The newest grunge film is so ironic it risks wandering forever among its own twists and turns. Fabius Burger reports
According to Reality Bites director Ben Stiller, “irony is the only defence this generation has against the commodification of their culture” — this generation being today’s twentysomethings, or Generation X, after the title of Doug Coupland’s zeitgeist novel. They’re into apathy, drift — the “slack pack”. They wouldn’t be high on the list in any economic reconstruction programme.
There may be too much irony in the movie, as Stiller piles it on. He plays smooth television executive Michael Grates, who persuades would-be filmmaker Leliana Pierce (Winona Ryder), fired as an assistant on a chat show, to let him have a video of her friends, all into basic grunge, for his show, In Your Face.
Leliana’s video is amateur — a symbol of “reality”, video as cinema verite. Her friends, including Troy (Ethan Hawke), a slouch guitarist with a taste for Descartes, talk openly about themselves with non- commercial authencity. Grates re-edits it, making it tricksy and shallow, full of computer graphics — and, worst of all, a blatant plug for Pizza Hut.
Thus even the name of the movie is ironic: “bites” refers to the hurtful way commercial television — Generation X’s frame of cultural reference — turns “reality” into mediated “unreality”, and how “reality” is also reduced to garish visual “bytes”. All semiotic fun, if you’re into that.
The film plays with the idea of resistance: in her valedictorian speech, Pierce tells her generation not to sell out the revolution, as their parents did, for a BMW and running shoes.
But does irony resist or exploit? Has Stiller sold out? He says, “I would throw up if somebody said to me, ‘Here, this is the movie that defines a generation’ because then they think you’re trying to sell them something.’
Well, he is trying to sell us something — a movie, a dreaded commodification — and he tries to have it both ways. To be true to his characters, the film should be mumble and incomprehension, but no one would pay to see it. The characters are analytical and literate.
At the end of the film, guitarist Troy says, “When my father found out he had cancer he gave me this big, pink seashell and said ‘Son, the answers are all inside of this.’ And then I realised the shell’s empty. There’s no point to any of this. It’s just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes.”
This is sad, evocative, but the movie is also amiable, amusing and witty, thanks to Helen Childress’ subtle, autobiographical script and good performances by Ryder and by Hawke who brings a genuine apathetic angst — if you can imagine that — to a laid-back attitude.
Stiller (and the script) tries to avoid making things too easy by playing down irony, and thus emphasises it. We’re in danger of losing ourselves in irony piled on irony and this is a problem. Irony as resistance becomes, in this movie, a matter of attitude and taste. True to itself as a system of ironic signs, the flm is loaded with references to consumer codes, to Diet Coke, to what’s “in” and “passe” musically, and so on, that will eventually date. One day the film could be a museum piece, its full meaning yielding only to those prepared to research the period. So ironic apathy, trapped in its own meaninglessness, could perhaps win in the long run.
Some commentators think the idea of grunge, slackers and Generation X is a journalists’ construction, and Coupland and Stiller deny trying to define the zeitgeist of a generation. But it has taken off. So far the slack generation has produced Cameron Crowe’s grunge romance, Singles, Richard Linklater’s teen drift-beer-dope pic, Dazed and Confused, and this one.
A small, interesting oeuvre, even if you’re not supposed to consume them.