Film Dunce is a weekly series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a movie that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never seen. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.
Reality Bites and so does this film. In the mid-‘90s I managed to see Empire Records, Clueless, PCU and Dazed and Confused when neighborhood girls would babysit my brothers and me. They would put their gum under the coffee table and turn on a make out film to make out to on Friday and Saturday nights during suburban summers. But somehow I missed Reality Bites, pitted chronologically and contextually amongst the slew of breezy movies that came out each year about the world of young Americans who transitioned with mall-brand angst into higher education or attempted to face the world that comes after college.
This 1994 bruise of a filmic memory stars Winona Ryder as Lelaina Pierce, the conflicted valedictorian of her fictitious alma mater. Foiling the conventionally magazine-attractive and sub-tragic Lelaina is her roommate Vickie, played by Janeane Garofalo, who thinks she is just ridiculously hilarious and charming. Then there’s Ethan Hawke playing the moronic, frustrated brat Troy, who like Garofalo’s Vickie, makes it hard for you to differentiate actual self-absorption from the intended personality of the character. Troy is a would-be nihilist, pseudo-intellectual who works as a clerk at a newstand before getting fired for eating a Snickers bar. He thinks that he’s in love with Ryder’s character but is too fixated on perceiving himself as being misunderstood and too busy feeling bad for himself because his father is struggling with cancer to do anything about his infatuation. It also doesn’t help that his idea of flirtation is at the same level of a fifth grader’s – an ongoing cringe-worthy behavior endured throughout Reality Bites. Filmed in the great tradition of popular culture and materialism – rampant with shameless product placement (BMW, GAP, 7-11 Big Gulps, Coke) – our snotty postgraduates struggle to get along under the same roof and find jobs that are cool enough and fulfilling.
So what the title Reality Bites really translates to is Consumer Society is Relatively Difficult for the Twentysomething Born of the Middle Class. The problem is not that Lelaina, Troy and their friends cannot get a job, fall in love, kick drugs or get recognition for a creative endeavor; it’s that none of them have any idea of what they want or if they do have an idea of what they want, they’re too afraid to take on any responsibility that might compromise their lifestyle. As pneumatic stereotypes of their generation, the characters that drive the film are overacted and underdeveloped, but not in a way where it’s awesomely bad and the experience of watching it is satisfyingly nostalgic. With Reality Bites, you don’t get to make fun of what people thought was hip and marvel at the get-ups as much as you lose interest in the shallow, contentious, untrustworthy, selfish, uninteresting character portrayals. None of them are rooted in any Reality other than their own, which is specific to themselves and only to themselves. Even the existentially aware reader Troy, whose band name is Hey That’s My Bike, is full of shit. Just because you’re too lazy or unmotivated doesn’t mean you’re politically active.
As far as nostalgia goes, though, Reality Bites is somewhat steeped in artifacts of the ‘90s such as blue and white denim, 1-800 numbers and fish tanks. There are also a few tenuous references to the proliferation of AIDS and the practice of getting tested paired with the anxieties of waiting to get results. In this respect, the problem with Reality Bites is its tepid energy. The humor is flat and the drama is nauseating. The script never pushes the story into any kind of depth, in one direction or the other. The subplots falter to heavy clichés instead of upholding any shred of integrity. It’s a slight comedy that suffers psychological blindness because it focuses on what is surface and misses opportunities of attainable realism. There’s a dubious scene in which Garofalo, for instance, gets tested for HIV but we don’t ever find out much about the situation. Almost 20 years later and the hyper-commercial Reality Bites gives us little insight into the consciousness of recent graduate of the ‘90s in America.
Perhaps the most bizarre dimension of Reality Bites is that Ben Stiller directs and Danny DeVito produces. There’s an odd instance of self-serving gratitude for Stiller who doubles up by playing Michael, a plain, uncomplicated, inexperienced television executive who comes into Lelaina’s life when she flicks a cigarette into his car by accident and he crashes. Lelaina fears that Michael will sue her, but instead, because of her desperation and looks of conventional consumer beauty, he takes her out to dinner. It’s convenient because Ryder’s character is supposedly a virgin whose personal project is a video art documentary that exhibits the life of her and her friends. They do things like smush brownies into each other’s faces, come out to their parents and drink beer on the top of industrial buildings. Stiller’s character Michael ends up bastardizing the documentary footage as captured by Ryder’s character by letting “In Your Face TV” turn it into an exploitative “Real World”-like chunk of demented ‘90s inventiveness (obnoxious montage of the lost and privileged). Lelaina becomes disenchanted and turns to back to Troy. It seems that what we’re to learn here is that sometimes sleeping with someone who has money and a career path is not all it is cracked up to be. Moreover, it’s just another failed reality. It is curious though as to why Stiller would set himself up to bang a virgin Ryder only to be dropped in the end for the moody, brooding coffee shop prince. Either way, if it weren’t for this plot point, we wouldn’t get to see the only scene worth watching the film for, which is Hawke freaking out on stage singing and playing guitar as frontman for Troy’s alt rock band.
For Stiller’s directorial debut as played by the faces of Ryder, Hawke and Garofalo, marked with the youth-crystalizing sheen of young Hollywood, it’s the pausing of age rather than the coming of age. There is no crisis realized. There is no productive discussion. There is no reflection. Now and in retrospect, it’s a music video of a bildungsroman turned on its side, strangled in a push-up bra, kissed on the cheek and photographed for “Seventeen” magazine. If you have gone as long as I did without seeing Reality Bites, one of the less entertaining flicks of the ‘90s, then consider it intentional that you have not already. Watch Heathers again instead.
