Reality, bites ?
Maybe I was more Gen-X than I felt at the time because when I first saw the title - Reality Bites - I thought it was some kind of wryism meant to say: Reality Sucks.
Reality: the world bestowed upon us by our parents and substitutes - our blitzed out and/or absent and/or abusive elders and betters - the reality that had zero to do with what baby boomers claimed they believed in - the reality on the ground, so to speak.
That's what I thought it meant: Reality - it sucks.
Perhaps it did.
But the title refers to what were once frequently bandied media terms - 'sound bite' and 'video bite' were terms coined and traded popular by spinners, image consultants and the other artful dodgers of the nineteen eighties and early nineties. 'Bite' was a humble word modernized, repackaged and remarketed as a cool new buzzword - one that was almost ripe enough to be dispatched by the baseball bat of historical dialect when writer Helen Childress came to describe life as a graduate 'slacker.'
It's tempting to laugh at the 'pain' of her twentyoid characters - young, healthy, rich (according to the I.M.F. and the W.H.O.) - who are relatively free and highly educated, but who still seem to have nothing, believe in nothing, and perhaps even are nothing. But although we do laugh, it is not so much at them as for them, as they stumble from one beach obstacle to the next on the way to becoming a middle manager, or a lower-mid-level-supervisor, or a top ranked janitor...
With good humor, Lelaina (Winona Ryder), Troy (Ethan Hawke) and friends casually annihilate almost every shake-n-bake platitude that Reaganism/Thatcherism promoted as 'our' values and, through their unknowing devotion to social evolution, they show us the lie that was the hippie dream and the baby boom work ethic: the girl who is thoughtful enough to record her latest lay in a notebook, but can't remember his name; the bleary eyed philosophy major - canned for stealing a candy bar; the mislaid son, reduced to gallows-humor at the prospect of honesty with his parents. And there's Lelaina Pierce - trapsing through the wilderness of the mall, the bars and the hopeful schemes that are only taken seriously by 23 year olds; Lelaina Pierce, who accidentally beheads the all powerful Dr. Zaius, distracted by passing issues of attraction and litigation; Lelaina, who cheerfully responds to an interview accusation of over qualification with:
"I'm really not that smart"
Lelaina, who blows her next interview because she can't define 'irony'.
..With the practical advantage of being fictional, the characters in Reality Bites demonstrate for us certain realities: that form triumphs over content, that tact bests truth, that big pictures outweigh little kids, and that we must not forget the 'wider issues' while standing in that strip of forest.
That's what slackers learnt and, to many of them, before they finally 'grew up' and accepted adult reality, it seemed the best response was the central digit of either hand.
text: © Copyright 2004 cb salter. all rights reserved.