MORRIS DICKSTEIN
435
and losers, and relentlessly sarcastic about anything earnest or "nor–
mal," especially any kind of naive enthusiasm. But when Enid meets
Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a dorky forty-ish record collector and social
misfit, her world begins to change. Hopeless with women, uneasy in his
rumpled body, comfortable only with his sad passion for vintage blues,
Seymour's vulnerability unwittingly teaches Enid something about gen–
uine feeling. As his life goes to pieces, thanks to her efforts to manage it
for him, she lets her guard down and the movie becomes a lesson in the
limits of irony.
Like several of the best American films of 2001,
Ghost World
has a
completely distinctive deadpan tone that owes much to the flourishing
independent cinema of the 1990S. Driven not by action but by look and
atmosphere, and by a outsider's point of view that mocks the pieties of
middle-class life, the film makes little concession to mainstream
moviemaking.
It
derides sports, good looks, ambition, romance, and
personal responsibility.
It
satirizes progressive parenthood in Enid's too–
tolerant father (Bob Balaban) and bohemian artspeak, lethally, in her
aging-hippie teacher (Illeana Douglas). But Enid's friendship with the
slightly creepy Seymour takes the film to another level. Steve Buscemi
inhabits the part with a shambling, perpetually defeated sense of awk–
wardness and embarrassment. As Enid comes to appreciate him, the
movie takes us beyond punk detachment toward an unforced, unsenti–
mental empathy.
The best American movies at the 39th New York Film Festival in the
early fall picked up from the dreamy terrain where
Ghost World
left off.
David Lynch's
Mulholland Drive,
Wes Anderson's
The Royal Tenen–
baums,
and Richard Linklater's
Waking Life
were quirky one-of-a-kind
movies by directors who had cut their teeth in the indie cinema of the
eighties and nineties. Lynch, once a painter, made his reputation with a
low-budget midnight movie,
Eraserhead,
more than twenty years ago
and solidified it with the surpassingly strange
Blue Velvet
and the
Twin
Peaks
TV series in the late eighties. His movies oscillate between hyper–
real scenes of ordinary life and dreamlike images of the decadence and
corruption just beneath the surface. With the help of noir-ish cine–
matography and the mesmerizing music of Angelo Badalementi, he is
able to create a spellbinding mood that substitutes teasing portent and
mystery for any clear narrative logic.
Mulholland Drive
may be the best
movie about Hollywood since Robert Altman's
The Player,
combining
all these features of Lynch's work into one enigmatic yet riveting film.
Beginning with a near-murder that's interrupted by a fatal auto acci–
dent and featuring a beautiful raven-haired woman with a bag full of
