In praise of Ghost World’s Bollywood-inspired… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In praise of Ghost World’s Bol­ly­wood-inspired open­ing credits

16 Jun 2021

Words by Saffron Maeve

Group of people wearing black clothing and sunglasses, with one person wearing a gold-coloured dress, in front of a banner that says "GHOST WORLD".
Group of people wearing black clothing and sunglasses, with one person wearing a gold-coloured dress, in front of a banner that says "GHOST WORLD".
For a film that active­ly dis­en­gages from pop­u­lar Amer­i­can cul­ture, the Indi­an dance sequence is a per­fect fit.

You know that feel­ing when you grad­u­ate high school and spend the sum­mer hat­ing every­thing and every­one except for fortysome­thing Steve Busce­mi? Or when you get upset because an uppi­ty class­mate plops a tam­pon in a teacup and calls it art? Do you dye your hair in cri­sis or protest? Twen­ty years on, Ter­ry Zwigoff’s Ghost World is still ask­ing these questions.

A mélange of post-grad exis­ten­tial­ism and ersatz 1950s aes­thet­ics, Ghost World fol­lows Enid (Tho­ra Birch), a dis­af­fect­ed teen liv­ing in an unnamed sub­urb, as she con­tends with her wan­ing friend­ship with Rebec­ca (Scar­lett Johans­son) and bud­ding attrac­tion to Sey­mour (Steve Busce­mi), a fee­ble mid­dle-aged record col­lec­tor. The film may be read­i­ly asso­ci­at­ed with bot­tle-green hair, pas­sive-aggres­sive art class­es and the gen­er­al malaise of the ear­ly 2000s, but its off­beat ener­gy is most effec­tive­ly char­ac­terised by its first nee­dle drop.

In the open­ing cred­its, Zwigoff inter­cuts a high­ly-stylised scene from the 1965 Bol­ly­wood thriller Gum­naam with a row of non­de­script sub­ur­ban homes and their inhab­i­tants. The clips from Gum­naam see a host of masked dancers gyrat­ing to Mohammed Rafi’s Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ (rough­ly mean­ing let’s know each oth­er”), a brassy Hin­di surf track with enough verve to jump­start a car. The sub­ur­ban­ites, by stark con­trast, are a lethar­gic bunch: some smok­ing, some reclin­ing, all vague­ly glanc­ing at walls and win­dows while tele­vi­sions paint light onto their faces.

The cam­era final­ly finds Enid pranc­ing around her room in a cap and gown while the Gum­naam sequence con­tin­ues on her TV set. She match­es her move­ments to the dancers with no sense of irony, bob­bing her head and shak­ing her wrists to the beat. Unlike the pal­lid blue-grey rooms we’ve just seen, Enid’s pri­vate space is an oasis: punky, kitschy, adorned with doll heads and a Pufn­stuf poster.

There’s a dis­ori­ent­ing appeal to blend­ing pro­to­typ­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can images with the dis­tinct sounds of Bol­ly­wood. It serves to sub­vert the viewer’s expec­ta­tions while grab­bing their atten­tion, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly recon­fig­ur­ing the songs for new audi­ences. (The open­ing cred­its of Spike Lee’s Inside Man, which bor­row the song Chaiyya Chaiyya’ from Hin­di dra­ma Dil Se, are a tes­ta­ment to this.) This appo­si­tion didn’t appear to be Zwigoff’s intend­ed effect, how­ev­er, as he picked the scene on a whim.

I saw a short clip of it on a VHS tape and I real­ly loved it and decid­ed I need­ed to use it in Ghost World some­how,” Zwigoff told Dazed. Wasn’t too log­i­cal an idea, but I knew I had to do it.” It was Daniel Clowes, the car­toon­ist who cre­at­ed the orig­i­nal Ghost World’ com­ic in 1995, who owned the tape, unaware of its filmic ori­gins. Through John Malkovich (a co-pro­duc­er on the film), Clowes and Zwigoff were able to trace the dance num­ber to Gum­naam and even invit­ed the producer’s chil­dren to watch them film the open­ing sequence. As Clowes recalled to Salon, They were so excit­ed to have it res­ur­rect­ed and they couldn’t believe how much we loved it. But we kept say­ing, This is the great­est thing ever filmed, you don’t understand!’”

Love­ly and live­ly as they may be, these sequences can also be tricky. The trou­ble with repur­pos­ing old­er for­eign” media for con­tem­po­rary West­ern audi­ences is that the orig­i­nal work can become occi­den­talised. I’d ven­ture to say that most fans of Ghost World haven’t sought out Gum­naam and are com­fort­able let­ting it live as a mere exten­sion of Zwigoff’s oeu­vre. As a con­se­quence, many may not know that Mohammed Rafi was one of India’s most dis­tin­guished and icon­ic play­back singers, and that Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ is one of thou­sands of songs he record­ed. Con­verse­ly, had Zwigoff not bor­rowed the song and scene for his film, it like­ly would have nev­er reached West­ern audi­ences, cement­ing its cult fol­low­ing abroad.

Some have also exhaust­ed Enid’s alter­na­girl sen­si­bil­i­ties to the point where Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ and her char­ac­ter­is­tic love for Indi­an rock and roll (“Do you have any old Indi­an records?” she asks Sey­mour when they first meet) seem to func­tion as a means of exoti­cism, where­in Enid’s con­sump­tion of for­eign media makes her more inter­est­ing to behold. Yet this pre­sup­pos­es a kind of cul­tur­al engage­ment that Ghost World sly­ly rejects. The film’s aim, both styl­is­ti­cal­ly and nar­ra­tive­ly, is to dis­en­gage from pop­u­lar Amer­i­can cul­ture, to carve out a space for the qui­et­ly bizarre.

In his essay Cos­mopoli­tanism, Reme­di­a­tion, and the Ghost World of Bol­ly­wood’, David Novak, an eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gy pro­fes­sor at UC San­ta Bar­bara, exca­vates Ghost World’s open­ing cred­its to under­stand the process of reme­di­a­tion that occurs through the film’s sound­track. He finds that while the title sequence may appear to evoke Ori­en­tal­ist fan­ta­sy, the song does not autho­rise Enid’s escape into the promise of anOth­er cul­ture. Rather, it is part of her alien­ation from the very idea of culture.”

Zwigoff doesn’t appro­pri­ate Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ so much as use the song to fur­ther detach Ghost World from its Amer­i­can back­drop: the nunchuck-wield­ing red­neck at the cor­ner store; the onslaught of col­lege-bound grads eager to be exploit­ed; the ugly, sleepy row of sub­ur­ban hous­es. The typ­i­cal delin­eation between East ver­sus West, or Amer­i­ca ver­sus Oth­er, is absent. In its place is an angsty teenag­er rev­el­ling in noth­ing and every­thing all at once, thrash­ing about to a song she doesn’t understand.

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