Troy is the Worst Human Ever

Reality Bites and the Invention of Reality TV

I think the vast majority of our audience here is a lot like me: either Gen X or elder Millennial. To borrow a tired internet meme, we grew up drinking out of the water hose behind the house.¹ So part of my pasttime as I’ve developed Historians At The Movies has been this quest to Gen X on film and get it in front of you guys.

For me, when I think of Gen X, I think of late Gen X—my Gen X. Well, not really. I think of author Emily Nussbaum’s Gen X. The part of the generation about ten years older than me and was way cooler. These movies tend to be produced between 1991 and 1995 and like so many others, deal with the angst of being newly adult and often newly single. The era tends to focus on the idea of late Gen X as slackers who fail the dreams set forth for them by their Boomer predecessors. That inevitably leads to thinking about films like Singles², Before Sunrise, Hackers, Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Clerks, and others. Noticing a pattern here? Yes. All of these films are predominantly white in their casting and target demographics. So thinking more broadly, Gen X films that we really need to pull into conversation also need to include movies like Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, and South Central.³

There’s also a strange thing happening at the time: MTV’s The Real World launched in 1992, followed shortly afterwards by Road Rules. These shows, especially the former, really launch a new era of how we conceptualize and consume our lives onscreen. They eventually make possible Survivor and a host of other “reality” shows including Duck Dynasty, Jon and Kate Plus 8, and god help us, The Apprentice. However, as the aforementioned Emily Nussbaum shows in her new book Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV, reality TV did not originate in the 90s and in fact has roots extending decades earlier.

So that brings us to that other early Gen X film, Reality Bites. I must admit that I’d always kind of loathed this film. Our protagonists, Winona Ryder’s Lelaina and Ethan Hawke’s Troy, are nearly unlikable. Actually, I think Troy may be the worst human to ever live. Plus, there’s all the smoking. And it’s set in TEXAS (wait actually this part is pretty good because it pushes away from Seattle).⁴ But the soundtrack is damn solid. And the film is ably directed by a young Ben Stiller, who also plays a love interest for Lelaina.

I hate you, Troy. I hope you got hit by a garbage truck.

But the reason we chose this film to talk about is because of its use of Lelaina’s Real World-esque reality show project, Reality Bites. And through this, Emily and I have this really awesome discussion about the defining characteristics of the 1990s, its racial dynamics, the greatest soundtracks of all time, and the development of reality television. In the clip below, Emily talks about the development of the word Gen X.

About our guest:

Emily Nussbaum is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and previously, was the magazine's television critic. She worked as an editor and a writer at New York Magazine, where she created The Approval Matrix. She's also written for Slate, The New York Times, Lingua Franca and Nerve, among other publications. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.⁵

Side note: Emily shares with me a love of Nashville and I must tell you she’s instantly one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.

You can follow her on Blue Sky at https://bsky.app/profile/emilynussbaum.bsky.social

Own her book:

It’s currently $18 for Hardcover on Amazon: https://amzn.to/49EWrYJ

Finally, check out our just awesome discussion on Reality Bites and the invention of Reality TV on Apple or Spotify below:

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Jason

1. This is actually true. When I’d visit my dad, they’ve lock me and my step sisters outside the house in the morning and tell us to come back at lunch. Our favorite pasttime in those days was going “walking” in the tiny town of Uniontown, Kentucky. It’s a shithole on God’s side of the Ohio River with nothing to do, so we’d just go exploring. We’d get into a lot of condemned buildings, coal ruins, stuff like that. On the days we could afford a generic soda, we felt like royalty.

2. My actual favorite feature film

3. There’s a bunch of other films to be discussed too, but you’ll hear that in the pod. There’s also a great discussion waiting to be made about the racial dynamics at play between Seattle and Los Angeles at the time.

4. Actually I’m told College Station is wildly ok.

5. Totally not a big deal at all.