I Ruined a High School Hang by Making My Friends Watch Ghost World (2001)

Reader, I’ve become a go-to “movie person” for many of my friends with different hobby priorities. I’m sure many of you can relate to this phenomenon. It can be a badge of honor to be the person your friends turn to when they want a movie recommendation, when they finally catch up with a movie they know you’ve seen, or if they just stumbled upon a great film-related article or meme.

But at times it can feel like a lot of pressure. It’s inevitable that some of those recommendations will backfire—especially when it’s something new that you haven’t seen yourself yet. You might wind up temporarily irking a room full of people for wasting two hours of their lives.

That’s happened to me a few times in my journey of learning how to read the room. Like when I convinced several of my non-cinephile friends that we should rent Only God Forgives because Drive is great and Ryan Gosling is hot.* Or that time several of my college buddies and I went to Blockbuster and they let me pick out Southland Tales for a group watch because Donnie Darko is cool and there are lots of famous people in it.** On both occasions, for extended periods of time, I could feel everyone in the room quietly hating my guts and regretting their trust in my decision-making abilities.

But my biggest misfire might’ve been my very first. Because I thought it was a good idea to blindly watch Ghost World with several of my friends in high school.

In this case, Ghost World was not the problem. The problem was I was 16 years old and hanging with half a dozen friends. I was a sophomore when this film hit video store shelves, and I was fortunate enough to have fit in with a group of juniors by virtue of being in a band with a couple of them.*** But I still felt pressure to impress them with my cultural sensibilities.

Music consumed most of my creative energy at the time, but many of my music-obsessed friends were also discovering indie cinema. I did my best to earn cool points by watching trendy films like Memento, Fight Club, and Reservoir Dogs. But I was also trying to dig a bit deeper into territory that was largely unexplored by my peers. I believe this was the same year my sister took me to see films like Run Lola Run and The Man Who Fell to Earth at our local museum when she was home from college. And my father had gifted me a subscription to Rolling Stone to feed my rock ‘n roll habits, though I spent more time reading Peter Travers’ film reviews near the end of the magazine than their front-page coverage.

It must’ve been Pete’s review that tipped me off to Ghost World. “Let the unsettling secrets of this outrageously funny and steadily engrossing meditation on the life of two high school misfits after graduation catch you by surprise,” he pleaded in his glowing August 2001 review. “It’s that good.”

Outrageously funny? Steadily engrossing? “Hell yeah,” I thought with my teenage brain. “I bet my buddies would love this.” So one night that summer, we went to the local video store, and I probably talked up this film I hadn’t seen yet until they gave in and indulged me.****

Reader, my friends simply did not enjoy Ghost World. And in the moment, neither could I. Had I been by myself, paying close attention to better understand the medium and evolve my cinematic palette, I probably would’ve at least appreciated it. But that room full of teenage boys simply could not get on the film’s wavelength—even if I was accidentally responsible for introducing most of them to Scarlett Johansson.***** The room was quiet, the vibes were bad, and my friends probably thought I was a pretentious weirdo. (Which would’ve been a fair assessment.)

But worry not, reader, because Ghost World was merely the first of two movies we rented that night. One of the other guys had picked out Resident Evil, naturally. So we hooted and hollered as we watched Milla Jovovich shoot up zombies for 100 minutes, and then we played ping-pong late into the night. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. (Except for my credibility.)

*This choice backfired in the moment, but after revisiting the film years later, I think it’s pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. (I really hope Refn goes back to making movies soon.)

**This film, on the other hand, is awful. I know it’s received a minor critical reappraisal of sorts and the director’s cut is allegedly a big improvement, but y’all ain’t fooling me again with this one.

***Since you’re surely dying to know: I played bass and sang. Probably as well as you’d imagine for a teenager. (There’s a reason why most singers don’t sound like the dude from The Promise Ring.)

****Funnily enough, Ghost World has a scene that takes place at a video store. I probably pointed and said something dumb like “Hey, they’re just like us!” while my friends rolled their eyes.

*****Unless they endured the misfortune of watching Home Alone 3, that is. (I stopped after the first two because I was a distinguished man of taste at age 11.)

Ghost World is now streaming on Amazon Prime, Hoopla, Tubi, PlutoTV, and Kanopy, and it is available to rent elsewhere.