Title: Reality Bites
Rating: 4 Stars
Generationally, I’m kind of on the cusp. Conventionally, the Baby Boomer generation is identified as being between 1946 through 1964 and Gen X was 1965 through 1980. I’ve always had the idea that the main reason that the Boomer dates were chosen was because of the transposition of the last two digits. The authors Strauss and Howe wrote a popular book about the various American generations called Generations (how original!). In their case, Gen X (called the 13th Generation in their nomenclature) was 1961 to 1981. In one case I’m a Boomer and in the other I’m a Gen Xer. Other authors provide different dates.
Regardless, although I’m probably a very young Boomer, my affinity has always been with Gen X. Much of that has probably to do with how I feel about the Boomer generation in general. That feeling can be summed up by the title of a book that I read, “A Generation of Sociopaths” (I wrote about it here).
So, given that I have that affinity, it’s kind of amazing that I’ve never seen Reality Bites. Reading Chuck Klosterman’s book, The Nineties, put this film back on my radar. Released in 1994, it still stands as the representative Gen X film. It stars Wynona Ryder (born in 1971), considered one of the Gen X icons. It also stars Janeane Garofalo (born in 1964, another cusper like me!), one of the most popular comedians of that generation. Appearing in it and also directing it is Ben Stiller (born in 1965, go cuspers!), yet another big player in the Gen X cultural world.
Four friends have recently graduated college. Lelaina (Ryder) is a TV production assistant and aspiring documentarian. Her roommate Vickie (Garafalo) is a manager at The Gap but is afraid, due to her promiscuousness, that she might have HIV. Troy (Ethan Hawke) is a directionless, aimless musician who, after being fired from his twelfth meaningless job, is now bunking on their couch. Sammy (Steve Zahn) is celibate because he is secretly gay and does not want to come out to his conservative parents.
Into this group lands Michael (Stiller) when he and Lelaina have a car accident. After this meet cute, the sparks fly between them. Not only that but Michael is an executive at an MTV wannabe network and is interested in putting Lelaina’s documentary about her friends on the air. This proceeds to stir up Troy’s latent jealousy.
And that’s how the story unfolds. Lelaina is fired from her TV job and falls into a depression. Michael and Troy fight for her affections. Her documentary is released but it disappoints her. As she begins to pull herself out of her funk, will she choose the straight, ambitious Michael or will she choose the slacker, soulful musician?
If you need a hint regarding who Lelaina will choose, as Chuck Klosterman mentions in his essay on the film, selling out was considered to be the high sin for Gen X. You should produce your art and just let it go. You should never promote it or seek to become rich and famous off it. The work is the reward. In the film, you see this lack of ambition manifested in Troy’s utter lack of ambition and in Lelaina’s reluctance to let her work be shown and her horror when she discovers how the network has commercialized it.
That is in direct opposition to today’s world, in which the hustle is the reward. The attitude today is to grind it until you can make it. Once you become rich and famous, then you flaunt it on Instagram.
The fact that I’ve been writing this blog for seven years, have written over 850 posts, and not once have even lifted a finger to try to raise my profile, worry about SEO, or any other nonsense like that is probably proof enough that I’m a Gen Xer at heart.
The lack of ambition in Reality Bites is not the only attribute that marks it as a Gen X film. All of the characters are products of divorced parents. Both of Lelaina’s parents are uninterested in helping her or providing guidance (other than some ‘time to grow up’ kind of comments).
Sammy’s gay struggle and his, as it turns out, justifiable fears that his parents will condemn him were very much of the 90s. In a similar vein, the sexual liberation and promiscuity of the 1960s and the 1970s gave way to the very real idea of dying from sex via HIV / AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, so Vickie’s fears were also of that moment.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a college education was pretty much a ticket to the middle class. Not many people were graduating and the US economy was growing at a rate to easily accommodate the influx of new graduates. In the 1980s and 1990s, this began to change. The four of them graduate from college but there’s a whole what’s-next vibe to their life. They’d followed all of the rules and were now ready to start their new lives as real adults, but there were no guides or templates for them to follow. Vickie seems to not have much more of a plan than being a Gap store manager. After Lelaina loses her job, she discovers how valueless her fancy class valedictorian college degree is when she can’t even get a fast food job. The world has changed but no one has told them and they have no milestones to follow.
By now, you’ve probably guessed that Lelaina chose Troy. It’d be interesting to see, if the film was remade today, if she’d choose differently. Sure, Mike wears a suit, has a nice haircut (what a sellout!), and is seemingly only vaguely knowledgeable about Hamlet (thus implying a problematic lack of intellectual pretension), but it’s clear that he deeply cares about Lelaina’s happiness and is willing to support her documentarian career. Meanwhile Troy, with his disheveled hair, can barely be bothered to stop smoking pot long enough to get off her couch. He mocks her documentaries and openly says that, because of who he is, that he will occasionally be cruel to her. The two of them fall for each other at a point where Troy is at a singularly vulnerable point in his life. Eventually that will wear off and in all likelihood they’ll be verbally fencing again.
In which case, they’ll get married, have children, and will bitterly divorce, so we can look forward to their Gen Z children’s films about their angst.
dorkenstein 