Reality Bites is a gen X classic where the only real enemies are capitalism and inauthenticity | Culture
YoIt appears each era has produced its personal cohort of overeducated twentysomethings who are stranded between promise and actuality, and routinely dismissed as lazy or gradual growers. Ben Stiller’s 90s romcom Reality Bites captured that enduring state of uncertainty, artistic ambition and emotional drift with a distinctly gen X really feel, when the only real enemies gave the impression to be capitalism and inauthenticity.
On launch in 1994, the movie obtained combined opinions. Stiller, a first-time director, was credited with capturing a 90s post-college drift, whereas Winona Ryder’s magnetic efficiency as Lelaina was broadly praised. The criticism was reserved for its “banal love story”, with Variety accusing it of promoting out to a Hollywood formulation – sarcastically what the movie’s characters rail in opposition to.
Now a cult classic, Reality Bites stays a defining entry to angsty, post-adolescent 90s cinema, from its plaid shirt and Levi’s aesthetics and pop-culture one-liners (“I’m bursting with fruit flavour”) to its killer soundtrack, together with Lisa Loeb’s hit Stay (launched to Stiller by Ethan Hawke).
The movie follows Lelaina, a valedictorian turned talkshow intern who is making a documentary about her associates’ collective ennui. There is the fun-loving and cynical Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who manages a Gap (howdy 90s); Sammy (Steve Zahn), quietly navigating his sexuality; and Lelaina’s greatest pal, Troy (a smoldering Hawke), who is pretentious, insecure and spectacularly emotionally unavailable, but nonetheless in love together with her. Enter Michael (Stiller), a younger, affable government at an MTV-adjacent firm, who presents Lelaina stability and, in a while, reshapes her uncooked footage into one thing extra “palatable.” This love triangle between Michael, Lelaina and Troy is an argument about promoting out, and that stress is where the movie is most alive.
Much of that vitality comes from the screenwriter, Helen Childress, who wrote the movie when she was simply 20, drawing straight from her personal life and these round her. The world feels correctly unfiltered, from the relentless indoor chain-smoking to conversations that shift between irony and confession. Hawke later observed: “What’s strange is that there was no grownup in charge.” It gave the movie each its authenticity and its structural unevenness.
Several scenes minimize via with real, poignant drive. Sammy, sitting on his mother and father’ entrance garden after popping out to them, admits: “It’s not because I’m scared of the big A. It’s because I can’t really start my life until I’m honest about who I am.” Vickie, awaiting medical outcomes, says: “I’m maybe, probably, sitting here dying of Aids, and I’m totally alone.” Troy’s notorious line – “This is all we need – you, me and $5” – distils a romanticized precarity that feels oddly present once more.
Troy is arguably the movie’s most dated proposition. Cerebral but gaslighty, he is the type of brooding romantic hero a era of 90s and 00s movies handed us as the template: he is imply as a result of he likes you. The movie stops in need of absolutely interrogating him however time has carried out it anyway. While the twentysomething situation is common, generations since have managed some evolution on that entrance (I hope).
Stiller enlisted cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, lengthy earlier than his Oscar-winning work on Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant. Shot on 35mm, the movie switches between mushy naturalism and stylisation. A late-night petrol station sequence with the group, stoned and dancing to My Sharona, is enhanced when it cuts to a static huge exterior shot – the only seen motion is via the store window. It’s a sublime scene that captures carefree youth.
Alongside Empire Records and Before SunriseReality Bites paved the approach for sharper, extra various malaise-lit cinema – Worst Person in the World, Shiva Baby, moonlight and Return to Seoul – however its relevance lies in its most cussed query: what occurs while you do all the things proper and it nonetheless would not work out? A couple of of us would really like a solution.
