Ghost World was preceeded by more commercials than I'd ever seen before on a movie theater screen: L'Oreal Color Gel ("Because you're worth it"), Raisin Bran Crunch ("Breakfast is Back"), American Express ("Forward"), Target ("Love: Style"), M & Ms ("What Is it About the Green Ones?"). The audience sat there and took it, though some giggled and heckled the unexpectedly endless sequence of stupid, pretty faces and groovy music.

It was just too perfect a segue into the film. Scene One: a high school graduation — sponsored by Hostess Twinkies, Tropicana Orange Juice and Dunkin' Donuts. The blank-faced graduates don't "get it": the dorky Spice Girls (I guess) imitation "rap" or the lame valdictorian speech ("High school is the training wheels of the bicycle of real life") — except for Enid, who rolls her eyes and exchanges a knowing glance with the only friend she has who does get it: Becky. We realize these girls wouldn't have made it without each other and are pleased to meet them, since, of course, we all "get" it, too.

And who can blame anyone for ducking behind a wall of irony to protect themselves from omnipresent, seemingly omnipotent, corporate bloodsuckers seeking whom they may devour? The chief irony is that they call us the consumers! — unless you consider the sheer tonnage of advertising messages we're all force fed daily. Media watchdogs like "Adbusters" call ours a "toxic culture" and point to studies linking such slime with a rise in drug use, eating disorders, school shootings, and a virtual "epidemic of despair."

Ghost World is haunted by that despair and the possibility of rising above it: meanwhile reminding us that the lofty heights of irony are too cold and airless to support a truly human existence.

After high school graduation, Enid and Rebecca keep going for awhile on inertia; they visit the same old haunts, play the same old games: Bait the Dorks, Skewer the Phonies, Collect the Freaks. They mock Melora (who is waaay to perky) in unison. Exchange witty repartee about "Wowsville," the "Authentic 50s Diner" where the jukebox plays rap. Spend a carefree afternoon chasing after the weird-looking couple Enid is absolutely "positive" are satanists.

They live their lives in quotes. Susan Sontag described this sensibility in a famous essay on "camp": to be detached from society, a spectator, finding all of life a joke or a game — especially people too stupid to get it. Indeed, sincerity or naivete is of the essence to camp, says Sontag: true believers in anything are the campiest of all.

Of course, "camp" can break a couple ways: into a shallowness in the observer as deep as the observed, for one; it can also cover depths of secret longing for both innocence and acceptance.

Rebecca, we (and Enid) soon realize, despite her superior pose, will eventually parlay her good looks into a compromise with her consumer destiny: as another character says: "It's America, Dude. Learn the rules." And a keen eye for the dorks turns out to be excellent training for zeroing in on brand names.

But Enid can't play by those rules: maybe it's just because she's too pudgy to think about chasing the consumer ideal: in any case, her relationship with Becky is as doomed as any based on fear of being conned. Her entire life is ending, and Enid is being forced to stop spectating and choose. In that sense, Ghost World functions as an old-fashioned coming-of-age film. But when you consider the "real world" Enid is hesitant to join, there seems to be more going on here than just a refusal to "grow up".

Ghost World is acclaimed documentary director Terry Zwigoff's first fictional feature, and he proves he can stage archetypal moments with as keen an eye as he has for picking them off in life. There are so many bullseyes here: the mullet-headed poser who hangs out at the convenience store. The summer school art teacher Roberta, who shares with her class her own work, the Taj Mahal of bad student films. We know these people — I do at least — both the cynical wisecrackers and their hopelessly dopey targets. Zwigoff has a gift for capturing oddballs in a few cartoony strokes, as does Enid in her sketchbook.

Comix are key: Enid's sketches were drawn by the daughter of legendary underground artist, R. Crumb, who Zwigoff featured in his previous film. Crumb, like its grotesque subject, was controversial — in the sense that some people question whether psychotic self-loathing and twisted sexual fantasies do much more for viewers than bring them down to the degraded level of their miserable source (though Crumb's freakishly dysfunctional relatives made him almost seem normal.) Ghost World itself began as an underground comic, based on graphic novels by script co-writer Daniel Clowes, whose loathing of the suburban wasteland is infused in collaboration with Zwigoff with a humanity not often known to survive long in the underground.

Credit for the warmth of this film goes mostly to bug-eyed and buck-toothed Steve Buscemi, the most Crumb-like human outside Crumb himself, whose understated performance as outsider reveals a human on the inside. Seymour is the poor dork who shows up at Wowsville after Enid and Becky play one of their favorite games, answering the most pathetic personals in the paper. "He should just kill himself," concludes Rebecca. Seymour sometimes feels like it, since he "can't relate to 99% of humanity." But Enid is part of other 1%: "He's the exact opposite of everything I hate."

By now, Enid is as weary as we are of the girls' predictable mocking schtick. Seymour's naivete is refreshing: he responds to Enid's vulgar irreverence like he's afraid of being struck by lightning. And he connects with mass society without being a mindless consumer: Seymour (like Crumb and Zwigoff) collects obscure blues records, such as Mississippi bluesman Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman." The shocking possibility of authenticity slows what was becoming for Enid a slippery slope into despair. That her relationship with Seymour does not end in fairy tale fashion keeps alive the possibility of authenticity for the rest of us.

Buscemi's is the most genuine and steady presence in the film; the other performances range between realistic and intentionally over-the-top, achieving when either style works (which is mostly) two kinds of authenticity. It seemed to me the 53-year old director was trying to balance the vitality of an unvarnished documentary with the greater artist control afforded by traditional narrative; it could be argued that some occasional bad timing and jumpy cutting worked to underscore the underground feel.

It could also be argued that authenticity seems much more authentic when the criticism of our over-commodified society comes from a $6 million dollar film rather than the six-times-slicker anti-consumerism Fight Club, with its glitzy Special Edition DVD (complete with double-disc featuring 14 featurettes, four audio commentaries, and custom slipcase/gatefold packaging...).

Of course, have yet to see the Ghost World DVD. And you can buy now your official Ghost World soundtrack CDs, original comics and illustrated screenplays, or visit the web site with the killer Flash ® graphics at www.mgm.com/ghostworld/. But all that may only demonstrate the supreme confidence and ingenuity of the culture industry, which can so deftly turn dissent into commodity. If we were Enid, we might paraphrase a recurring question asked on background televisions in Ghost World about oil companies, "Is it crazy for a media congomerate to care about the toxic culture created by relentless commodification? We don't think so..."

But, of course, we are Enid, in a way, or face the same problem: how do we escape the relentless falseness of the world in which we live? Ghost World offers no real answers: and while some will describe the film's ending as escapism, there may have been no simple answer which could have been offered that wouldn't have falsified the entire film.

(I keep hearing in my head some reader suggesting that Enid's escape would have been turning to Christ. But this film could have been done the same way with only "Christian" products and platitudes. And, judging from his treatment of born-again Christians in Eightball comics, Daniel Clowes would have been well-able to script that version, too.)

Finding a way to be in, without being of, the consumer society is everybody's problem.

Or it should be.

Ghost World is an amazing film — if only for asking so many great questions: Is it that the rest of the world is unreal, or am I? What does it mean to "get it", if "it" is something most people don't "get"? And even though I hate living in a society that turns people into objects, don't I do the same thing?

Questions not directly asked by the film rise up like ghosts between the lines: What are the long term consequences of saying "No" to a consumer culture, and how long can I keep it up? If nothing is sacred, then why am I so attacted to those who think some things are — to innocence? And if my fear of shallowness is really a fear of non-being, am I ready to take the necessary risks for depth?

The most haunting unasked question is this: if media conglomerates can turn self-criticism into just one more product, can audiences, too? Is it crazy for an audience numbed into submissive consumption to care enough about authenticity to become authentic? We don't like to think so.