Ghost World Essay

Enid latches on to Seymour and the two form a friendship that briefly, painfully turns sexual after numerous attempts on Enid’s part to get Seymour a date.Lonely, neurotic and volatile in his self-pity, his presence extends the thematic bleakness of the story to suggest that for misfits like Enid and Seymour alienation is not simply a teenage phase but can last indefinitely.She is attending her school graduation ceremony, which is being addressed by a pupil recently paralysed in a car accident caused by drug abuse.

The look of the film is carefully controlled, with a detached, minimilistically simple camera style that frames its subjects in such a way as to emphasise flat planes of vision, as if the world were actually a two-dimensional drawing.

The rhythm of the film is also boldly stylised, the two-dimensionality of the image causing a slight awkwardness in editing and movement which creates the subliminally haunting effect of a perpetual, subtly oppressive stillness and detachment in the unusually aloof but insistently expressive environment.

Visually, stylises the look of the characters to conform with their comic counterparts, although amazingly Enid emerges looking more like a comic strip character in the film.

Thora Birch is much better looking than Clowes’ Enid, but her face has a distinctively masklike quality when wearing her glasses which is quite different from the original.

So what is this perception of the world that offers us?

The Stranger Essay - Ghost World Essay

It is essentially Enid’s perception, a frontline view of her struggle against the tyranny of clichéd, superficial patterns of fashions and behaviour.

When Seymour asks her why she is so concerned about his love life, Enid replies with one of the film’s most moving and revealing lines in which she says she can’t bear the thought of living in a world where a man like him can’t get a date. The dry, sharp wit of Enid’s constant observations are matched by the deadpan outlandishness of the parade of off-centre characters she comes into contact with, which inspire them.

Zwigoff strikes and skillfully maintains a balance between the laughter and the melancholy.

It is this same curiosity, this same search for something to identify with, which leads her to Seymour.

Intrigued by an advertisement he has placed in a lonely hearts column, she and Rebecca sadistically contact him simply in order to see what sort of person would place such an ad.