This guest post by Beatrix Coles previously appeared at Filmme Fatales and appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.
“As a female, how many roles are out there anyway? And for women over 40 who don’t go to the gym, like myself? C’mon”
– Janeane Garofalo (New York Times)
Reality Bites was sleepover fodder when I was a teenager, played on high rotation with Empire Records (“I’m going to Art School…in Boston…so I can be near you”), Clueless (“You see how picky I am about my shoes- and they only go on my feet”) and Dazed and Confused (need I say the thing about the high school girls staying the same age?). Of all of them, it felt the most dangerous and exciting, in hindsight for the simple reason that these characters were older, mired somewhere between The Wonder Years and FRIENDS. They were bravely navigating that bit of life we weren’t sure about. The part that we would go into armed with university degrees and emerge from with mortgages.
Ben Stiller’s directorial debut was penned by debut screenwriter Helen Childress, who is yet to have another film produced. Rumoured to have gone through 70-odd re-writes before hitting the screen, the script was based on the exploits of her college friends–which means that the end credit mish-mash “television pilot” is some kind of simulacra on par with the Disney Castle.
The film follows four recent college graduates living in Houston in the early 90s. The two male characters are fairly aimless and harmless. Ethan Hawke plays Troy, will-they-won’t-they love interest to Lelaina and a philosophy graduate turned inevitably unemployed beardy. He’s in a band though (Hey, That’s My Bike!), and that makes him a prospect (that and the fact he looks a lot like Ethan Hawke). Steve Zahn plays Sammy, the closeted charmer who spends most of the fim grappling not with his sexuality, but with his parent’s likely reaction to finding out their son is gay.
The ladies, thankfully, are a lot more complicated. Would-be filmmaker Lelaina (Winona Ryder) is the outlier of the small group, driven, privileged and beautiful. She’s the leader of this motley pack, a self-starter, destined for great things. She would step away from these great things though to pursue her love of documentary filmmaking. For now, she has a second-hand BMW and a production assistant role on a terrible daytime television show.
Janeane Garofalo’s Vickie is a different kettle of fish. She’s sexually assertive, keeping a list (annotated perhaps?) of her conquests. She’s come out of college claiming to have learnt only her social security number. She works at the Gap where she is responsible “for so many sweaters,” and this is OK by her.
Billed as “a comedy about love in the 90s,” the poster places the love triangle of Leilana, Michael, and Troy front and centre. Michael is played by Ben Stiller, and is a marvellous creation of the early 90s–a “youth” television executive, from whom the doe-eyed Lelaina represents the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of, well, his dreams. There’s a meet cute, when she flings a cigarette (people smoked then) and he’s all affronted in his sport jacket. Her share house and love for bucket-sized sodas quickly see him whisking her away for weekends in hotel suites, and he begins to pitch her documentary as a series (The Real World was first broadcast two years prior in 1992).
It’s so tempting to draw parallels between the characters of Lelaina and Vickie and the future careers of Winona and Janeane. Ryder’s career is going to be forever marked by both her relationship with Johnny Depp (Wino Forever) and her arrest for shoplifting. Johnny Depp may be a little more successful than Troy was ever fated to be, but Troy’s version of fame would probably include the Viper Room and dressing up as Keith Richards.
Post arrest, Winona alternated wearing Marc Jacobs, the brand she attempted to pinch, to her court appearances, and “Free Winona” t-shirts in photoshoots. But despite the spin, it was a Manic Pixie nightmare. Looking back now, Lelaina’s middle finger to her job seems equally problematic. Everyone has a bad first job, a lame boss, demeaning tasks to do in order to get money, to, you know, pay for things.
While Janeane Garofalo has never reached the level of fame or notoriety of Winona, she has had a number of roles in films that will long outlast How to Make an American Quilt (and I’m thinking mainly of Wet Hot American Summer, because cultural importance). She has used her influence to promote her political views, even co-hosting The Majority Report on Air America Radio. She has openly opposed her conservative father, supported and then unsupported Nader, and openly questioned America’s interest in Iraq and the supposed existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
While a fun exercise, it’s really just as counter-productive to reduce these two women to their Reality Bites character archetypes as it is pointless. But yet, there is something familiar and soothing in these roles. We want the pretty girl who falls from grace punished, just as we want the girl wearing glasses to have a political point of view and to not be too concerned about whether she has a boyfriend.
Of course, it all goes deeper than this. It’s the fact that the female screenwriter hasn’t made another film. It’s the fact that Winona’s last big role was the fading ballerina in Black Swan. That for a long time she was just Johnny’s ex. It’s that Janeane’s unholy desire to be Black Swan has seen her sidelined and that when she said she found working on Saturday Night Live sexist, that she was probably right. It’s the idea that women aren’t meant to screw up, aren’t meant to deviate and aren’t meant to be honest about their experiences. Again, it seems too tidy. But this reality certainly bites.
Beatrix Coles is a Melbourne-based writer who is passionate about crowdfunding, coffee, and Saturday Night Live and can be found discussing all of these at @beatrixcoles.