The 2001 live-action Ghost World was the first collaboration involving director Terry Zwigoff, cartoonist Daniel Clowes, and John Malkovich’s production company. Art School Confidential is the second. It’s far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess. Holding it together is the same anger about the way art is taught that gave so much edgy life to the scenes with Illeana Douglas in Ghost World. Even if one disagrees with some of its points, as I do, it offers plenty to mull over.
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Both films faintly echo a four-page catalog of Clowes’s gripes called “Art School Confidential” that appeared in his comic book Eightball. (Having taught courses in film and critical writing in a university art department in the mid-70s,I can testify that art-world careerism was the main preoccupation of both my students and my colleagues.) Clowes clearly felt alienated as an art student and has been spewing bile ever since. But as in the work of his fellow comic-book artist (and Zwigoff associate) Robert Crumb, self-hatred, misogyny, and misanthropy compete with the social criticism, to the point that they’re often difficult to separate. Art School Confidential‘s also full of Freudian confusion, which becomes obvious when we belatedly discover that the heroine dislikes the work of a particular painter simply because he’s her father.
It’s characteristic of Clowes’s overall disaffection that the comic “Art School Confidential” lists “certain recurring character types [that] appear in every art-school class” and that in the movie Bardo (Joel David Moore), a classmate of Jerome’s, does the same thing. Yet there’s practically no overlap between the two lists, which makes me skeptical about both. In any case, the main “type” that’s missing from both lists is Bardo/Clowes—the adolescent wiseass who insists on reducing his classmates to such categories.
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Written by Daniel Clowes
With Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, Matt Keeslar, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, Ethan Suplee, Steve Buscemi, and Anjelica Huston
