there's no secret handshake. there's an iq prerequisite, but there's no secret handshake.

Thanks to an article on the only website I really read, I was thinking a lot about Reality Bites last night. Judging from the comments on the article and the article itself, it's one of those movies that polarizes the women of my dumb, self absorbed generation, in more ways than one: You either love it (and in this case, "it" includes Janeane Garofalo's amazing bedroom, Winona Rider's hair and clothes and WHOLE BEING, Ethan Hawke's greasy beard, the dance in the gas station, the whole idea that growing up is pretty fucking awful and you're basically going to sell your soul as soon as you leave the hallowed halls of your overpriced college...you know, that stuff), or you hate it (and in this case "it" means the reductive, oversimplified plot/characters/themes, Ethan Hawke's greasy beard, the incredibly obvious dichotomy set up between Hawke's hipster doofus archetype and Ben Stiller's quasi-capitalist douchebag, et al).

I get that. But I also fall firmly into the former camp.

I've seen this movie so many damned times, in so many different living rooms and basements and bedrooms. I bought the soundtrack through the Columbia Record club back in that brief period when a whole generation of people were still duped by that little money grab (we still have an Anthrax CD that was mailed to us after we neglected to send back the little form with the "for the love of god, don't send us an Anthrax CD and then bill us for it" box ticked off). I was a teenager when Reality Bites came out, and I longed for those awful, confusing years of my early twenties, because they seemed like they'd at least be more independent than the awful, confusing years of my adolescence. I fell in love with Ethan Hawke (I know, I know. I even READ HIS BOOKS, you guys. I had a problem.) and dreamed of the day when I'd have a job to be fired from and my own apartment and philosophical dilemmas with actual, tangible heft. I think that's my favourite element of this movie, the struggle to just live your own life and be your own self while having no idea how to do it, only a general sense of what you DON'T want.

It's also the thing that creeps me out about this movie as an adult who is now older than its heroes and heroines. When you're on the far side of twenty-five, you start to realize that you're likely never going to feel one hundred percent satisfied with your life, that you're rarely going to have all your ducks in a row, although most of the time you'll have enough of them lined up to stave off the urge to curl up in the fetal position and unplug the phone forever. But until that dawns on you, you sort of freak the hell out constantly and convince yourself you're never going to get it right. The stakes are so absurdly high:

Lelaina: I was really going to be somebody by the time I was 23.
Troy: Honey, all you have to be by the time you're 23 is yourself.
Lelaina: I don't know who that is anymore.
Troy: I do. And we all love her. I love her. She breaks my heart again and again, but I love her.

Oh MY. As a teenager I loved that part. The emotional subtext, the self-doubt, the intensity of every exchange. As an adult, I still love it, but I also feel so relieved to be past it. It also reminds me of Demi Moore's line in St Elmo's Fire, another post-college classic, where she says, "I never thought I'd be so tired at 23." When I turned 23, I felt pretty much the same way (melodrama!), but now that I'm nearly 30, I feel like I'm on the other side of that constant struggle. And it feels good to look back. It really does.