Enid’s remedial art class is a ’mare, as Roberta sniffily dismisses Enid’s accomplished art – which looks like Robert Crumb cartoons because some of them are by Crumb and his daughter Sophie – in favour of the girl who puts a tampon in a teacup. Enid tries to solve this problem while teaching the Ghost World viewer an extraordinary lesson about the racism of America’s past and a real Ohio restaurant chain called Coon’s Chicken. But her attempts to con the world just make things worse.
Enid has also taken it upon herself to find Seymour a girlfriend in order to deny her own attraction to someone so wildly inappropriate, and this cues a horribly, hilariously accurate scene in a dodgy blues bar where Seymour can’t resist responding to a woman’s friendly ‘I like blues’ conversational gambit with a long, dull lecture about the differences between blues and ragtime. Buscemi is brilliant here, because Seymour is a smart guy who knows this stuff does to chatting up what Napalm does to dandelions, but . . . he . . . just . . . can’t . . . stop . . . talking, because that geek is just who he is. His horror at Blueshammer, the white boys who play pub rock and call it ‘authentic Delta blues’, finishes the job.
Ghost World is neither a celebration of outsiders or riot grrls or alternative culture or rebellion, nor a movie that urges you to put away childish things and ‘grow up’, meaning ‘conform’. It’s a movie that suggests that some people simply don’t fit that easily, and that, rather than conform, they must find their own path and accept the painful truth that they will be lonely and unpopular most of the time, but better that than compromise themselves to make the rest of us feel comfortable. It has one of the few strong teen characters who actually doesn’t want to ‘come of age’. She understands that much of what we consider ‘mature’ is actually deeply stupid and deeply lazy. She may not like sex enough with Seymour to be his teenage lover. But she tells him, truthfully, that he is her hero because, no matter how inadequate or dull or weak we may see him as, he is at least truly himself.
Clowes’ original graphic novel was great, but the movie is even better, developing Seymour’s minor character into a goofy kind of romantic lead (Zwigoff is a collector of ancient jazz and blues records) and making the extraordinary Thora Birch into the focal point of the story. Johansson is, at just 16, the star she will become, her deep voice and sneering bee-stung lips the perfect foil for Birch’s pale fury.
But Birch, coming off her biggest triumph as Jane Burnham in American Beauty, is almost unbearably poignant and charismatic; the very essence of the bitchy outsider beauty who any nerdy boy would fall in love with if she wasn’t such a ball-busting bitch, even though you know it’s all for show.
And, as with all the best American post-John Hughes teen comedies, the dialogue crackles and burns. Particular favourite quotes include the note Enid leaves at Josh’s house when they call and he isn’t in (‘Dear Josh: We came by to fuck you but you were not home. Therefore, you are gay. Signed Tiffany and Amber.’); and Enid’s rude epilogue to Seymour’s failed attempt to sell a record to an especially fussy collector (‘So what was all that about enlarged holes and tight cracks?’).
The movie ends with two journeys on a bus that shouldn’t exist, the last of which is along an empty bridge; a lovely metaphor for the lonely journey a kid takes when they realise that their confused and singular nature means they have to search for their adult self alone. It’s the price you pay for refusing to conform in order to belong. Because, for some of us, teenage rebellion never quite goes away. Ghost World is a tribute to the creative possibilities of lifelong immaturity.
DONNIE DARKO
2001
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Mary McDonell, Holmes Osborne, Katherine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Dir.: Richard Kelly
Plot: Well . . . there’s this miserable kid and a rabbit-man and a jet engine and The Apocalypse and . . . wait a minute! Nearly had me there. HA! Good one.
Key line: ‘They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things.’
Richard Kelly once stated that his unfathomable teen cult masterpiece is ‘a black comedy foreshadowing the impact of the 1988 Presidential election’. That was the one where, despite the Iran-Contra scandal and hitherto unimaginable social divisions and economic chaos, the American public gave the Reagan administration a thumbs-up and elected his former CIA spook Vice-President, George Bush Snr. I guess that would explain all the wry stuff at the outset of this movie about losing Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis and the Stars And Stripes hanging over Donnie’s head and ‘The Star-S
pangled Banner’ playing on the TV as he takes his first sleepwalk, but . . . I’m getting ahead of myself.
Thank the Lord for a movie writer called Dan Kois. On the salon.com website, Mr Kois gives the world a step-by-step rundown of the Donnie Darko plot and a credible stab at the movie’s meaning, having watched both the original theatrical version and the currently available 133-minute Director’s Cut, and all the extras on the DVD, and Kelly’s director’s commentary, and even negotiated the painfully slow and oblique revelations on the Donnie Darko official website. You can find Kois’s painstakingly assembled theorem at www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2004/07/23/darko, and you definitely should, ’cos there is no way I’m rewriting his detective work and passing it off as my own.
But Kois writes as if everyone who has ever loved this teen angst Twin Peaks has been inspired to take the nerd’s route . . . spending hours on the web and talking with friends and rewatching the movie with a laptop and a Klingon dictionary to satisfy their need to know exactly what it all means. I think geek Donnie Darko fans are a minority. I reckon that most of the people who have made an initial theatrical flop into a much-loved, money-spinning DVD hit sit in front of it with friends, booze and weed, loving every second of being bamboozled and claiming it as one of the great progenitors of the kind of post-MTV surrealism we now call ‘random’ because the best thing about Donnie Darko is that it looks and sounds amazing and makes your brain work without having to come to any form of conclusion whatsoever. Except some vague idea about an angry suburban teen who gets Chosen by God or another higher power to fix a potentially catastrophic hole in time, and succeeds, and dies. And catches a kiddy-fiddler along the way, which is always cheering, especially when the director is crazy and inspired enough to cast Patrick Swayze as the bad guy. Giggle. Munch. Puzzle. Toke. Glug. Giggle. Cheer. Toke. Munch. Putitonagainitsmental!
So, for this entry and this entry only, I decided to reject my normal methodology and get into the spirit of how the movie is watched. I’m going to switch off the laptop, resist making any notes, lie back with my drugs of choice (I smoked all my crack while watching Bring It On, so its sugary tea and nicotine all the way) and bliss out. And then come back and write about what hits me. We’ll be right back after these arcane messages.
Right. Well . . . that was bracing. The first time I’ve watched Donnie Darko and felt so emotionally, as well as aesthetically, engaged. The bit where chubby Oriental outsider Cherita reveals her love for Donnie by running away from him in sheer romantic terror almost made me cry.
The reason, I think, that Donnie Darko is much more affecting than the similarly complex sci-fi/time-travel jiggery-pokeries of Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan is because it is about a teenage boy. It taps into something primal and universal about that moment, in adolescence, when you’ve worked out how you feel about the adult world and realised that it doesn’t share your sense of right and wrong. You’ve read certain books (perhaps provided by a favourite teacher who reminds you of Drew Barrymore) and listened to certain records (maybe British ’80s songs by Tears For Fears and Joy Division and Echo And The Bunnymen) that derive a dreamy beauty from an intellectualized form of doomed romantic angst and you’ve watched the government on TV and made connections between what you hate about them and school and your parents, and you are suddenly fuelled with a self-righteous idealism and an existential despair about the compromised, philistine adult world that you are expected to fit into. But you still love comic books and sci-fi and you fantasise, occasionally, about being a superhero who saves the world from all of its evil, because this is both less daunting than the prospect of political action and more noble than accepting that you just want things to be how you want them to be.
There is so much detail in Donnie’s story that I can’t help concluding that Donnie is Richard Kelly. That, at the age of 25, he was still haunted – and fascinated – by the teen years that made him but, instead of the usual thinly veiled semi-autobiographical rites-of-passage tale, he used his fertile imagination to concoct an entire parallel universe around his love of Graham Greene’s The Destructors and Richard Adams’ Watership Down; his experiences at a private school, which at various points tried to brainwash pupils into bland self-help conservatism, ban books and fire liberal teachers; his love for the perfect girl who never knew he existed; his apoplectic rage at the Reagan/Bush years; his childhood affection for E.T. and Back To The Future; his regret at disconnecting from his parents; his favourite miserabalist pop records; and, perhaps, a period when he committed petty crimes, and was sent to therapy and put on anti-depression medication. I mean, I could be way off beam here, but the major reason that Donnie Darko works so well lies less in the parallel universe and more in the detail about teenage life, from ridiculous conversations about the sexual organs of The Smurfs, to the vital importance a bookish teen might attach to the distinctions between being an atheist and an agnostic, to the texts you use to justify the intellectual rebel mantra that you must destroy to create. Kelly absolutely hits aspects of my own teenage angst so firmly on the noggin that I can’t believe that this is just good writing. Donnie Darko is the most multi-dimensional movie teen of all time because he’s plucked from deep within the writer’s memories.
But none of this would work without the performance of Jake Gyllenhaal. His ability to switch between the obnoxious and the adorable, the malevolent and the vulnerable, the strident young rebel and the regressed child in hypnotherapy, the gibbering madman and the only sane boy on Earth, makes for one of the most complete characters in teen fiction. He has to carry a conceit so convoluted and implausible that it makes Mulholland Drive look like Coronation Street, and he neither trips over his feet nor misses a beat. Gyllenhaal glares back with hooded eyes and dark pleasure at the Jim Starks and Ferris Buellers and Alex Droogs, amused at their two dimensions, an amalgam of them all. As for how the guy’s acted since . . . it’s been ten years since he played Donnie; shouldn’t he have cured the sleepwalking by now?
And as for Kelly, I reckon the reason that his two subsequent movies Southland Tales and The Box just didn’t work for people is that they possess all of his geeky imagination, but none of the heart. They have no Donnie/Gyllenhaal at their centre. They’re just about fictional characters. There is nothing universal about coming of age and our idealised selves at stake. Donnie is a real boy and torn, piece by piece, from Kelly’s soul.
I love Donnie Darko. I love its desperation to rip the world up and start again. I love its righteous fury at the fundamentalist right and their exploitation of frightened people’s desperate need for easy answers. I love its teen boy wish-fulfilment, not just because Donnie saves the world, but because of that bit where Ms Barrymore tells the new girl in class to just sit next to the boy she thinks is cutest, because hot teacher and crush object conspiring to announce to the world that you’re the cutest thing ever is even more thrilling to the teen narcissist than saving the planet from Republicans and rips in the time-space continuum.
But most of all, I love the idea of this alienated kid in a classroom sometime around the dawn of the ’90s, being blown away by a Graham Greene short story, storing the moment away like a rabbit stores food, and, ten years of dreaming and hard work later, growing a towering work of art out of that anonymous moment. That’s teenage rebellion at its best.
BULLY
2001
Starring: Brad Renfro, Nick Stahl, Rachel Miner, Bijou Phillips, Michael Pitt, Leo Fitzpatrick, Kelli Garner, Daniel Franzese
Dir.: Paul Weitz
Plot: River’s Edge meets Kids. In hell!
Key line(s): ‘Listen: I gotta go down to Fort Lauderdale to help my friend Lisa to kill this asshole named Bobby. But if you want I can come pick you up . . .’
‘Er . . . OK.’
I hold my hands up straight away. My love of this movie is less a guilty pleasure and more of an indefensible one. It is gratuitous, sensationalist, and pornographic in a barely legal way. It’s only
justification? It’s all true.
Bully is based on a Florida murder trial known as the Broward County Seven case. In July 1993, seven teenagers conspired to murder another teen, Bobby Kent. One of the killers was Kent’s best friend, Marty Puccio. The script for Bully was co-written by American History X writer David McKenna (under the pseudonym Zachary Long) and Roger Pullis, and based on a book called Bully: A True Story Of High School Revenge, a factual account of the case by Jim Schutze. No one even changed the names to protect the . . . well . . . guilty as fuck, actually.
But if the evidence of this movie is to be believed, Bobby Kent (the excellent Stahl) was something a little more hardcore than a common-or-garden bully. He pimps his male friends out at gay clubs. He has a Jones for homemade gay porn which he especially likes to watch while raping girls. He’s a memorable monster. He’s like Peter Stegman from Class Of 1984 (see here), but with the irony unplugged. I wouldn’t mind if he was the usual thick-necked, mountain-sized jock (the real-life Bobby was a steroid junkie) or Latino leather-jacketed knife-boy thug. But he’s a skinny, pretty, white middle-class kid. Why doesn’t anyone just punch him or call the police?
Well, actually, Marty does punch him. But it makes no difference. Bobby takes the punch and then does what any good pimp does: apologises, makes all the right, loving noises, makes a victim feel empowered by having forced his tormentor to pretend to make nice for a change. And then he just continues fucking you because he knows you hate yourself enough to believe you deserve it.
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