SUSTAINABILITY AND GHOST WORLD

2001’s Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff), based on the dark and funny comic book by Daniel Clowes, offers up a perfect example of a modern romantic notion of a perfect and unobtainable past. When we look forward in time, through science fiction mostly, popular culture portrays a dystopia of environmental and/or social justice. Pop-culture is littered with that particular view. The future is always dark matter. When we look back - not in a historical look - but in a “longing” we recall a simple time that wasn’t. Past is a remembered perfection that we use to contrast a sense of modern fucked-upness. This is the case with both the movie Ghost World and sustainability.

Ghost World opens (though I think the scenes actually work better of read as flash forwards after she has embraced a musical past that is further away than 70’s punk) with Enid played by a richman’s Christina Ricci Thora Birch, dancing to a, perhaps imagined, 60’s tune.  Clips of a dance party from the same era cut in and out, placing her perfectly out of place - she is living in the wrong time.  Modern products looking to appeal to the pastoral past or eco-nostalgia play this same game - their packaging is throw-back, their sugar is throw-back, they are new version of an old, happier, more authentic self.  I question all marketing, especially marketing that claims to be authentic.  The antidote is this.  

Enid is graduating high school, that special coming of age moment - the cusp of adulthood but not.  Hip Hop performers at the graduation, rhyme “graduation” with “now we’re members of the general population.”  High School is a special, safe place and Enid and her fellow classmates are being thrust in to adult life - a life akin to prison Gen-Pop.  If brooding, punk Enid represents that dark side of modernity pining for a pastoral perfect past dance party, then her friend Scarlett Johansson - the most unconvincing slacker ever - represents light and hope of a brighter future.  ScarJo is excited by the prospect of a job and an apartment.  Enid continues to want to fuck around with the past, so much so that she sleeps with Steve Buscemi.  Not a young Steve Buscemi either (he would have been 43 during filming).  His age is off-putting, but to Enid, his age is a way to recapture the past.  He introduced her to the blues.  Her musical taste moves from the Buzzcocks (a near past) to the blues of Skip James (a distant past.)  The further back she goes, the more authentic she feels the experience.  And this is a core value to the consumption of brands, products and concepts that claim to be sustainable.  in many ways, what they are buying is a promise of wholesome goodness the way it was.  Or rather, they way we are told to remember it.

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