'Ghost World' and why I fall in love with bittersweet endings

Ghost World was a movie that caught my attention at roughly just the right time. It's one of those smartly observed comedies that appeal to a certain kind of iconoclast who often finds themselves groaning with disgust at the majority of humanity.

While my disposition has improved considerably since I was in college, I still find this movie undeniably charming after all these years.

I've never read the graphic novel on which its based, although I intend to, but for me the story has a lot of pop integrity all its own.

It also has (spoiler alert) a bittersweet, maybe even quite sad ending -- which I love.

Now, I am not someone who is wholly against happy endings. I remember once getting into a heated debate over Wonder Boys (which ironically came out the same year as Ghost World) with some hipster college friends of mine.

Ghost World

They slammed that movie because of its unabashedly upbeat finale -- but I had no problem with it. In my estimation, Michael Douglas' character had lost a lot in the movie -- so the rebound he gets in the final scenes was earned.

In Ghost World, the story is mainly about Thora Birch's disaffected teen -- but the character that lingered with me is Steve Buscemi's Seymour (probably because I am straight male), a lonely old-timey record enthusiast with a short temper but a great heart. This is one of Buscemi's all-time best performances (which is saying a lot) and you really root for his character because I think of all of us, at a certain point in our lives, have had a similar crippling fear of intimacy.

There is a very conventional way this movie could have ended and I must admit after going quite a few years since I last watched it I couldn't remember whether it did take the easy way out. But instead, the film opts for truth and it's a painful, socially awkward one.

Again, spoiler alert -- but for reasons that are too complicated to detail here Buscemi's character falls for Birch and it seems like the feelings are returned, and in a way they are. But Birch's character is too young and immature to shoulder the burden of a self-imposed hermit and she flees -- leaving Seymour without a job, a girlfriend or much of a life.

Steve Buscemi in Ghost World

In his final scene he is pathetically summing up his existence at a therapy session when he's interrupted by his smothering mother and we learn that he now lives with her, presumably under her thumb. It's funny in a heartbreaking sort of way and yet, if the film is true to this character it's kind of the only place he could wind up.

I felt the same way about Darren Aronosky's brilliant 2008 movie The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke's character has a real shot at happiness with the gorgeous Marisa Tomei but instead he opts to literally kill himself in the ring. Why? Because that's who he is.

I've always been attracted to bittersweet endings and tragic heroes -- I suppose because I think we are often doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again in life. Of course we sometimes learn from them and from that emerges stories of triumph but there are plenty of us that don't.

Those stories don't get told as much, I suspect not because they aren't interesting, but because by Hollywood industry standards they are "downers." But Ghost World doesn't make me sad, it makes me glad that its filmmaker was willing to let his characters reach their inevitable conclusions.

That shouldn't be so bold and daring but in an industry where honest characterization is so often stifled or non-existent, it kind of is.