Culture  /  Film Review

'Reality Bites' Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony

The 1994 studio film was written by a 20-something who mined her own life to tell the story of a generation that disdained 'selling out.'

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The term Generation X hadn’t entered the cultural lexicon when Reality Bites was conceived. It was 1990, and Douglas Coupland had yet to publish the novel that popularized the term, though in July a Time cover story titled “Twentysomething” dubbed Childress’s generation “the baby busters,” for how few they were. “Money is still important as an indicator of career performance, but crass materialism is on the wane,” the article stated, citing the effects of “a depressed Wall Street and slack economy.” That year, Richard Linklater became arguably the first director to commit Gen X to celluloid with Slacker, a $23,000 meditation on aimless youth in downtown Austin, Texas. Though the Sundance Film Festival favorite helped launch the indie-film movement of the ’90s, Michael Shamberg wanted to commit this noncommittal generation to studio format. And he did—for 500 times Slacker’s budget.

Twenty-year-old Helen Childress’s insight was essential to the plot. In 1990, she was a student at the University of Southern California when a theatrical performance of one of her scripts secured her an agent, who sent it to Shamberg. “Her writing was extraordinarily good for her age,” the producer recalled in a 2014 oral history of Reality Bites. “When she started talking about herself and her friends and what they were doing, that gave me the idea that she should write about herself, because nobody had done a movie about that generation.” In the summer of 1990, the duo went to TriStar with their idea, which became known as “Untitled Baby Busters Project.” Shamberg would produce; Childress, for $75,000, would write. “I had no point of reference,” she said of what now sounds like a fairly low-ball fee. “I felt like I had just won a scratcher.”

Reality Bites was “meta” before the word went mainstream. The film’s heroine is a recent college grad who makes $400 a week while knocking back Diet Cokes and cigarettes, toiling on a documentary that is, in the character’s words, “about people who are trying to find their own identity without having any real role models or heroes or anything.” Childress, meanwhile, was a college student making roughly $500 a week while knocking back Diet Cokes and cigarettes, toiling on a film about the same subject.