‘Reality Bites’ at 30: Slackers and Yuppies Face-Off In This Gen X Battle Between Authenticity and Capitalism

If one of the characters in Reality Bites had a baby straight out of college, that child would now be 30 – much older than Lelaina (Winona Ryder), Troy (Ethan Hawke), Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), Sammy (Steve Zahn), or even the less recently graduated Michael (Ben Stiller, who also directed) as depicted by the movie, which chronicles that first year or so after leaving campus behind. You can play that game with practically any movie of a certain age, but it stings a little sharper with Reality Bites, because this particular movie is so focused on the trials of young adulthood. Naturally, with three additional decades of economic bleakening for the middle-class (and attendant, understandable reluctance/inability to emerge as a fully-formed adult straight out of college), the characters’ supposed disappointments sound premature. “I was really going to be something by the age of 23,” Lelaina says at one point. Sure, and Reality Bites was going to be the voice of a generation; it didn’t turn out quite like that.

Lelaina is an aspiring filmmaker, working on her documentary while hustling through a demeaning assistant job at a Houston-area TV show hosted by a cheerful, avuncular fellow who’s secretly a toxic old crank (John Mahoney). She lives with her friend Vickie, who is temporarily embracing her new position as manager of a Gap, and starts dating slightly older TV producer Michael, while unresolved feelings for standoffish, anti-establishment Troy nag at her, though Troy is more forward about his desires. Generational spokeswoman or not, Lelaina is still the kind of rom-com heroine who nonsensically refers to her closest-by-default male friend as “best friend,” behavior that Vickie – by all evidence her actual best friend – somehow fails to call out. It’s a surprising omission; given Garofalo’s best-in-movie performance and the sometime tartness of the dialogue from writer Helen Childress, letting Troy have the “best friend” title feels like stacking the deck in his favor.

But let’s not relitigate the central romantic conflict of Reality Bites, which has given the movie swoony staying power while also powering plenty of subsequent re-evaluations: Michael, who the movie eventually characterizes as kind of a spineless, uncreative yuppie, versus Troy, who the movie seems to regard as a flawed but essentially principled truth-teller. You can rewatch the movie and decide for yourself whose behavior seems borderline psychotic; it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that Lelaina should ditch them both and move to another city entirely. (You want to say, Lainy, there’s something pretty cool happening over in Austin right now if you’re serious about this filmmaking thing.)

What has aged well, though perhaps not in the way the movie intended, is its surface-skimming portrait of Generation X. Lelaina and her friends claim to value authenticity, or at least exhibit a jaundiced sense of humor about the idea of selling themselves out. Yet to some degree, that combination of earnestness about themselves and cynicism about the world comes across as learned behavior, certainly not reflected by their junk-culture tastes, which are never quite as ironic as the characters themselves appear to believe. They all seem to dimly perceive that mocking the language of TV commercials constitutes some form of commentary – something Stiller’s Michael fumbles over, emphasizing his outsider status – yet they’re not exactly making a point, either. Lelaina, somewhat improbably, is a college valedictorian who stammers hopelessly and helplessly when asked to define irony. (Troy, a college dropout, later provides a textbook definition that I think is supposed to point to his natural intelligence.)

Interestingly, grunge is virtually nowhere to be found, despite Troy’s fledgling coffee-shop rock band Hey That’s My Bike. Lelaina, Vickie, and Sammy subsist a diet of ’70s and ’80s cheese like “Tempted” and “My Sharona” – and while it’s probably realistic that a bunch of 22-year-olds born around 1972 would latch on to the music of their youth, it’s also striking to watch a movie with such a that’s-so-’90s rep and hear its most famous ’90s song – “Stay,” by Hawke’s pal Lisa Loeb – buried in the end credits. (Even then-hipper choices like Violent Femmes and U2 are repped via stuff they released in the ’80s.) Cameron Crowe’s Singles, released about 18 months earlier, went the opposite way: the Seattle music scene is depicted with what seems like lived-in accuracy, while most of the main characters are a little square to qualify as slackers or even slacker-adjacent.

The Reality Bites characters are nominally edgier, chain-smoking and fretting over AIDS tests, which ultimately gives way to relative traditionalism – sound familiar, Gen X? Again, the movie is prescient, paying some attention to the economic precariousness of Lelaina’s generation – dead-end jobs, many situated in dead zones between overqualification and underqualification – while unable to acknowledge how much worse it would get, and how many Gen Xers became just as curdled in their worldview as the Boomers that preceded them. The Gen X-iest plot turn is how Michael, eager to share his girlfriend’s work, helps Lelaina sell her doc footage to an MTV-like cable channel, which promptly gussies it up with cheesy graphics, rapid-fire editing, and Stiller, as a director, generally reading The Real World to filth. At the same time: Is this betrayal of Lelaina’s vision actually much worse than her raw footage?

“I worked so hard,” she laments – while also wondering aloud why things can’t go back to normal “at the end of the half-hour, like The Brady Bunch or something.” Maybe the irony in Lelaina conveying heartbreak over the sitcom commodification of her vision through the comfort of an even junkier sitcom is intentional, but Stiller doesn’t play the scene for satire. To his credit, he respects the characters’ feelings – and is willing to make himself look plenty dorky as Michael. And if Lelaine’s shaky-camcordered confessionals don’t have much artistry, Stiller’s film is So ’90s in that it casually looks better than a lot of contemporary cinema, thanks to warm lighting and well-framed dialogue scenes. It’s an early American film for cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, not long before he started working with Alfonso Cuarón and, later, became the first person to win three consecutive Best Cinematography Oscars

As a plot-light, dialogue-heavy, bittersweet comedy, though, Reality Bites was quickly (and perhaps appropriately) shown up by an ever-so-slightly younger group: The characters in Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming, as well as the more mature (but still youthful) friends of Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking. Whatever studio polish these movies lack, they make up for in sharp, often unsparing wit that feels more of their mid-1990s time than this movie. Stiller, too, would sharpen his knives in subsequent directorial projects like The Cable Guy and Tropic Thunder. That doesn’t invalidate Reality Bites; it just connects the movie to slick romantic comedies of the era, rather than other quarterlife crises or cultural satires. Here’s where Lelaina really does speak for her generation, or maybe the younger cohort who grew up on this dithery romance: “I know it sounds stupid, but it really meant something to me.”

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.