Reality Bites at 25: Is the Winona Ryder romcom still relevant to millennials?

Reality Bites is a bleak viewing experience for the average millennial. Watching Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder), a recent college graduate, worry that she might be fired from her $400 a week assistant job (in her dream career in television, to boot) and be replaced by an unpaid intern feels quaint now. The Lelaina of today could only dream of being that unpaid intern.

The romcom, directed by Ben Stiller, was met with a middling critical reception upon its release 25 years ago – but has since risen through the ranks to become a cult classic. Its enduring popularity probably has less to do with its central love triangle – Lelaina must choose between two equally unappealing men, Ethan Hawke’s slacker-philosopher Troy and Stiller’s blancmange-in-a-suit Michael – than its ability to capture the zeitgeist of the 1990s. It does so even better than its contemporary counterparts, Clerks, Singles, Dazed and Confused and Slacker – and not just because of all the flannel, Lisa Loeb and Big Gulps.

Written by Helen Childress, the film was originally intended as an ensemble piece focused on the struggles of college graduates in the face of an economic recession. It was Stiller who amped up the romantic aspect of the film’s storyline. But beyond the love triangle, the various musings of Lelaina and her friends form an oddly definitive portrait of Generation X, a term derived from the title of Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book, in reference to those born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s.

It also happens to be a celluloid record of how far we’ve since plummeted down the spiral of capitalist despair. Reality Bites is far from timeless, filled with sincere complaints that the millennial generation (the succeeding age demographic to Generation X) is bound to find a little laughable. According to a 2015 US Census Bureau study, young adults in the US, on average, earn around $2,000 less than young adults in 1980, despite the fact that millennials are more likely to have earned a college degree. In Reality Bites, Lelaina scoffs at the fact that landing a house and a job, aka the American Dream, “could take years” for her generation, while showing equal disdain for her roommate Vickie (Janeane Garofalo)’s promotion to a managerial role at The Gap. Millennials, meanwhile, have largely made peace with the fact that a steady income and a house to call their own is more of a pipe dream than a life goal.

If there has been a major shift in thinking, Reality Bites suggests it’s this: that the ideological anxiety of Generation X has morphed into the practical concerns of millennials. Take Lelaina’s valedictorian speech, which not only opens the film but provides its thesis. “And they wonder why those of us in our 20s refuse to work an 80-hour week, just so we can afford to buy their BMWs,” she intones. Her voice is full of righteous fury. The film deals with the disillusionment of realising you’ve dedicated your life to a system that provides only hollow rewards. Yet, in millennial thinking, there’s little to be disillusioned about, since it’s obvious those rewards are now a mere fabrication. Reality bites harder, and so a different kind of coping mechanism has kicked in.

What’s grown in its place is a semi-ironic celebration of “the hustle”, which sees the characters of the popular Comedy Central series Broad City roll into the bank, Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” blasting, in order to deposit “eight f***ing thousand dollars”. Or sees the hero of Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, played by Greta Gerwig, consider a tax rebate so much of a personal victory that she gains the confidence to ask a man out on a date. When there’s no ultimate prize dangled in front of this generation’s face, pop culture has started to treat any kind of cash flow as a small victory.

You have to wonder whether this kind of open celebration of money would have seen these characters labelled as sell-outs by the crew of Reality Bites. Cinema was, for a good stretch of the 1990s, obsessed with “yuppies”, a damning label attached to anyone who was seen to openly embrace materialism. Lelaina teases her date Michael for his penchant for nice suits, while Troy claims his only appeal is his “extensive knowledge of mineral water”. But those fixations have since died out. The birth of the hipster seemed to arrive with a greater realisation that many don’t even have the opportunity to sell their soul to climb the corporate ladder, leaving hipsters to become financially invested in trying to erase their own privilege with ripped-up jeans and bohemian posing.

This isn’t to say that Generation X had it easy, just that they were placed in the position of experiencing the first big dip in financial fortune. A 2014 study found that, although 75 per cent of Generation X earned more than baby boomers did when they were the same age, only 36 per cent have acquired more wealth than their parents, due to debt that arose from the dot-com bust of 1995-2000 and the later financial crisis of 2008.

Reality Bites’s seemingly romantic conclusion isn’t entirely rosy. Lelaina rejects the opportunity to sell her documentary to an MTV-esque channel because it would mean compromising her artistic vision, and chooses the unemployed but deep-thinking Troy over the bland but stable Michael. But there’s nothing about Troy, who is repeatedly cruel to Lelaina and laughs in her face at the suggestion he’s in love with her, that suggests a particularly bright future. In his big speech, in fact, he openly admits: “I might hurt you, and I might run away without your permission.” Lelaina has seen that, for her generation, there are no more easy paths, and so compromises must be made. In her eyes, she has sacrificed stability in order to live authentically.

Millennials have their own compromises, stemming from their own limitations in choice. If you believe the breathless reports, they’ve chosen avocado toast over saving money to buy a home, despite the current economy dictating they would never be able to buy a home in the first place. A lot has changed between the generations, but Reality Bites asks a question that anyone, of any age, will find familiar: what happens when the life you were promised isn’t the life you got?