Bringing adolescent angst to the silver screen
Article by Dan Eldridge
Resonance, March 2000
He's known by thousands of fans as the most unforgiving cultural critic since Salinger. Time magazine wrote that his work captured the feeling of being young and filled with ennui and living in America at the end of the 20th century. But he isn't a novelist, or a journalist, or even a poet. He's a comic book artist.
Meet Dan Clowes, who at 39 years old is finally receiving the same level of mainstream media attention that made heroes out of underground-comic pioneers like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman before him. For more than a decade now, Clowes has been single-handedly--and painstakingly--commenting on every possible aspect of the modern urban experience in his sometimes-disturbing, sometimes-reassuring comic book, Eightball.
Throughout the book's 11-year history, Clowes has dreamt up any number of stories based on seemingly disparate themes, but it's his long-running narratives, the ones that weave through issue after issue, which seem to resonate deepest with readers. Undoubtedly the best of these stories, 'Ghost World" is the melancholy tale of two girls, Enid Coleslaw and Becky Doppelmeyer, who try to remain friends as they graduate from high school and deal with the harsh realities of living in the real world. Fantagraphics first published the story as a limited-edition hardcover, and now, with help from producer John Malkovich, it's about to be immortalized forever on the silver screen (scheduled for a June release)--a remarkable coup d'etat for the alternative comic genre.
It may seem like a bit of a contradiction, a major studio financing a film version of a comic book that's known for its hugely cynical, sometimes twisted take on American corporate culture. But odd as it may seem, Clowes is no stranger to having big-budget projects land on his desk. In years past, for instance, his neurotic, anti-social strips have popped up in such unlikely locales as Details, Esquire, even The New Yorker. And way back in 1994, Clowes was hand-picked by the Coca-Cola Company to design the artwork for a new beverage called OK Soda, which was being marketed directly to "the slacker generation."
"It was so obvious to me that it was going to be this grand failure," Clowes admitted, "that I just knew I had to be involved." When the drink failed to turn a profit within the first few months, it was indeed taken off the shelves, and Clowes went right back to living his quiet, anonymous lifestyle--but not for long.
As the story goes, it was Terry Zwigoff's wife--the same Terry Zwigoff who directed the award-winning documentary film Crumb--who discovered Clowes' work and thought it was filmmaking material. After a bit of cajoling by his better half, Zwigoff met with Clowes, and the two decided they had enough in common to make a collaboration work.
"Terry and I have the same sense of cynical humor," Clowes says, laughing to himself. "We both seem to view the world from an outsider's perspective."
But whether Ghost World ends up appealing more to cynical outsiders than peppy insiders, it's a pretty sure bet that its top-drawer cast will appeal to both. The leading role of Enid Coleslaw, once reserved for Christina Ricci, will now be played by American Beauty star Thora Birch. Scarlet Johansson will fill the role of Enid's friend Becky, while the rest of the cast is rounded out with a curious mixture of underground antiheroes, including Steve Buscemi as the girls' dorky pal Seymour, and Bruce Glover--father of Crispin Glover--as the Rascal-riding Feldman.
Unfortunately, though, one anti-hero we won't be seeing on screen is Clowes himself; his plans to create a Hitchcock-esque cameo role for himself failed to materialize once he witnessed firsthand the trials and tribulations of a day on the set.
"You wouldn't believe how much work it takes to be in a movie for just a few minutes, watering the plants in the background or something," he says, in his whispery, quiet-as-a-church-mouse voice. "Every day I kept telling myself that today was going to be my day, but I could never seem to penetrate this whirlwind of activity and ambition that was going on all around me."
It's really quite amazing, in fact, just how closely Clowes sounds like the characters in his comics: incredibly soft-spoken, unfailing polite yet possessed of a razor-sharp wit, cynical yet stable. Even when he speaks about the year he spent making Ghost World, it's impossible not to share pangs of pity and sympathy: "It made me feel really bad about myself," he says, "seeing all these ultra-ambitious workaholics who were 20 years younger than me. It made me wonder if I should be doing what I'm doing."
But after a lifetime behind the drawing board, Clowes ins't showing any signs of slowing down. If he should, though, we'll still have Ghost World to keep us happy--at least, that is, until the next socially maladjusted, cynical cartoon genius comes along to replace him.
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