The Spectral Surface

I reread Daniel Clowes' Ghost World last year and, ever since then, have been meaning to watch the 2001 film adaptation again. I finally got around to it last night and was surprised how effective it was.

The comic does a much better job of capturing adolescence and some of the humour in the film is much too broad. In the comic, it's clear to see how Enid and Becca use their cynical humour as a defense mechanism, a shield for their insecurities. The film moves the balance a bit so that it seems the world Enid lives in deserves her disgust. In doing this, it goes a little too broad sometimes. The phony blues band that's more popular than the real blues legend at a club is too obviously a caricature. Enid, speaking in a mock confidential tone to a customer about how he should supersize his soda would likely have been met with friendly laughter from the patron rather than stunned confusion.

There are also problems with the film's structure. Particularly in the end, it feels like crucial dialogue is missing in Enid's scenes with Illeana Douglas and Steve Buscemi.

But the film's assets outweigh its flaws. I like how Illeana Douglas' high school art teacher is both a subject for the film's mockery as well as a genuinely intelligent, positive influence on Enid's life. Her insistence that art with a political message is more important than amusing cartoons is funny and slightly sinister, especially now, considering what the landscape of popular art looks like.

I feel like I've become Steve Buscemi's Seymour character in some ways. Certainly I identify with him a lot more than I did twenty years ago. He can't find anyone to connect with because he can't find anyone who appreciates how he values blues and antique American culture--except Enid. It reminds me of how frustrated I've been in trying to find a live, flesh and blood person who likes movies as much as I do. Or even understands why I value them. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't think would be as rare as it is. Even some people who I used to think kind of got it seem to have grown cold to it in the past ten years. Movie tastes, both in Japan and in the US, even when it comes to some of the better movies, have shifted to the doggedly unsubtle. That title, "Ghost World", has never felt more apt.

I guess I'd say I sympathise more with Enid in the movie than Enid in the comic although I think she's better written in the comic, if that makes sense. In the film, she's someone with an itch she can't scratch or even identify, only she knows that the things Becca wants and her father wants don't make sense to her. There's something of value to be attained just beyond her grasp but the best she can do to reach it is a scattershot experimentation. Dying her hair green one day, invading a sex shop, dancing to a Bollywood movie in her room.

Thora Birch looks amazing in the movie. Her high contrast wardrobe suits her perfectly even as it out-comic books the comic book. Scarlett Johansson plays a very different Becca compared to her comic book counterpart and has to be the wet blanket for most of the movie. But I think this conflict introduced between her and Enid nicely illuminates the underlying issues.

Ghost World is available on Amazon Prime.

A Rainy Day in Ghost World

Before I left San Diego, I boxed up all the books, DVDs, and Blu-Rays I couldn't bear to sell, which was quite a lot. I packed most of them in boxes a little bigger than a hat box, I think about fifteen such boxes in all. I left most of them with my parents and my sister but I took three with me when I drove to Tennessee and left them with my grandmother. Recently, she mailed me one that was filled with some of my comics, a couple spools of DVD-ROMs with various movies and TV shows, two of my Blu-Rays (Repulsion and Riso Amaro), my porcelain mermaid, and a stack of my comics.

I hadn't actually finished Black Hole so I guess it's a good thing that ended up here. If I'd had my choice I'd have wanted one of the boxes with my Shakespeare, Milton, or books on 17th century England but this may have been the more fortuitous choice. A few months ago, I was talking to one of the teachers I work with here in Japan about how I use manga to study Japanese. She wondered if it would be valuable to read English comics to better her English and I thought about what to recommend to her. I said I wished I had some of my comics with me to lend her something and now here some of them are. I'm not sure any of these are fit for the task.

My first instinct was to recommend the Jaimie Hernandez comics, which I'd been in the mood to read, anyway, but I'd forgotten how many big blocks of text there are in those, not to mention how confusing it would be whenever the dialogue switches to Spanish. Over the past couple days, I read Ghost World again, and in terms of dialogue to illustration ratio, it may be the more suitable work to recommend to an English learner. But in terms of culture and character . . . as I was reading, I found myself thinking Ghost World would either be totally incomprehensible to a Japanese reader or an extremely valuable insight.

I've often heard people say that the Japanese don't have irony or sarcasm--even people who've actually been to Japan and interacted with Japanese people say that--but I can tell you it's definitely not true. Maybe it's more of an issue of irony itself not necessarily translating well. Sarcasm is easy enough to detect in the guys at school who, seeing English as a pointless subject, overenthusiastically scream "GOOD MORNING" at two in the afternoon at me.

What I don't think many Japanese people, or even many young American people, would understand about Ghost World is Enid and Rebecca's ironic/not ironic love for half-assed efforts. The "pathetic" comedian with the trendy shoes or the fake '50s diners. I always liked how Daniel Clowes connected this very adolescent '90s humour with a fairly simple story of two teenagers facing frightening, impending adulthood.

I kept thinking of the title "Ghost World" in San Diego in the few years before I left, as the homeless crisis became worse and more and more businesses I associated with the city were going under. Someone I worked with at J.C. Penney told me about how nice the department store had been when she started working there decades ago, how people in the food court used to send the employees free meals like they were part of a little community. The people who work there did still care about each other and I did feel like I was part of a community of sorts at J.C. Penney but I could remember how much more solid it used to be, how much more effort people felt they could afford to put into making things beautiful and pleasant for everyone else.

I suppose if I'd lived in Kashihara for forty years, I'd notice how things have changed here, in some cases, for the worse, too. I hear about how the shopping mall is driving smaller businesses into the ground, which is like deja vu from '80s America. I wonder if I'll leave Japan at some point and hop from country to country so that I can always see places for the good things that are new to me. But then, I have to remind myself that there's no massive homeless crisis in Japan, the country has an embedded respect for its elders, and all in all there's generally a feeling of solid earth maintained under everyone's feet. Though I guess this is changing. I spoke to one of the older teachers at the school I work at now and I mentioned how the deer at Nara park look like they're starving and she told me it's actually not only Corona behind this. There are now starving deer wandering into towns elsewhere in Nara prefecture because the older generation of people who lived in the forests are dying. These people who used to routinely chop down lumber, thereby creating new foliage for the deer to eat, are disappearing and their kids don't want these jobs. Japanese lumber is more expensive than imported lumber.

I think the transition from the world of school to the world of work may not be as rough on most Japanese people as it is on American kids. I've been in the buildings for the city water and for the city gas and I noticed all the people wear uniforms. Of course, they do in most of the sales jobs, too. For a lot of people, it must be just like trading one uniform and campus for another, except there's fewer pointless lessons. But I know a lot of these kids can dream big, too, so I don't know. Maybe it's always painful.