The damage we inherited

Nothing motivated Gen X culture in the 1990s more than the fear of selling out. But the fundamental question of what alternatives there were was never really answered.

The 1994 movie Reality Bites opens with Lelaina, played by Winona Ryder, speaking at her college graduation as the class valedictorian. As the opening credits roll, we see shaky-cam video picking things up mid-address:  

“And they wonder why those of us in our twenties refuse to work an eighty hour week just so we can afford to buy their BMWs. Why we aren’t interested in a counterculture they invented. As if we did not see them disembowel their revolution for a pair of running shoes!” 

This is the central dilemma of Gen X, framed by their perception of the trajectory of their Boomer parents. How do you navigate between the yuppified world of well-paid corporate drudgery on the one hand, and the failed pretensions of an exhausted and co-opted counterculture on the other? Especially since both seem to land in the same place, namely, empty consumerism?

Lelaina continues: “But the question remains: What are we going to do now? How can we repair all the damage we inherited? How can we out-grow these bankrupt hand-me-downs? Fellow graduates, the answer is simple. The answer …”

She pauses, flustered. What is the answer?

“I don’t know,” she finally says, to great applause.  

What she and her friends do know is that neither horn of the dilemma is tenable. Each one amounts to renouncing your principles, compromising on your ambition, abandoning any hope of self-respect. Selling out, in other words.  

Never sell out is the underlying message of Reality Bites. And, for pretty much the entire decade of the nineties, it was the unofficial but unshakeable credo of Gen X. 

But what is selling out anyway? And why is it such a big deal?

Selling out involves compromising on something that is profoundly important to you, such as your principles, your morality, or your integrity, in exchange for something that is perceived to be less important, or more shallow, such as money, popularity, or status. So for example, someone who goes into law to help the underdog might decide to abandon a life as a poorly paid and overworked public defender and take up corporate law. An artist might allow one of her most profound works to be used in an ad; a challenging musician might change his sound to be more appealing to the masses; a politician might fudge their principles in the hope of appealing to a broader swathe of the electorate. 

Selling out is everywhere, it’s been going on for centuries, and people of principle have been objecting to it for just as long – with middling success. But resistance to selling out, as a generalized form of political dissent, was a creature of the counterculture that arose as part of the critique of mass society in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As the counterculture saw it, mass society was one big system of enforced conformity. From the schools to the hospitals to the military-industrial complex to the government to the media to the culture as a whole, society thrived on people having similar views, similar thoughts, similar tastes, and similar values, all designed to keep The System (aka The Man) functioning smoothly. But what this meant was that any form of non-conformity, or dissent, or rebellion, could be construed as a political act. 

The counterculture of the sixties, especially as it was practiced by the hippies, elevated the politics of non-conformity to an entire lifestyle. It was enormously successful — so successful in fact, that it simply became the culture. And as it turned out, it was also enormously successful at selling things. Countercultural rebellion became the mechanism through which virtually any consumer good might be marketed and sold: music and fashion and art most obviously, but also cars, cigarettes, condos, soft drinks, you name it.  This is what gave rise to the criticism that the baby boomers had sold out. The hippies had become yuppies – they were “hippiecrits.” 

The lesson that Gen Xers drew from the experience of their parents was not that rebellion was pointless. Rather, it was that the dangers of selling out (or, its obverse, co-optation) were constant and inherent in any viable alternative to the mainstream. As Lelaina makes it clear in her convocation address, everyone is caught between the Scylla of selling out for BMWs and the Charybdis of seeing your rebellion used to sell running shoes. What lies between? It isn’t clear. 

Reality Bites is one long attempt at answering the question Lelaina herself could not, and it puts forward four possible paths. 

One way to avoid selling out is to just buy in — to never really have any principles in the first place. That’s the option represented in the film by Michael, played by Ben Stiller (who also directed it.) He’s not the villain of the piece so much as just the guy who embraced the dilemma and made a conscious choice to embrace the business opportunities of youth culture. 

A second option stems from the idea that the problem with the hippies was that they simply weren’t radical enough – they didn’t take their rejection of the system as seriously as they needed to. That’s the path followed by Troy, played by Ethan Hawke, who plays in a band, smokes pot and sleeps around, and sneers at everyone who has a proper job, or even clean clothes.  

The third is what we can call the Slacker Compromise: You give up just enough of your integrity to pay your bills, but like the proverbial man who chases two rabbits, you end up with neither principles nor much in the way of material comfort. This is the choice taken by Lelaina’s roommate Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who finds herself promoted to management at The Gap, to Lelaina’s great horror. 

Then there is the path of pure principle, represented by Lelaina herself, the Gen X soul of the piece. She just wants to make little “reality bites” — short documentary sketches of her friends and their lives — and isn’t willing to make any compromises along the way. She gets herself fired from her job at a morning television talk show because her boss is a jerk; when that leads to a financial  crisis with her roommates, she sneers at Vickie’s offer of a position folding clothes. And when Michael (who is now her boyfriend) turns her documentary footage into an MTV style rapid montage sales pitch for Pizza Hut, she’s so disgusted she runs off into the arms of Troy.

But for many, the relentless fear of selling out came at a steep price, and one of the most jarring things, looking back over the remnants of the nineties, is how sad everyone was.

The movie ends on a romantic upbeat, as Lelaina and Troy finally hook up, but there’s nothing close to a resolution of the film’s central dilemma. In fact, we can be pretty sure what isn’t going to happen: Troy’s band isn’t going to make it big, and Lelaina’s career as a documentarian is going nowhere. At some point, something is going to have to give, but where they end up is left open.  

There’s actually another path, one that isn’t explored by Reality Bites (which is fundamentally a comedy) and that is the one taken by Kurt Cobain, along with far too many other leading Gen X figures: suicide. 

Cobain has been called the last “authentic” musician, in the sense that he was the last one of any influence for whom things like integrity and authenticity mattered. More than any other musician of his generation, Cobain was haunted by the fear of selling out. Sometimes, that desire to hang onto every last scrap of integrity was just funny, like when he wore a shirt that read “corporate rock magazines still suck” to a photo shoot for the cover of Rolling Stone. 

But for many, the relentless fear of selling out came at a steep price, and one of the most jarring things, looking back over the entrails of the nineties, is how sad everyone was. Kurt Cobain is the most obvious example, but it is astonishing how many actors and musicians and artists writers from that period are dead, done in by either suicide or overdose. Ever more astonishing is how much of that attrition we took for granted. 

The whole thing sort of ended by the mid-2000s.  Part of it is because Gen Xers got older; people got jobs, and started families; the economy boomed, it crashed, then 9/11 happened and the culture underwent a profound shift. Along the way, everyone just stopped worrying about selling out. When was the last time you heard anyone moan about artistic integrity?

How and why that happened is for a future dispatch. For now, enjoy the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock”, one of the greatest takedowns of hipster poseurs ever written.

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