Nearly a decade ago, Interview magazine mourned the loss of the “sassy cool girl” in American cinema: the kind of teenager who could be mean and withering, who’d read Sylvia Plath but also find her whiny, and who’d pine for an adulthood free of mainstream idiocy. Interview mentioned Nineties classics like The Craft, and Jawbreaker, and 10 Things I Hate About You, paradigms of strutting, mouthy alt-teen cool. But they could have saved time by simply mourning the loss of Thora Birch. Between American Beauty and Ghost World, her two showcases of spiky, adolescent malaise, no actor better encapsulated fresh-faced contempt at the turn of the millennium. And then, practically in a flash, Birch seemed to vanish.
In 2001’s Ghost World she was Enid, an insecure outsider who nonetheless projected outrageous amounts of self-confidence; who was rude, and bitchy, and just so deliciously above it all. I was Enid, too. Or at least, I wanted to be. Twenty-five years later, I tell Birch this over Zoom. Surely everyone who watches Ghost World feels the same? “I would hope,” Birch says, quickly. “And I’d halfway assume it’s still pretty emotionally relevant for a certain age group...” She nods. “Maybe even more so with, you know, isolation due to social media. All that.” She stares. “Blah-blah-blah.” She giggles.
