Dated But On The Money: Revisiting ‘Reality Bites’

As a college student, when "Reality Bites" was released in 1994, the film spoke to me. Maybe the character played by Winona Ryder, Lelaina, who was trying to break into the media, made me relate to the film the most. Or perhaps it was what all four main characters were going through as they transitioned from college to being fully functional adults. Some of their discussions, worries, hopes, and dreams were similar to my conversations with friends, dorm mates, and acquaintances. 30 years after its release, does "Reality Bites" actually hold up?

I probably hadn't watched the film in about 20 years, and what I remember from when I watched it in 2004 was how utterly dated it seemed 10 years after its release. It's a film of it's time.

The themes of figuring out who you are, your values, and starting your own unique life as an adult are universal. Yet some of the specifics the characters deal with throughout the film are unique problems of the early 1990s. Like Sammy (Steve Zahn) telling his parents he's gay or Vickie (Janeane Garofalo) going to the free clinic for an Aids test.

Don't get me wrong, people today can still find themselves in the same situations as Vickie and Sammy.  Yet, in 2024, many 20-somethings deal with those issues from a completely different perspective than the 20-somethings in the early 90s. It's a different time.

Of course, there are the obvious things that look dated. For example, the only person with a cell phone is Michael (Ben Stiller). Troy and Lelaina look like GenXers right out of a Nirvana video. There's no internet, but the 1-800 Psychic Hotline exists. When Lelaina's looking for work, she's hitting the pavement, not an online job application. There's also a lot of smoking, yet in the 90s, a pack of Camels seemed to be part of the "uniform" if you were a college student.

So, after rewatching it after 30 years, what do I think? The film does a pretty good job of depicting the experiences of people in their early 20s who were in college or graduated from college in the early 1990s. That said, it is difficult to say this film will be relatable to everyone in Generation X.

Britannica and Wikipedia define Generation X as people born between 1965 and 1980. If you were born in '65 and would be 22 in 1987, it could be somewhat challenging to relate to these characters. Just as someone born in 1980 who turned 22 in 2002 realistically had a very different experience than those turning 22 a decade earlier.

The first third of the film, where you get the background on the characters and the plot, seemed slow. It might be different if you're watching the movie for the first time and learning about the characters. The second two-thirds of the film tended to move more quickly, and I felt it was reasonably entertaining.

I've tended to focus on the overall experience the film shows of growing up and the trials and tribulations the characters are going through. However, in many respects, the film is about love—specifically, the love triangle between Michael (Ben Stiller), Troy (Ethan Hawke), and Lelania (Winona Ryder). The tagline on the poster calls the film "a comedy about love in the 90s."

The key to that love triangle is whether Lelania will choose Troy, an intelligent underachiever with strong ideals and opinions, or the corporate media dude Michael, the polar opposite.

What's interesting to me is that neither of Lelania's potential boyfriends is unlikable; they're just different. It's interesting to watch Lelania work through her emotions to choose the man she wants to be with, and the film does a decent job of showing that and incorporating that into the plot. As for Vickie and Sammy's specific plot points, Lelaina's job search, and the journey and growth the other characters experience, you have to connect the dots, although the film does give the viewer a resolution.

In my 20s, I don't remember whether I thought Michael was the same age as Troy and Lelania or a little older. Yet, upon this rewatch, even though Ben Stiller looks young, I think his character is a few years older than Troy and Lelaina. Still Gen X, but born at the very beginning of the generation.  He comes across as someone who has already come through what Lelaina, Troy, Vickie, and Sammy were going through a few years earlier and is comfortable with who he has become.

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When it's said and done, I enjoyed re-watching Reality Bites. It brought back some personal memories of that time in my life, and I'll tell you, it was a fairly unpleasant time for me, especially my post-college life in the mid to late 90s. It wasn't easy. Yet I got through it and grew and thrived. I know how my friends and I turned out; what I was left curious about was what happened to Lelaina and her friends. Where are they today? How did their lives turn out?

It would be interesting to see Ryder, Hawke, Garofalo, Zahn, and Stiller reprise their roles and let us into their lives 30 years later. Whether any of them are interested in revisiting these characters or whether making a sequel to the film would ever happen after the original wasn't a huge hit is a different conversation altogether.