Culture Clash: Music, Character and Identity in ‘Reality Bites’
Look, you guys! It’s the actual college paper Cate wrote on the use of character and identity in her favorite film, Reality Bites! She totally got an A.
We recommend you listen to Episode 019: Reality Bites (1994) first, but hey, you can do what you want. (Except plagiarize this, of course. The world doesn’t owe you a Snickers and colleges check for that stuff.)
Culture Clash: Music, Character and Identity in Reality Bites
The movie Reality Bites is a basic love triangle story with a twist. Not only must the girl, Lanie, choose between two boys, Michael and Troy, she must also choose between the musical identities that each of them symbolize and, in doing so, establish an identity of her own. The audience understands the film through the characters’ embodiment of distinct identities created, in large part, by their musical likes and dislikes. The audience’s ability to understand, relate to or reject those identities illustrates the complete, often unconscious acceptance of music as a signifier of identity. With the help of music scholars, this largely unconscious process of identification through music is made conscious. For instance, Simon Frith said, “we use pop songs to create for ourselves a particular sort of self-definition” (346). Furthermore, the validity of this process of self-definition is reinforced when it is portrayed in a popular film since “a culture constitutes social reality by accepting specific narratives complacently enough to make them virtually transparent” (Nadel 5).
In the early part of Reality Bites, the audience is unfamiliar with the characters, so must rely on musical signifiers to form its ideas and opinions. In keeping with this idea, diegetic* music is used frequently throughout the first half of the movie. By the middle of the film, the audience is secure in its knowledge of the characters and music is no longer necessary to reinforce its ideas. Yet as the conflict between the contrasting identities increases, the music is once again needed to emphasize the distinction between Michael and Troy. The filmmakers depend upon the audience’s ability to use music and images to create solid characterizations. They take full advantage of this ability by using music to further the audience’s understanding of the film.
Creating characters the audience can either identify with or reject is tantamount to the success of the film and the development of the story. It is important for the audience to have empathy for Lanie’s character and the decision she must make. In creating Troy the filmmakers made an Everyman for Generation X. In the establishing shots of Troy he has his guitar in hand, in some shots he is even embracing it. The guitar, coupled with his grungy, loose fitting clothes and greasy hair appearance – fashion signifiers of the alternative music identity – make evident without a word being uttered that Troy is a musician. Specifically Troy is a musician that the target audience wants to identify with. He represents the rejection of commercialization that was sweeping the music industry in the early 1990s. Troy’s lack of concern over commercial success is shown in his quote about his band’s goals, “What Hey That’s My Bike would like to do eventually, as a band, is travel the countryside like Woodie Guthrie.” Troy embodies the popularly held sentiment that “pop music becomes more valuable the more independent it is of the social forces that organize the pop process in the first place” (Frith 343). Troy’s words expose his strong sense of independence by rejecting the more traditional signs of success such as a record contract and embracing the simpler path traveled by musicians, such as Woodie Guthrie, in an era when music was perceived to be less commercial. The ultimate success of the film relies on the audience seeing in Troy the musical and moral beliefs it identifies with itself. The audience’s acceptance of Troy reveals the underlying principles of its social reality.
If Troy is the audience’s reference of independence and identification, then Michael is the polar opposite. The audience reinforces its own identity by rejecting Michael’s. The rejection is accomplished mainly through humor; the audience laughs at Michael not with him. He is first seen in his BMW, shouting into a cell phone, looking at a map with his radio blasting a rap song. The result of this image is funny not only to Lanie, who laughs as she drives past him, but also to the audience. This shared rejection of Michael helps to solidify the audience’s identification with Lanie, whose musical identity thus far has remained somewhat ambiguous. Her initial reaction to Michael and his music set the audience up for her eventual return to Troy at the end of the film. Another unforgettable example of humor enabling rejection is one of the film, Michael’s deeply earnest profession, “I can’t believe you don’t remember Frampton Comes Alive, that album totally changed my life.” In laughing at Michael, the audience is creating distance and distinction between his identity and its own. As Frith reminds us, “it is important to note that the production of identity is also a production of non-identity – it is a process of inclusion and exclusion” (346).
The audience’s unquestioning acceptance of the conflict between Troy and Michael reveals the social truth of the conflict itself. The crux of Reality Bites is the struggle between Michael and Troy. Since it has already been established that their identities are closely tied to their musical tastes, then in a greater sense, the conflict is between the independent artist and the commercialized world. By aligning itself with Troy and against Michael, that audience has not needed to pause to question the validity of the conflict; it is a concept so ingrained in its identity that it immediately sides with one and against the other.
As the tensions between Troy and Michael increase, the audience’s sense of identification grows evermore fragile. The audience looks to the conflict resolution to reaffirm its beliefs in its own identity. Lanie holds the key to which identity will be the victor. At the crisis point of the conflict, the premier of Lanie’s documentary for In Your Face, Lanie is confronted with the pure commercialization that Michael represents. At this point Lanie makes a definitive decision between Michael and Troy, and finally firmly establishes her own musical identity. In Your Face has applied too obvious musical overlays to Lanie’s now cut-to-shreds documentary. The song Let’s Talk About Sex initiates the segments dealing with sex, while a Talking Heads’ song with the lyrics, “We’re on the road to nowhere,” overlays the graduation procession. Lanie recognizes the identity signifiers in these songs and refuses to allow herself, her friends and her work to be connected to them. When Lanie storms out of the premier and eventually into Troy’s open arms, the audience is reassured that it has made the right choice in identifying with Troy. The Frampton loving, Beamer driving, commercialized jerk has lost, and the independent, down to earth Everyman has won the girl; everything is finally right with the world.
The audience’s identity is revealed through another use of music not yet discussed. Non-diegetic music’s ability to foster the mood of a scene without distracting the audience helps to expose the audience’s identity. The most telling example of this occurs at the end of the film. Only minutes before, Lanie and the audience rejected the use of too-obvious musical overlays in Lanie’s documentary. Yet, the audience willingly embraces the use of U2’s All I Want Is You played during the shots of Lanie and Troy longing for each other. The audience accepts this because the music is part of its own identity. U2 fits the audience’s criteria of authentic and relevant music and is therefore allowed to convey the emotions of the characters by enriching the images of longing in the film (347 Frith).
Music is a powerful component in the development of identity. This fact is realized through the seamless use of music in popular films, such as Reality Bites, to establish character identities. At the same time musical identities in popular films and the way the audience relates to them help to validate the audience’s identity. By constantly identifying with those musical signifiers that support our identities while simultaneously rejecting those that do not, we use film and media to help define our social reality and our own place in it.
Works Cited
Frith, Simon. “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music.” 1987. Classic Essays on
Twentieth Century Music. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby. New
York: Schirmer Books, 1996, 340-354.
Nadel, Alan. “Class, Film, and President Reagan’s America.” Flatlining on the Field of
Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997, 1-11.
Reality Bites. Dir. Ben Stiller. Perf. Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller. 1994.
Videocassette. MCA Home Video, 1998.
*I couldn’t remember what diegetic music meant all these years later, here’s Wiki’s definition: Diegetic music or source music is music in a drama (e.g., film or video game) that is part of the fictional setting and so, presumably, is heard by the characters. The term refers to diegesis, a style of storytelling.
