Two girls who love Ghost World break up

Everything that I could ever want has no name. All I need is to catch her eye, and just like that, I’m known.

At graduation, Enid glances back to Becky and that’s all it takes for them to laugh.

The best feeling in the world is knowing you’re not alone. When I first meet Clara, I’m asleep on the concrete outside the 9:30 Club, so someone else has to say my name. We don’t talk much but I think she’s the absolute coolest. So self-assured, so confident. It’s like she doesn’t even need to try. It’s only later that I learn she thought the same about me.

I must’ve showed her Ghost World on that first trip down to Atlanta. She’d just graduated that summer, and even though I was a few years out, the film still felt true in a way few other things did. I wouldn’t have shown her if it didn’t. I forget the details, but we must’ve watched it on her couch. The couch is where you hang out, it’s where everything goes down. If you can make it to the couch with a friend, then you’re golden. You won’t ever need anything more.

Enid and Becky are the two girls in Ghost World. Enid, played by Thora Birch. Becky, by Scarlett Johansson. Released in 2001 and directed by Terry Zwigoff, the movie follows our two girls the summer after their high school graduation.

They’ve known each other for ten years. They grew up together. They hate the same people, they hate the same things. Becky has Enid’s old family photo album for some reason. When they see the same thing unfold, their thoughts almost come in unison. Enid says they should follow a couple they see at the café. Becky’s eyes gleam and she says in response, “Oh, we totally have to.” Becky suggests prank calling an ad in the personals. Enid lights up and says the same exact thing. The world is easier when they’re together. It makes more sense.

I start calling Clara a lot more after I get back from Atlanta. There’s things now that only she would understand. I could say the same thing to a hundred people, but I know only Clara would take it the way I mean it. The whole thing makes me giddy. Knowing someone can sometimes feel like wanting to spill the biggest secret in the world. You could build a whole life around just that feeling.

Ghost World was a comic by Daniel Clowes before it ever was a movie. Terry Zwigoff was getting scripts sent to him left and right after the success of his 1994 documentary Crumb, but he hated all of them. In a 2021 interview with The Independent, he calls those scripts ‘false and contrived.’ He wanted what he was making to be something real.

When Enid and Becky make eyes at each other while talking to a classmate, it’s a feeling I know. When Enid mouths a name to Becky and she has to keep from laughing, the joke is familiar. Not everyone is so sarcastic. Not all friendships are so sullen or so pointed, but the cadence is clear.

Each friendship creates its own benchmarks. Enid and Becky are Enid and Becky. The world bends to their gaze when they’re together. It’s intoxicating to feel like you’re a part of something. It can make you feel like you’ll never be alone. Here’s another person who sees things the way you do. You don’t even have to ask, you just already know it’s true.

The most fun a girl can have is to be gotten completely. Enid and Becky are so perfect when we first meet them. They feel the same things and they know it without saying. They get together and a day goes by. Becky shows Enid the comedian she was talking about. Enid reacts just like Becky thought she would. Clara and I send voice notes back and forth and half of it is just us laughing. “Once again,” we joke, “Clara and Sabrina are the only two people who get what’s going on.”

Enid and Becky ride in the back while their friend drives. I meet Clara in the backseat when I pick her up. It’s always exhilarating to see yourself in someone else. Mirror images create a world impenetrable. Arm in arm, Clara and I walk down the street, laughing because the world is funnier when you have someone to laugh about it with.

Not even half a week back from Atlanta, I tell Clara I’m already wanting to watch Ghost World again. “oh no girl,” she replies, “what’s going on.” The movie becomes shorthand for me. Every time I leave off feeling kind of weird. Every time the moment feels emptier than it should be. Every time the present comes clashing up against the past.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly when something ends. The first time they hang out after high school, Becky slides into the booth across from Enid and expresses how weird it feels to be out of high school. Without looking up from her sketchbook, Enid offhandedly admits it hasn’t really hit her yet. The two go on like usual. Nothing’s really changed because nothing really has to. At the faux 50s diner they end up at, they make a joke of their waiter and find new ways to waste time. They don’t have jobs yet. No one’s expecting them anywhere. Their only real obligation is to hang out with each other. Enid makes a napkin hat. Becky plays with the salt.

Things are already different the next time they hang out. Enid tries to make a joke to the waiter and Becky tells her twice to shut up. When they stumble upon the yard sale of the guy they pranked, Becky’s pulling on Enid’s shirt to go, but she stays. It’s not a betrayal to think something else, but when you’re so close, it can sometimes feel like it. Enid tries to get her point across to Becky in the café.

Becky’s got her head down circling apartment listings, but she looks up when Enid quits on the conversation. Neither of them wants to face what’s different, so they go back to what they still know. A girl they hate leaves, and Becky mimics her while Enid laughs.

Enid and Becky’s plan has always been to move in together after graduation, except now Enid doesn’t seem so sure. At the café, Becky proposes to Enid that they dress up as yuppies so landlords will rent to them. Enid stares back like a challenge. In the very next frame, she’s dying her hair green. “That’s just great,” Becky says standing in the doorway to Enid’s room, “When did you do that?”

Things fall apart in the subtlest ways. If you paid attention, you’d have seen it coming from a mile away. Clara and I have a big fight in New York. I leave her crying at the hotel and she doesn’t show to the movie later that night. We don’t talk for a week and it gets better before it gets worse. At that point, it’s not really about the fight or what we said to each other. It becomes about something neither of us can name, or maybe something neither of us are willing to.

We don’t even really get that much time with the girls before it all starts falling apart. The first thing Becky asks Enid after they graduate is when they’re gonna start looking for their apartment. Enid shrugs off the question. She can wait, Becky can’t. Enid starts hanging out with the poor creep they played a prank on. Becky gets a job at the coffeeshop. The thing they once were is fading. Just because no one says it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The big thing is: Becky wants to move on, Enid wants to stay right where they are.

It’s not so big a deal this time when they disagree. Both of them can already kind of see it coming. Becky just shrugs and asks when Enid’s gonna get a job. Enid promises she’ll have one by next week.

Enid gets fired on her first day. She tries to sell her stuff in a yard sale, but then finds she can’t bear to let anything go. She goes houseware shopping with Becky the next day, but hates everything they look at. When Enid calls to come over that night, Becky makes up an excuse. At least a month has passed by the next time we see them, though Enid’s still jobless and dragging her feet. They’re supposed to be apartment-hunting, but they end up fighting on the sidewalk instead. Becky storms off and Enid ends up crying in her bed. “God,” Enid sobs, “Fuck you, too.”

It’s a million little things that add up to one moment. It only gets so bad because no one can say it. I’m crying on the phone with Clara. I’m crying on the phone to someone else about Clara. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. This is what it feels like when a world tumbles down. It’s why you keep your mouth shut, because probably anything would feel better than this. We haven’t been the same for at least a year now, but you can only drag the end out for so long.

The heartbreak is slow and gradual. We see Enid and Becky only after their friendship has peaked. When Becky tells Enid, “God, I can’t believe you went to Anthony’s without me,” you can tell she’s only saying it for Enid’s sake. They think different now. It’s hard to admit they’re not what they used to be, easier to let it blow up and snuff itself out. Enid and Becky saw the world the same way for a long time, but now they don’t.

Enid works herself up trying to work it out. She screws up her scholarship to the art academy. She has sex with someone who she shouldn’t have. She goes back to Becky, pleading to move in with her, then goes back on her word a few days later. Sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, she admits to the guy she screwed over, “Guess I just have to figure myself.”

Becky waits for her on a bench outside the hospital. She’s dressed in her work clothes and Enid still has on her combat boots from the first scene. Enid takes her hand after she sits down.

Enid nods. Becky gathers her stuff. After one last squeeze, she lets Enid’s hand go.

Clara meets me at Union Station. It’s the spot where I normally drop her off. We have about an hour before her bus leaves. The last time we saw each other was six months ago, the last time we talked was three. She gets in the car and everything familiar comes floating back. We don’t get to the hard part until later.

It’s strange to talk in broad strokes with the person you’d normally go down to the minute with. I still want to tell her everything but now that she’s in front of me, none of it seems so essential. I used to be able to breathe and have her know exactly what I mean. What we had was freeing, like no matter how bad it gets, at least we'd still know each other. “Thank god for Clara,” I used to say to myself all the time.

The air is heavy with whatever we’re not saying. This thing between us feels so complex now. It used to seem so easy, like the most obvious thing. Now it just feels like one big knot. What happens when two girls meet and their favorite movie is Ghost World? How inevitable is it for them to come apart? Clara says the best way she can think to put it is that maybe we both just need time to grow.

It’s bittersweet to drive away. I put on one of Clara’s playlists and the perfect song comes on. It can be so fun to get swept up in us. We scream and we jump and we spend the first five minutes after we get on the phone just laughing. Sometimes it can feel like there’s nothing better than getting to know someone like that, but the world doesn’t stop when you get understood.

Enid can’t define herself by what she hates anymore. For a while, she could. Hating everything and knowing Becky were enough to sustain a life, but things are different now. Becky’s moving on, Enid has to let go. The film ends with a shot of Enid getting on a bus and riding away. It’s the first time we see Enid make a real decision of her own accord. Change is never easy, but it’s harder if you resist.

One year, when putting something else off, I locked myself in a room for a week and wrote a movie. I never name her, but Clara’s in it a lot. I would've never written it if I'd never met her. In the second-to-last scene, the two main characters are walking down a street in late afternoon.

Olive turns to her and smiles. “No.”

Quotes pulled from the Ghost World script, the Ghost World making-of featurette that came with the DVD, Rick Burin’s 20-year retrospective piece on Ghost World for The Independent, and the user's own personal real and lived life.