Ghost World (film) - Plot

Plot

The film follows the lives of best friends Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) during the summer after their high-school graduation. The girls are both social outcasts, but Rebecca is more popular with boys than Enid. Enid's diploma is awarded on the condition that she attend a remedial art class. Even though she is a talented artist, her art teacher, Roberta (Illeana Douglas), believes art must be socially meaningful and dismisses Enid's sketches as "light entertainment".

Shortly after graduation, the two girls see a personal ad in which a lonely man named Seymour (Steve Buscemi) asks a woman he met recently to contact him. With Becky at her side, Enid makes a prank phone call to Seymour, pretending to be the woman and inviting him to meet her at a diner, and when he goes there, the two girls secretly watch and make fun of him. However, Enid begins to feel sorry for him, so a few days later they follow him to his apartment building, where they find him selling vintage records in a garage sale. Enid buys an old blues album from him, and they gradually become friends. One of her favorite activities is trying to find women for him to date. Meanwhile, Enid has been attending her art class. In order to please Roberta, Enid persuades Seymour to lend her an old poster depicting a grotesquely caricatured black man, which was once used as a promotional tool by the fried-chicken franchise where Seymour holds a middle management position. In class, she presents the poster as a social comment about racism, and Roberta is so impressed with the concept that she later offers Enid a scholarship to an art college.

At this point, Enid's and Becky's lives have seriously diverged. While Enid has been spending time with Seymour, Becky has found a job and become more interested in clothing, boys, and other material things. Enid finds a job so the girls can rent an apartment together, but she is fired after only one day. Finally, Becky gives up on looking for an apartment with Enid after their personal differences erupt in an angry argument. Sometime after Enid loses her job, Seymour receives a phone call from Dana (Stacey Travis), the woman he had written to in the personal ad. Enid encourages him to develop a relationship with Dana, but becomes jealous when he begins avoiding Enid to spend time with Dana. At the end of the summer, Enid's and Seymour's lives fall apart. When Enid's poster is displayed in an art show, school officials find it so offensive they force Roberta to give her a failing grade; when Enid discovers she has lost her scholarship, she visits Seymour for solace, resulting in a drunken one-night stand. Seymour then breaks up with Dana before realizing he has no chance with Enid, and loses his job after the poster is displayed in a newspaper. Becky tells Seymour about Enid's phone prank, and he becomes hospitalized after attacking a boy who was with the girls at the time.

Finally, Enid gives in to her childhood fantasy of running away from home. Throughout the film, she has periodically spoken with an old man named Norman (Charles C. Stevenson, Jr.) who was waiting at an unused bus stop for a bus that never arrived. After quitting her new job and meeting with Seymour in the hospital, Enid sees a bus finally arrive to pick up Norman, and the next day, while Seymour discusses the summer's events with his therapist, Enid goes to the bus stop and gets on the bus when it arrives. The film ends as the bus drives away.