When this film was released, the Gen-Xers who were its target audience saw it, of course, although not in the numbers required to make it a hit. We also pushed back against its narrative and the reality represented by its characters. We reacted like Troy would have, sickened by the obvious commercial packaging of the movie and taken aback by the broad stereotypes of our generation.
The thing is, this aspect of the film is what makes it ring true for wiser Gen-Xers looking back now. Writing about the film at the time, Roger Ebert complained that it was "blind ... to its own realities" and that the film needed more acknowledgment of certain obvious aspects of the story (like Troy was a jerk and Lelaina not a very good filmmaker).
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| Pizza figures into Reality Bites in interesting ways. Of course it does. (Photo by Justine!) |
It's perhaps true that the story could have done more with these potential points of conflict, but I think the film and filmmakers were actually very much aware of these realities and how the characters embodied them. There's another scene in the movie where the Winona Ryder character (Lelaina, supposedly a valedictorian) is asked to define irony and can't do it. To me, this scene suggests a deeper aspect to this story, as written by a screenwriter very much of her generation at the time (I don't think many of us were aware of that fact, either). Lelaina doesn't get irony in the same way that post-grunge singer Alanis Morrisette didn't "get" it. (But then, of course she did. The song was ironic.)
When you're a Gen-Xer, you don't need to define irony because there's just too much of it. We did sit around and watch Good Times and talk about the Brady Bunch, but we didn't think it was all that ironic. (We didn't think it was all that serious, either.) As has also been pointed out by the online commenting class, the characters in this movie consume a lot of commercial products for people so apparently dead set against crass commercialism. But that actually seems pretty valid as an aspect of Generation X. We complained and even whined about commercialism, but we didn't feel we could do that much about it. We also liked Diet Coke and Quarter Pounders (as Troy notes). We saw no contradiction there. We didn't invent this stuff; we just consumed it. We didn't see a lot of choices. Yes, I will have this Quarter Pounder and Diet Coke. What else are you offering?
It seemed we didn't have a lot of choices about life either. Roger Ebert makes much of the slacker who is "supposed to be" wise or interesting because he doesn't work, but that's not why alleged "slackers" struck that pose in the early 1990s. The economy really was in the toilet, and jobs for young people, even educated young people, were scarce. The slacker thing was more about dealing with one's circumstances and learning to survive in a less-than-amazing job. (Sarcasm is often part of survival.) Perhaps Ebert related more to the parents in this movie, who represent the parents of Generation Xers in very interesting ways, projecting that sense of disappointment even as they seem unwilling to acknowledge their own responsibility (both personal and collective-economic) in shaping this "reality' for dissatisfied 20-somethings.
Yes, we were whiny and thought we were great filmmakers and artists when maybe we weren't. But we also knew the irony of all that, even if we didn't want to admit it. It's like the when the Simpsons did the parody of the 1990s music festival, and the Gen-X-type character said he "didn't even know" if he was being sarcastic anymore. We don't tend to think about it as a separate concept because it's just too central to everything as we see it.
Gen Xers became cynical (and yes, ironic and sarcastic) as a survival mechanism, not as some sort of expression of cultural coolness. Many of us just happened to internalize that quality as we got older, and so we understood that kind of conversation. The Ebert review makes some good points about the film as such, but this Washington Post review gets a lot closer to the truth about what the movie will come to represent, especially for a review of the time. Maybe Ebert just didn't "get it."*
As I mentioned, a lot of us Gen Xers didn't "get it" either. Winona Ryder was our generation's star, and we usually trusted her, but we weren't sure about what they were representing here. We weren't this whiny and self-indulgent, were we? The answer is no; probably only the coolest of us came off like Ethan Hawke in this movie (Ebert's right about his performance also -- he's unlikable but also conveys a certain injured quality -- what's amazing is how different this is from some of his other characters of the time). Most of us were just struggling and searching and trying to put it together, and we weren't ready to have this kind of light focused on us yet or to make fun of ourselves yet -- even it was pretty damn accurate.
*Ebert also gets some facts about the movie wrong in his review, which is an astonishingly common feature of his reviews.
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